Daniel Pink, the author of five New York Times bestselling books including Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, joins Scott to discuss regret, human motivation, and his Washington Post column, “Why Not?” Follow Dan, @DanielPink. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What is the power of regret?
I would say get a better goal than that, for starters, because that is a terrible goal. Being another Scott Gallery, being another X, that's a terrible, awful goal. And I would say that with a degree of harshness. I would say, you don't want to be the next blank. You want to be the first you.
Beyond that, you know, I mean, among the things that I've, some of the things that I did right and some of the things that I did wrong. Among the things that I did right were that at a certain point, young in my life, relatively young in my life, I kind of stopped caring about what people thought about me.
And I felt like earlier in my life, I was fairly concerned about what people thought about me. Did they think I was cool? Did they think I was smart? Did they think I was accomplished and so forth? And then I came to this startling revelation about what people thought about me. And that was They weren't thinking about me. Nobody was thinking about me because everybody's thinking about themselves.
And so that was like a great liberating moment. So don't think too much. Don't think, don't care about what other people think. That's the most important thing. You know, and the rest of it, I think is pretty standard. It's like, you know, if you outwork people and you take more shots on goal than people, than most people, you're gonna be all right.
I mean, if you don't care what people think, you outwork them, other people, and you take more shots on goal, you're gonna be all right. I mean, I can't tell you how exactly it's gonna happen, but it's gonna be all right. The other thing that I would tell people is forget about planning in any kind of detailed way. One of the things that I suggest that young people do
is that they find a Scott Galloway. They find someone who's doing something cool. You know, someone in their 50s or whatever, who's doing something cool, who's doing something interesting. Oh my God, that'd be so great to have a pie. Oh, it'd be so great to do that. And I say, talk to that person and ask them how they got there.
And I say, I guarantee you that 49 out of 50 interesting, accomplished people answer the question like this. It's a long story. because it was failure, it was circuitous, it was unplanned, there was serendipity, there was good luck, there was bad luck. And so, you know, if you, again, outwork, take more shots on goal, don't care what people think, be generous, do great work.
You're gonna be fine, truly. I mean, you really are. I mean, it's easy to say from the vantage point of someone who is 60 years old, but it's true. The one thing that I didn't do well, Scott, I think I relied too heavily on myself throughout my life especially professionally. And I never like someone says, who's your mentor? I said, I don't have a freaking mentor.
I never had I never had a great I never had like a mentor. Not because like people weren't kind and generous to me. It's because I was sort of too arrogant to think that I needed something like that. And so one of the things that I could have done a better job on is.
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