Daniel H. Pink

You can do the right thing or you can do the wrong thing.

People do the wrong thing.

and they regret it.

I mean, one of the most amazing, one of the ones that just really stuck with me, I'm gonna try to pull it up here, is this one here.

This woman, she's a 71-year-old woman in New Jersey.

When I was a kid, my mother would send me to a small local store for a few items.

I frequently would steal a candy bar when the grocer wasn't looking.

That's bothered me for about 60 years.

She's a 71-year-old woman in New Jersey.

For 60 years, she's been bugged by this moral breach.

And so moral regrets, we have people regretting bullying, we have people regretting marital infidelity, all kinds of things.

Moral regrets sound like this.

If only I'd done the right thing.

And finally, our fourth category are what I call connection regrets.

Connection regrets are like this.

You have a relationship or ought to have a relationship.

And it doesn't matter what the relationship is.

kids, parents, siblings, cousins, friends, colleagues, but you have a relationship or ought to have had a relationship and the relationship comes apart.

And what's interesting is that what these 16,000 people were telling me is that the way these relationships come apart

is often not very dramatic, not very dramatic at all.