S7E10 Daniel Pink: The Only Regrets that Matter, Motivation, the Secret to Life...

Welcome to Success Engineering. So welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman. Today I have Daniel Pink on. He's the author of five New York Times bestselling books. His latest is The Power of Regret, so How Looking Backward actually moves us forward. And this was named the Best book of 2022 by NPR, Amazon, Apple Books. Some of his other books include New York Times Bestseller, When: a Whole New Mind as well as #1 New York times Bestseller Drive and to Sell is Human.

So it won multiple awards around the world, translated into tons of different languages, sold millions of copies. He's also the host and co-executive producer of Crowd Control. So a National Geographic TV series on human behavior that's aired in more than a hundred countries. And he's appeared multiple times on N P R, pbs, abc, all the big names. So it's a pleasure to have you on the show here. I'm excited for this conversation.

And I'd always been fascinated by Japan. I had only been there a couple of times and one of the things that fascinated me about Japan, Was this whole industry, they have surrounding manga surrounding comics. In Japan. Comics are not simply for kids or freaks and geeks, or it's not only about superheroes and that kind of thing. It's actually a very robust medium. So there are comics about. Finance, there are comics about relationships, there are comics about history.

In fact, I have one, I don't, well, your audience can't see it but back here, somewhere on this pile is a, this I haven't read yet. There's giant kind of history of Japan, a certain era of Japan in manga form. So anyway, the point of all that is that I was fascinated by that, and my wife and I and our kids wanted to go live somewhere else for a while. And so I got a fellowship to go to Tokyo. And we lived there and I studied the comic industry and I was so inspired by that.

I did some journalism there, but I was so inspired by that, that I ended up writing my own comic, my own business book in the Japanese comic form of Manga that came out 12 years, 13 years ago called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, the last Career Guide you'll ever need.

And I think when it comes to conveying ideas, I felt like the visual image, especially comics, Japanese, you know, manga in particular, comics in general was woefully underused. That's why I wanted to give it a shot. For your listeners who are interested, There's a brilliant book. It's probably 25 years old now by Scott McLeod, called Understanding Comics. Understanding Comics, which is a brilliant guide to what, how do comics work as a narrative?

For instance, what's going on between the frames? How does your brain fill in what's going on between the frames of a comic, whether it's a comic strip you know, old-fashioned comic strip like peanuts or whether it is a graphic novel or anything like that. So, Understanding Comics by Scott McLeod is a really interesting read for the 14 people out there who are, has interested in, I as I am in the narrative engine power and comic.

You know, decked in a plaid sweater, you know, it's like, just put 'em in a plaid sweater. You don't have to say it. it's pretty, so, so you end up writing in a more spare and to use your word, and it's in a good word to use here, a more precise way.

I'm really curious around, and this is a super broad question and it's, I'll kind of leave it up to you and it's specific to what behavior you're looking at changing, but I'm curious as what are some of your thoughts around some of those external things that people don't necessarily think about in terms of changing, behavior?

So when we say we, we look at, we say, Fred over there, Fred is a jerk, and because he is a jerk, he's gonna do this. Bob over there is kind and because he is kind, he's gonna do this. And we discount the importance of the situation Bob and Fred are in. And so, You know, so I think at a broad level it's a question of when we try to, when we want to try to change behavior, we focus sometimes too much on the person and not enough on the situation.

And when we focus on the situation, there are all kinds of things that are that are powerful. So for instance to me, like one of the best ways is if you want someone to do something, make it easy for them to do it. You know, don't try to, don't try to change their minds. Just make it easy for them to do it. We see that there was a lot of research on this.

There's a, you know, famous example from here in the United States of the federal government and other nonprofits spending, you know, literally hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get people to save for retirement.

And particularly in the United States where our system in the last 30 years or so has moved from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions that is from basically you, you're getting a check when you retire to no, you, during your working life, you have to put aside money for your retirement 401ks. And so we had this phenomen. Years ago where people were not putting money in, it was getting matched by their employee employers, but they weren't putting money in.

They would have a chance to opt in. They would say, do you wanna opt in to this 401k? If you put in a dollar your employer will put in a dollar. And people say, ah, no thanks.

They gave people free choice. You can opt out if you want. You don't have to do this, but we're just gonna, we're gonna check the box for you. And the participation in 401K went up dramatically. So again that's a, I think it's an interesting example of how you can change the environment, make it easy for people to do what you want them to do, rather than trying to hoang them, persuade them, and always change their mind. There are many other examples there.

