Daniel H. Pink

Let's talk about regret.

It is, to my mind, our most misunderstood emotion.

And so I decided to spend a couple of years studying it.

And one of the things that I did is I went back and I looked at about 50 years of social science on regret.

And here's what it tells you.

I'll save you the trouble of reading a half century of social science.

The research tells us that everybody has regrets.

Regrets make us human.

Truly, the only people without regrets are five-year-olds.

people with brain damage, and sociopaths.

The rest of us, we have regrets.

And if we treat our regrets right, and that's a big if, but there are ways to do it, regrets can actually make us better.

They can improve our decision-making skills, improve our negotiation skills, make us better strategists, make us better problem solvers, enhance our sense of meaning if we treat them right.

And the good news is that there's a systematic way to do that.

But I want to take just a few minutes to tell you about another aspect of regret that I think is really, really just super interesting.

As part of the research here, I decided to ask people for their regrets.

And to my surprise, I ended up collecting about 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries.

It's incredible.

extraordinary trove.

And what I realized when I went through this incredible database of human longing and aspiration is that around the world, and there's very little national difference here, people kept expressing the same four regrets.