The 4 Regrets Every Human Has (And How To Avoid Them)

Regret. It's one of our most common emotions, but also one of our most misunderstood. We think that the path to a good life is to ignore our regrets, to always look forward and never look back, to always be positive and never be negative. And that is a mistake. We have a rich body of science telling us that if we approach our regrets in the right way, we can enlist them to work smarter and live better. In this video, I'm gonna show you the 4 universal regrets that people all over the world have, and I'm gonna show you how to learn from them. A few years ago, I created something called the World Regret Project, where I asked people all over the world to share with me one of their big regrets. We now have a database of more than 26,000 regrets from people in 134 countries. And what's amazing about these regrets is that around the world, people seem to have the same 4 core regrets. First category, foundation regrets. These are small decisions that people make early in life, no single one of which is deadly or cataclysmic, but that accumulate to negative consequences later on. Classic example, I spent too much and saved too little, and now I'm broke. Foundation regrets sound like this, if only I'd done the work. Second category, boldness regrets. You're at a juncture in your life. You have 2 choices. You can play it safe, or you can take the chance. And overwhelmingly, people regret not taking the chance. And it doesn't matter what the domain of life is. It could be asking somebody out on a date. It could be starting a business. It could be traveling. What sticks with us over time are the inactions, the lack of boldness. Boldness regrets sound like this: If only I'd taken the chance. Third category, moral regrets. Once again, you're at a juncture in your life. This time, you can do the right thing or you can do the wrong thing. And what happens? Most of us, most of the time, over time, regret doing the wrong thing, 'cause most of us are good and most of us want to be good. It could be bullying, it could be extramarital affairs, it could be lying. When we do the wrong thing, it sticks with us. Moral regrets. If only I'd done the right thing. Final category: connection regrets. These are about relationships, and not only about romantic relationships, but about the full suite of relationships in our lives. You have a relationship that was intact or should have been intact, but it comes apart, and it often comes apart in deeply undramatic ways. It doesn't explode, it just drifts apart. You want to reach out, but you don't because it's going to be awkward. You want to reach out, but you think the other side's not going to care. So you wait and the drift widens. Almost always a mistake. Connection regrets sound like this: if only I'd reached out. So around the world, people have the same 4 core regrets. Foundation regrets: if only I'd done the work. Boldness regrets: if only I'd taken the chance. Moral regrets: if only I'd done the right thing. And connection regrets: if only I'd reached out. These regrets are instructive, and one of the things I learned as a researcher is that when people tell you what they regret the most, They're telling you what they value the most. And these 4 universal regrets are telling you, telling all of us, what we value in life. They're giving us the path to a good life. Let's go to another area here. What do you do with your regrets? All of us have regrets. How do you turn them into an engine of progress? I have a 3-step process for doing that. The 3-step process is this: inward, outward, forward. First step when you have a regret is how you treat yourself. When we make mistakes, when we have screw-ups, when we have regrets, the way we talk to ourselves is cruel. We think that being that mean-spirited toward ourselves is going to improve our performance, and that's not true. So the first step in dealing with a regret is to treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Don't treat yourself better than anybody else, but don't treat yourself worse than anybody else. A lot of the times, the way we talk to ourselves We would never talk to anybody else that way. Recognize that your regrets are part of the human condition, and recognize that your regret is a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life. Step 2: Outward. There is a strong argument in the research for writing about your regret, talking about your regret. We fear that if we talk about our regrets with other people, or we talk about our mistakes, our setbacks, that people will think less of us. But there's some very good evidence that's wrong. That people often think more of us. They admire our courage. They admire our candor. So that's one reason to talk about your regrets, to write about your regrets. The other reason is that when we express our regrets, it's a form of unburdening. We remove the regrets from our shoulder. A final reason that this outward expression of regrets is valuable is that negative emotions are blobby. They're amorphous. They sit up there like a vapor. When you write about your regrets, Or talk about your regret. You take this vaporous, abstract thing and you turn it into concrete words that's less menacing. So, final step: forward. How do you use your regret to move forward? You have to be very systematic and explicit about this. Think about your regret and ask yourself these 2 questions: What lesson is this teaching me? And what am I gonna do next? Extract a lesson from the regret and then take that lesson and say, what is my next move going to be? When we do that, this Negative emotion can be a positive force because looking backward can move us forward.