I mean, you want people to, you want people to to walk more in your community, have sidewalks, you know, rather than y you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't mean that as a joke. You know, if you want people to You know, you want people to take public transportation more, you know, make tran put public transportation closer to where people live. It's a stupid example, but you get the idea.

Like what can I do to make this as, as simple as possible? And I think it's very important to, to think about that. I want to dive into motivation because this is your, you know, area. I mean, you have a lot of areas of expertise, but what are, what would you say is a big aspect of motivation, and this can be, I'm curious on an individual level and a corporate level where people get it wrong, and if you could say, Hey, I'd recommend changing this area.

What's a big area where people make a mistake in terms of relying on motivation or not relying on motivation or doing it kind of correctly?

So, so, so that when you think about motivation that way, you think about it completely differently. I'm not trying to motivate you. What I'm trying to do is change, once again, going back to what we were talking about before. I'm gonna try to change the situation, the circumstances, the rules, so you have the capacity to motivate yourself. So that's pretty, that, that's pretty fundamental.

The other big thing that we get wrong is we tend to think that it's about, it's entirely about contingent rewards and punishments what I like to call if then rewards. We, we tend to say that if you reward beha, we tend to believe it's, it works like, The law of gravity, it works like rolling a ball down a hill. It works like my dropping this pencil on planet Earth and it's gonna fall to the ground. We we say that when you reward behavior, you get more of it.

When you punish behavior, you get less of it, and that's true a lot of time, but it's not true all the time. And so, you know, and it's untrue more often than we realize. And so there's, there are a set of things where those kinds of contingent rewards, if you do this, then you get that really don't work very well. And it's important for us to rethink that, get past that, overcome. Barrier. So, so it's two things. One is that motivation is something one person does to another.

The other one is that rewards and punishments, carrots and sticks, particularly contingent carrots and sticks. If you do this, then you get that. If you don't do this, then you get whacked in this way are a universal solution to motivational problems that is fundamentally untrue.

My theory is, my, my argument is essentially this, that if you want people to be motivated, okay, if then rewards are pretty good for simple task with short time horizons. They work pretty well. People love rewards. They get you to focus. So if you know exactly what you need if people know exactly what they need to do, if then rewards will get them to do it better. You want people to stuff envelopes. It's not even close.

Pay in per envelope and give 'em a bonus for stuffing a hundred envelope, every a hundred envelope you'll get more envelope stuff. There's no question about that. But if you want people to design a new marketing plan, you want people to invent a new product and you say, you know, if you come up with a good idea, I'll pay you a bonus. There's pretty good evidence that doesn't work that well. Sometimes it backfires, but most times it has no effect because it, people like rewards so much.

They narrow their focus when they should be expanding it. And so when we think about the task that require a more expansive view of things, rather than a purely like, sort of short-term, narrow view. And that's, I think, a lot of the tasks that people are doing on the job because those short-term algorithmic tasks are increasingly being done. By very low wage labor or more likely by machines and by computers.

And so the hu human beings are gonna have to do things that are more long-term and that require judgment, creativity, discernment, et cetera, et cetera. And for those tasks. Now I'm gonna actually steer this ship around and answer your question for those tasks. What seems to work best is this one pay people well. It's not that money isn't a motivator. It is a motivator. You have to pay people well, you have to pay people fairly.

If you're trying to sort of, the research does not say that you can scrimp on pay and decompensate people in intrinsic motivation that's bullshit. What you have to do is you have to actually pay people, well pay people fairly once you do that. What I think show the research shows is that there are three, these three factors that lead to enduring motivation, particularly for these more complicated, complex tasks. One is autonomy auto, and this is, comes very much from the DC work. Autonomy.

Autonomy is, do you have some control? Do you have some sovereignty? Do you have some authority over what you do when you do it, where you do it, who you do it with? And I think a lot of this goes into our fundamental notion of human nature is that are, you know, are we, you know, you know, do human beings prefer to be controlled or do they prefer to be autonomous? And I think that the history of human civilization is that human being. Ultimately resist being controlled.

And so, and when we are controlled, when human beings are controlled, we reply we respond in, in two ways. One, we comply, or two we defy. But that's not what we want in most cases, not what we want in offices. It's not what we don't want. Comply pure compliance. We don't want, certainly don't want defiance in, in education. We don't want people to be as students, purely compliant. We don't want them to be defiant either. We want them to be engaged in the way that people are engaged.

Is when they get places under their own steam. And that's what autonomy is. The second one is mastery. Mastery is about our desire to get better at something, our desire to improve, to learn, to grow, to make progress in meaningful work. It is a powerful human motivation. Human motivator. We see it on display. Throughout the human condition since the beginning of human civilization. I mean, it's a powerful thing. Why do pe people play musical instruments on the weekend?

Because they like it and because they get better at it. And to some extent, because they're doing it with other people. Why do people play? You know, why do pe why do people try to get better at painting or basketball or anything like that? So that's mastery. And the final one is purpose. And purpose is essentially, do you know, The reason you're doing something, do you know why you're doing something?

And there's a pile of really exciting evidence, again, in social psychology, really accumulated over the last 15 years or so showing that purpose. Whether it's sort of knowing how your work affects somebody else, how your work improves the life of somebody else, how your work just helps out a teammate, how your world just has an impact in the world is a powerful. Extraordinarily cost effective performance enhancer. There are plenty of examples of that.

And so when we look at this, when we're looking for a motivational recipe, or not even a recipe, a set of design principles, what you want is you want to hire great people. You want to pay them well and pay them fairly. And you wanna offer a degree of autonomy. You know, some sovereignty, some control over the important aspects of their work. You want to help them get better at something that matters.

Put them in situations again where they can make progress and meaningful work and show them the purpose of what they're doing so they know not only how to do it well, but why they're doing it in the first place and they can see some impact out there in the wider world. When we do that, people are quite motivat.

They're absurd. They're nefarious, they're horrible. So don't do things like that. So I think that's, you know, so autonomy has to really be autonomy. It's not, it can't be this kind of fake autonomy. It can't be, you know, there's a, there's this tendency sometimes inside of. You know, in, in physical workplaces in the old days, that bosses would walk around at 4 55 to make sure everybody was in their seat because being in their seat meant they were working, they weren't shirking.

So don't do the electronic equivalent of that. So I think that's I think that's a autonomy. And the other thing about that, the autonomy that we're seeing in remote work, there's a little bit of a head fake here in that we think that the autonomy of remote work is where people work. That is, oh, I can work at home, I can work where I wanna work. And that's part of it. But don't discount the autonomy over when. And people remote work gives people greater autonomy over the when of their work.

Not only the where of their work, but over their, when of their work, over their time, not only their location. And that ends up being a very valuable. Aspect of remote work when we see this, I mean, if you're interested, feel if your listeners are interested. Check out the work of Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University, who's been studying remote work for 20 years, and that comes out, I, I think pretty clearly in some of the stuff that he's done. So, so focus on that.

When, in terms of mastery, that's a really important one. I mean, I think what you want to do is you wanna establish ways to have regular check-ins and mechanisms to help people see the progress that they're making. So I don't think you wanna just let people adrift. I think you wanna come up with some kind of cadence of having a five. You know, one-on-one every week you know, where you ask people, what are you working on, what do you need? You know, how's it go?

You know, that, that kind of thing. I mean, the cadence is gonna vary from person to person and industry to industry and so forth. And then my favorite technique for, so when it comes to purpose you know, just truly just have more conversations about why, and, you know, a few more conversations about why, and a few more. Few fewer about how, so when you're coaching somebody, you say, okay, we gotta, you gotta do the sales presentation. Here's how you do it.

You know, say, that's okay, but you should also say, here's why we're doing that sales presentation. Here's why we're creating this piece of marketing collateral. Here's why we are. Trying to design this new piece of software. And that can help people see the purpose of it. And you know, anything that you can do to show people the effect of their work. Here's a customer who was touched by what you did here. Is it a fellow employee who was touched by what you did?

I don't mean touched in sort of the emotional sense, but just like improved had a problem solve. Those kinds of things can be really.

I can't remember who did this showing that when e again, leaving aside remote is that these kinds of these kind of group fun activities on the job, right office, fun stuff is completely ineffective. some circumstances and quite effective in other circumstances, and the dividing line seems to be that when it is imposed on people, it doesn't do anything for belonging and relatedness and affinity when it emerges. From the people themselves. It's a powerful bonding tool.

So I would look for things that are emergent in that. And then, you know, I think you really do have to, you know, you really do have to keep in touch, you know, just, it doesn't have to be these long, horrible. Zoom meetings. It can be these the relatively frequent check-ins and just say, Hey, you know, letting people know what's going on. Sta you know, you gotta think of it as like a, depending on the size of your team, you know, as a, a, you're always having a conversation.

And and that can be that can be helpful. And then you also, I think you have to be intentional about, you know, if you're gonna go to a situation. There aren't that, there aren't that, that many places that are fully 100% everybody is remote. I think there that, what seems to be going on here is a move toward hybrid basically every, you know, what hybrid as essentially the norm. And so when you think about that, you have to be intentional about what do you, using those moments when people are.

Not to have them do heads down work that they could do on their own, but to use those moments when they're together to do things that you can only do in person and together. And that could be certain kinds of discussions, it could be certain kinds of group activities, whatever that is. I think you have to be very intentional about that. And I think that intention ends up cascading into the form of the office itself.

So when you think about a white collar I, it just, it's unimaginable to me that it's gonna, that the office of five years from now is gonna look like the office of 15 years ago with rows and rows of cubicles, and a lot of people sitting there in front of computers doing heads down work. I think it's gonna look much more like a lounge, a library, a cafe. A nightclub, something like that.

Because precisely for the reasons you're suggesting that the point of an office is to convene, to bring people together, to gather in a meaningful, intentional way to connect, to belong, to show our affinity.

That was

So if you have somebody who is let's say you, you have a senior comp software engineer and she is actually working with a junior software engineer and she is actually helping that junior software engineer. Fix her code you know, to make it better, to make it run better, to identify the bugs, to make it more efficient whatever the case.

Okay. That sounds very technical, but the act of doing that and doing that in a way that has psychological safety and doing that in a way that coaches somebody to get better and doing that in a way where the boss has your back and doing that in a way where the boss is saying not only. Here's how to fix that line, but also saying, Hey, let's go back to first principles and talk about why we're doing this. That's belonging right there.

And so, so the boundary line between technical and belonging is not nearly as stark as we might think.

Rather than this kind of more kind of mechanical, first you do this, then you do this, and then you do this that they work together. And there, there is affinity among all three of those affinity among all three of those elements. If you have, if you are self-determined at work, if you have some authority, you're gonna, you're gonna be much more likely to get better at something than if you're. All right, if you know the purpose of what you're doing, you're more likely to get better.

You know, achieve that achieve that mastery. If you are getting better at something that matters, you're more likely to want to do it in the service of something bigger than yourself. Purpose. So they all work together.

Beings have, we have these needs for autonomy and mastery and purpose, but can you talk about how using the research around using regret almost as that photographic negative for fundamental values and what are some of those fundamental values that came out through the research that you did?

I did a big public opinion survey of the US population, but to get to your question here, I also did something called the World Regret Survey, where I gathered regrets from over. We now have a database of over 24,000 regrets from people in 109 countries. And what I found. Exactly as you say is that around the world people seem to have the same four core regrets. And I can tell you quickly what they are and then answer your question more directly.

The four core regrets are, first one is what I call foundation regrets. These are small, these are small decisions people make early in life that cascade and accumulate to terrible consequences later in life. Classic one, I spent too much and saved too little, and now I'm broke. I I didn't work hard enough in school and now I have no skills. I ate crappy food in there for exercise, and now I'm unhealthy. So that's foundation. Regrets boldness, regrets, big category. These are people who regret.

So we're at a juncture in their life when they could play it safe or take the chance. And when they didn't take the. Many of them regretted it. Not all of them, but many of them regretted it. If only I'd asked out Frida for on a date, if only I had started a business, if only I had taken my family to China for that kind of adventure. If only I had studied abroad, if only I had spoken up. Right? So not being bold. Third category, moral regrets. If only I'd done the right thing.

These are people who, at our juncture in their life, they could take the high road, take the low road, and when they take, when we take the low road, not all the time, and not everyone, but most of the time, and most of us, End up regretting it. So these are people who bullied people years ago who cheated on their spouse, who did other dastardly things. And then finally, our connection regrets, which are about relationships.

Particularly relationships that have slowly relationships that have come apart. Usually in slow undramatic ways. People wanna reach out, they don't. And the relationship wide the lack of relationship the r the drift widens, and. Sometimes it's too late. So connection, regrets are if only I had reached out. And so to actually answer the question you posed, here is the answer to the question. We have foundation regrets. If only I'd taken the chance, I'm sorry if only I'd done the work.

You have boldness regrets. If only I'd taken the chance, you have connection. Regrets if only I'd reached out and more regrets if only I'd done the right thing. These reg the big punchline here is that when people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling you what they value The. That's the key. It's a reverse image, and this is extraordinarily important when we think about an emotion like regret.

When we think about all the decisions and indecisions we make in our life, all of the indecisions and dec, the decisions and indecisions and choices and actions and so forth that you took today, Michael, you. Most of them, you're not even gonna remember tomorrow. Tomorrow, right? But if you have an action or an inaction from five years ago or 10 years ago, and not only do you remember it, it makes you feel bad. That's a very strong signal. That's a very strong signal about, about what you value.

And so foundation regrets tell us that we value stability, boldness regrets tell us that we value learning and growth and just doing something before we die. Moral regrets tell us that we value goodness and connection. Regrets tell us that we value love. And so this profoundly misunderstood emotion of regret gives us a window into what I think most people want out of.

And so the question then really becomes, what do you do with your regrets? And this is where we have been led astray. Some of us say we should ignore our regrets. We've been coached to ignore our regrets, to put our fingers in our ears to be positive all the time, and never be negative. To always look forward and never look back. That's a bad idea. But it's also a bad idea to wallow in your regrets. To ruminate in your regrets, to steward your regrets.

That's a real, that's arguably a worse idea. What we want to do is we want to confront our regrets in a systematic way, and the way to do that is to begin sort of inward outward forward. So inward is how do you frame the regret in yourself? So there's a whole line of research and what's called self-compassion, and so I think you start by You know, how do you talk, how do you talk to yourself about your regret? A lot of times when we make mistakes, we're vicious on ourselves. Don't do that.

There's no sign that's effective. Instead, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. And again, we have very good evidence that's effective. Lacerating, self-criticism, we don't have a lot of good evidence that's effective. I would advocate las or I would. To advocate, advocate lacerating self-criticism as a performance enhancer, but the evidence doesn't exist. So. But what the evidence does exist for treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt.

Recognizing your mistakes are part of the human condition. All right, so you sort of exonerate yourself. Then there's a second is outward. There's a strong argument to be made for disclosure. We tend to feel a sense of shame about our mistakes and our regrets fearing that if we expose them, if we disclose them, people will think less of us. There's some pretty good evidence that people think more of. When we do that they admire our courage.

And then more important than anything else is that when we write about our regrets or talk about our regrets, we convert this abstract emotion into something more concrete words. And those words are always less menacing. It could be in the sense-making process. And finally, you have to draw a lesson from it. You have to say, okay, what is this? What is, what's the lesson I learned here and what should I do about it?

And that requires often some self distancing where you sort of ask yourself, if my best friend was in the situation, what would I tell them to do? And so when we think about this, we treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt. We disclose and talk about it to. We leave the burden and make sense of it, and then we explicitly and directly say, what did I learn from this and what am I gonna do about it?

And when we do that, this relatively simple process regret, we have a lot of evidence again, Michael that when we do that with our regrets, it's really helpful. I mean, it helps us become better negotiators. It helps us become better problem solvers. It helps us become clearer thinkers. It helps us become better strategists. It helps us find more meaning in.

And so, so if I say, gee, what will I anticipate? What will I regret more? Make, you know? Or, you know, what will be the least regretful thing? Should I make hamburgers? Oh, maybe I'll regret having beef. Should I make chicken? Oh, maybe I'll regret, okay. That decision doesn't. So if you try to anticipate every regret that you have, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. What you want to do is you want to think about back to those four core regrets, right?

The only regrets that matter ultimately are, "Did you build a stable foundation for yourself and for your family? Did you act with some boldness to learn and grow during the vanishingly short time that you were alive? Did you do the right thing and did you connect with people that you that you love?" And that's it. And those are the kinds of regrets you should avoid. Everything else doesn't really matter that much.

And this is hard for people to do because again, we'll go back to, you know, you know, anybody who's listening to this show can basically, it can actually have introduction to social psychology as a prerequisite filled because there's. Principle from that course that you'll get the started by a wonderful guy named Barry Schwartz about the difference between maximizers and satisfiers. Maximizers. Try to get the best of everything.

All right, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna order the best hamburger in town. I'm gonna get the best roofer to fix my house. I'm gonna get the best sweater I could possibly. All right. And then the people satisfiers who are like, okay, it's good. And what the evidence shows is that there's some evidence that maximizers perform at a higher level in certain things. But maximizers are miserable because you're never gonna win that game.

And so I think a secret to life is figuring out where do you draw the balance? What do you maximize on? And what do you satisfy on? And I think that the universe of things that we should satisfy on is extraordinarily large and the universe of things we should maximize on is relatively small. And we should focus our efforts on maximizing those four, you know, you know, maximizing those things. And just forgetting about anything else.

And if we do that, we're gonna be able to an because what we're gonna regret, here's the. What we're gonna regret, what I'm gonna regret, let's make it about me, what I'm gonna regret 10 years from now, all right? What I'm gonna regret 10 years from now is not, I made a bad choice for dinner tonight. What I will regret. When my son is 30 and not 20, and he's gone off into the world, it's like, wait a second.

My, my son was here for, in Washington, DC for a trimester, and he was actually living in our house and I didn't hang out with him. What was I thinking? All right, that's the kind of thing that I'll regret in 10 years. And so that connection kind of regret that regrets about love. And so maximize on that and satisfies on everything.