Daniel Pink

And I say to you, is this person a man or a woman?

You don't know.

And so it's the universality of it that surprised me the most.

I'll give you one small example of this, which is that similar to your pile right there.

As I mentioned, I wanted to give people anonymity because I felt like they were going to be more forthright about it all.

But I also said, if you're interested in doing a follow-up interview, leave your email address.

I figured maybe get maybe 5% of people.

We had nearly a third of people leave their email address and say, yeah, it's like, not only do I want to tell you a complete stranger, my big regret, but here's my email address so you can talk to me some more about it.

There is this kind of yearning to unburden yourself, to make sense of it, to talk about it, to, you know, I like your metaphor, to open up that suitcase and actually see what's in it.

And when people do open that up, the act of opening it makes it less menacing.

It is for understanding what we care about and telling us how to do better in the future.

You know, this is not only research that I've done.

Social psychologists and neuroscientists and other cognitive scientists have been studying regret for 60 years.

And they found, again, regret is one of the most ubiquitous emotions that human beings have.

But we also have data showing that when you actually systematically interrogate your regrets, think about your regrets, try to learn from your regrets, it makes you better at stuff.

I mean, at the very least, we have all kinds of evidence from negotiation.

You go into a negotiation session, right?

People come out.

The researchers say, tell me what you regret doing or not doing in that negotiation.

So they invite the bad emotion.