The Power of Regret Quotes

“When feeling is for thinking and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“A look at the research shows that regret, handled correctly, offers three broad benefits. It can sharpen our decision-making skills. It can elevate our performance on a range of tasks. And it can strengthen our sense of meaning and connectedness.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Create a failure résumé. Most of us have a résumé—a written compendium of jobs, experiences, and credentials that demonstrate to prospective employers and clients how qualified, adept, and generally awesome we are. Tina Seelig, a professor of practice at Stanford University, says we also need a “failure résumé,” a detailed and thorough inventory of our flops. A failure résumé offers another method for addressing our regrets. The very act of creating one is a form of disclosure. And by eyeing your failure résumé not as its protagonist, but as an observer, you can learn from it without feeling diminished by your mistakes. A few years ago, I compiled a failure résumé, then tried to glean lessons from the many screwups I’d committed. (Disclosing these embarrassments to myself will be sufficient, thank you very much.) I realized I’d repeatedly made variations of the same two mistakes, and that knowledge has helped me avoid those mistakes again.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“A life of obligation and no opportunity is crimped. A life of opportunity and no obligation is hollow. A life that fuses opportunity and obligation is true.”
― Daniel H Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Foundation regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the work.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“If we know what we truly regret, we know what we truly value.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“If our lives are the stories we tell ourselves, regret reminds us that we have a dual role. We are both the authors and the actors. We can shape the plot but not fully. We can toss aside the script but not always. We live at the intersection of free will and circumstance.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesn’t bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.” When we’re beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite direction—not to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera. After self-disclosure relieves the burden of carrying a regret, and self-compassion reframes the regret as a human imperfection rather than an incapacitating flaw, self-distancing helps you analyze and strategize—to examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Self-compassion emerged in part from Neff’s recognition that when we stumble or fail, we treat ourselves more harshly than we would ever treat friends, family, or even strangers in the same predicament. That’s counterproductive, she has shown. Rather than belittling or berating ourselves during moments of frustration and failure, we’re better off extending ourselves the same warmth and understanding we’d offer another person. Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness. It doesn’t ignore our screwups or neglect our weaknesses. It simply recognizes that “being imperfect, making mistakes, and encountering life difficulties is part of the shared human experience.”[15] By normalizing negative experiences, we neutralize them.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Moral regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the right thing.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Foundation regrets arise from our failures of foresight and conscientiousness. Like all deep structure regrets, they start with a choice. At some early moment, we face a series of decisions. One set represents the path of the ant. These choices require short-term sacrifice, but in the service of a long-term payoff. The other choices represent the path of the grasshopper. This route demands little exertion or assiduousness in the short run, but risks exacting a cost in the long run.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“If you have a broken heart, it means you have done something big enough and important enough and valuable enough to have broken your heart.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“The Regret Optimization Framework holds that we should devote time and effort to anticipate the four core regrets: foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. But anticipating regrets outside these four categories is usually not worthwhile”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding and extrinsically valuable. It can lighten our burden, make abstract negative emotions more concrete, and build affiliation. So, to begin to harness your regrets to improve in the future, try any of the following: Write about your regret for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days. Talk about your regret into a voice recorder for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days. Tell someone else about the regret in person or by phone. Include sufficient detail about what happened, but establish a time limit (perhaps a half hour) to avoid the possibilities of repetition and brooding.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“At the heart of all boldness regrets is the thwarted possibility of growth.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“But the most common negative emotion—and the second most common emotion of any kind—was regret. The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Only 1 percent of our respondents said that they never engage in such behavior—and fewer than 17 percent do it rarely. Meanwhile, about 43 percent report doing it frequently or all the time. In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Regret makes us human.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“As the Harvard Gazette summarized in 2017: Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.[7] Men who’d had warm childhood relationships with their parents earned more as adults than men whose parent-child bonds were more strained. They were also happier and less likely to suffer dementia in old age. People with strong marriages suffered less physical pain and emotional distress over the course of their lives. Individuals’ close friendships were more accurate predictors of healthy aging than their cholesterol levels. Social support and connections to a community helped insulate people against disease and depression. Meanwhile, loneliness and disconnection, in some cases, were fatal.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Regret can improve decisions. To begin understanding regret’s ameliorative properties, imagine the following scenario. During the pandemic of 2020–21, you hastily purchased a guitar, but you never got around to playing it. Now it’s taking up space in your apartment—and you could use a little cash. So, you decide to sell it. As luck would have it, your neighbor Maria is in the market for a used guitar. She asks how much you want for your instrument. Suppose you bought the guitar for $500. (It’s acoustic.) No way you can charge Maria that much for a used item. It would be great to get $300, but that seems steep. So, you suggest $225 with the plan to settle for $200. When Maria hears your $225 price, she accepts instantly, then hands you your money. Are you feeling regret? Probably. Many people do, even more so in situations with stakes greater than the sale of a used guitar. When others accept our first offer without hesitation or pushback, we often kick ourselves for not asking for more.[2] However, acknowledging one’s regrets in such situations—inviting, rather than repelling, this aversive emotion—can improve our decisions in the future. For example, in 2002, Adam Galinsky, now at Columbia University, and three other social psychologists studied negotiators who’d had their first offer accepted. They asked these negotiators to rate how much better they could have done if only they’d made a higher offer. The more they regretted their decision, the more time they spent preparing for a subsequent negotiation.[3] A related study by Galinsky, University of California, Berkeley’s, Laura Kray, and Ohio University’s Keith Markman found that when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doing—for example, not extending a strong first offer—they made better decisions in later negotiations. What’s more, these regret-enhanced decisions spread the benefits widely. During their subsequent encounters, regretful negotiators expanded the size of the pie and secured themselves a larger slice. The very act of contemplating what they hadn’t done previously widened the possibilities of what they could do next and provided a script for future interactions.[4]”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Mentally subtract positive events. To take the hurt out of a regret, try a mental trick made famous in the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life. On Christmas Eve, George Bailey stands on the brink of suicide when he’s visited by Clarence, an angel who shows George what life in Bedford Falls would be like had he never been born. Clarence’s technique is called “mentally subtracting positive events.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“3. Study self-compassion.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“The third method of self-distancing, as Julius Caesar and Elmo teach us, is through language. Kross, Ayduk, and others have carried out some fascinating research concluding that “subtle shifts in the language people use to refer to themselves during introspection can influence their capacity to regulate how they think, feel, and behave under stress.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“The second way to self-distance is through time. We can enlist the same capacity for time travel that gives birth to regret to analyze and strategize about learning from these regrets.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“First, we can distance through space. The classic move is known, unsurprisingly, as the “fly-on-the-wall technique.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

“Connection regrets sound like this: If only I’d reached out.”
― Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward