We love to keep ourself surrounded by positive power and neglect negative emotions. However, the imbalance investment in our emotions where we outweighing too much positivity inhibit our growth and potential. Negative emotions are as essential as positve emotions. Our fear and anger is the one that keep us survive. It is true that too much negativity is weakening, but too little is also devastating.
In the book of The Power of Regret, Daniel H. Pink argues that the regret benefits human being. If we don’t take a look at what we regret from our past, then how could we reveal what we value the most and trying our best to undo it?
If we know what we truly regret, we know what we truly value.
Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret
Highlight
Regret makes us a (healthy) human
Regret arises from the ability of healthy human brain to perform the mental trapeze act which means swinging our mind between past-present and reality-imagination. By the age of 6 years old, these skill are fully develop in our brain—that’s why children below 6 don’t understand regret.
Regret is the marker of our psychological health. Neuroscientists found that the inability to feel regret is a sign of brain damage and other diseases of the brain.
At least and If Only
Whenever regret comes to us, there are two tunnels at the end of our thinking:
- Imagining the past could have been worse and urge us to say “At least..” to comfort us and help us reexamine the present. We cannot change the past, but “at least” change how we feel about our past and give us value.
- Imagining how the alternative could have gone better and push us to say “If only..” which make us feel worse.
Regret refine us
No matter which tunnel that we ended up—either at least or if only—regret is actually advantageous for us.
Looking backward can move us forward, but only if we do it right.
Daniel H. Pink, The power of Regret
Regret can improve decisions
The pain of regret decelerate our time to make decisions for our future. As the old people say: experience is the best teacher. We gather and reflect before we decide what to do. More considerations come to our mind and set us up for the subsequent event.
Regret can boost performance
As more things to consider, our persistence increase and lead to the promotion of our performances.
Regret can deepen meaning
A study from Northwestern concluded that people who intensely doing counterfactual reflection endows their critical life experiences with more substantial meaning.
Resolving and anticipating regret
Pink provides well-studied advices on how to relieve our burden, embrace, and learn from our regret. In addition, he found a way called Regret Optimization Framework to help us anticipating regret.
This is an eye-opener book and I believe most of our future-self will thanks to the takeaways from Pink. The Power of Regret addresses important issue that we all can relate and worth reading.
Author: Daniel H. Pink
Publication date: 1st February 2022
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Number of pages: 239 pages
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