A common phrase from adventurous people is to live with “no regrets”, but that’s not really possible.
Say you’re considering breaking up with your girlfriend. The “no regrets” side would say to do it and test the open waters, but it’s entirely possible that 10 years from now you’ll have huge regrets about that breakup instead. Sticking with her OR leaving could cause a future regret, so you can’t always avoid it.
Daniel Pink’s book “The Power of Regret” digs deep into this. I’ll start with an interesting quote that explains how people that really have “no regrets” often feel that way due to brain damage:
However, one group didn’t feel any worse when they discovered that a different choice would have produced a better outcome: people with lesions on a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. “They seem to experience no regret whatsoever,” neuroscientist Nathalie Camille and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science. “These patients fail to grasp this concept.” In other words, the inability to feel regret—in some sense, the apotheosis of what the “no regrets” philosophy encourages—wasn’t an advantage. It was a sign of brain damage.
As Pink goes through things, he summarizes regrets into four buckets:
- Foundation Regrets, focused on long-term efforts often around health or finance.
- Boldness Regrets, like failing to start that new business or learn to play a new instrument.
- Moral Regrets, when you wish you had done the right thing.
- Connection Regrets, when you let relationships slide over time.
Those regrets are all areas where we might feel badly, but they can be used to improve future performance. You can start exercising now. You can starting learning to play the piano. You can call your friend that you haven’t spoken to in five years.
Using regret as a tool for good is something we all do, and putting Pink’s framework around it made me see regrets in a new way. I encourage you to pick up his book, as it digs deeper into all of this and is really quite fascinating.
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