no there are no straight lines so for me there was not a huge amount of like long-term planning um at a certain point I think I felt like I needed a long-term plan but then what I also found is that any long-term plan immediately hits the ugly truth of reality and then becomes a joke and so for me I think very carefully about what's next what's next eel Doo the great novelist had this lovely metaphor for writing I think it's true in some levels for careers and for life which is that you're driving on a
dark night and you have your headlights on and you can only see you know a few meters ahead of you and that's sometimes aggravating but the thing is you can make the whole journey that way and that's sort of how I feel about it so what I do you asked about books it's like I don't have any long-term strategy for the books I just find something that I find an IDE idea a set of stories a concept that I find so irresistible that I'm willing to endure the torture of writing it and to get the
pleasure of being able to talk about it for the rest of my life when we experience regret it's somehow an aberration when in fact everybody experiences regret regret makes us human regret is part of the human condition what's more we think that regret makes us weaker when in fact the research shows that done right regret can make us stronger that we can enlist our regrets as a an engine for forward progress so um so what I'm trying to do in this book is reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion uh what's more is that in a
weird way regret also taught me about what makes a good life because I had you know collected 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries and when they told me their regrets in a sense they were also telling me about what made life worth living I think you're going to see regret in a new light and not be scared of it but instead realize that regret gives you the clues to lead a life of success and meaning and contribution um one of the things that's interesting that I that I find is that we tend to think
that leadership is about mostly about assertion mostly about announcing and talking when in fact I think that it is as much about humility and listening as it is on anything and the thing is it's like most of are terrible listeners in part because in our schools we don't teach people to listen if we had to distill it to four words talk less listen more I understand that no regrets philosophy the problem is is that it's not possible because we all have regrets now we should try to minimize our future regrets but the idea that you
should never look backward on your life and say oh I wish I had done things differently is actually a terrible blueprint for living um and and I think one of the problems you know especially in North America is that we're a little over indexed on positivity you know positive emotions are incredibly important and they should outnumber our negative emotions but we need some negative emotions because they instruct us and our most prominent negative emotion is regret and because regret teaches us it instructs us it clarifies us uh it clarifies what's what we should be doing
and how we should be doing it and so um and so we need to understand how to deal with our negative emotions we can't ignore them like No Regrets We Can't wallow in them like oh my God it's so terrible I'm such an awful person what we need to do is we need to think about our regrets and when we think about our regrets the evidence is pretty clear that they can help us make better decisions solve problems faster be better strategists find greater meaning in our life regret hurts there's no question about that but
here's the thing regret also in structs and you can't have one without the other so what you have to do is so if you avoid the pain you don't get any of the learning so what you have to do is be able to process that pain and I think there's a way for us to do that to take our regrets use them as signals we haven't been taught to do that that's the problem we have this weird view of negative emotions like some of us think oh positive all the time that leads to delusion some
of us get so absorbed in our negative emotions that they in some ways exonerate us from making progress that's a bad idea too what we need to do is we need to process our negative emotions in a in a in a systematic way and I and I think there's a good way to do that don't ignore it don't Dodge it just confront it it's much less fearsome than you think and this way that I think that we can process our regrets is very healthy so one thing you can do is you can re you know
like I I feel like there's three simple steps that you can take to turn your regrets into engines for Progress one of them is to reframe the regret and the way you think about yourself so a lot of times when we have a regret one reason that we try to avoid it is that if we really confront it we start lacerating ourselves saying you you know our selft talk is you're an idiot what are you talking about um and what we should do instead is it sounds gooey but what we should do instead is treat
ourselves with kindness there's a body of research in what's called self-compassion which is treating ourselves with kindness rather than contempt um thinking about our own missteps as part of the human condition not something that only we do um looking at our missteps not as fully definitional of who we are but as just one part of who we are and so just sort of being a little better to ourselves the second thing you can do which we see which is a reason why we had 16,000 people offer up their regrets is disclosure disclosure is itself inherently
valuable and we know that it relieves the burden but the other thing when we talk about our regrets or even write about them we take this Blobby amorphous negative emotion and convert it into words and that makes it less fearsome and it begins the sensemaking process so there's a pile of evidence showing that talking about our regrets even writing about them privately is a way to defang them and finally what we need to do which is essential is we need to you know we can we can look inward all right we can express outward but
then we got we got to move forward and the way to do that in my mind is to take a step back and extract a lesson from it uh what would you tell your best friend to do uh if you if you were looking back on this decision 10 years from now what would you want to have done if someone else were in your position what would she do and and I think this process of looking Inward and treating ourselves with some kindness expressing outward and disclosing the regret as a way to make sense of
it and then moving forward by taking a step back and extracting a lesson is relatively simple to do and allows us to take these regrets and not be scared of them and not let them debilitate us but to enlist them as forces for moving forward what I like to do is I'm sort of trying to reach the people on on either side of that so the people who feel debilitated by their regrets I you my view is listen take one go through this process you can enlist it as a Force for good but I also
want to do a wakeup call to the people who think they don't have any regrets um and so what I want to do is in some sense I guess normalize it because it is normal that's the thing regrets are part of the human condition they exist for a reason they're part of our cognitive Machinery the only people Without Regrets are 5-year-olds people with brain damage and sociopaths the rest of us have regrets you know and so instead of instead of denying that Humanity let's embrace it and use it [Music] [Music]
