The Real Trick To Long Term Motivation Daniel Pink - E130

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No one ever teaches us how to deal with negative emotions. That's the big problem, I think.

I've watched Daniel Pink's videos as a way to inspire me for years.

The world is littered with people who have a decent amount of innate talent who didn't put in the work. Here's the thing about us human beings. We stink at solving our own problems. We fear that when we share our mistakes, our vulnerabilities, our regrets, People will think less of us. The fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years, that's telling me something. Real courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them. We are on this planet for a vanishingly small amount of time, and you're not using that time wisely. Best way to improve is to—

So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening. But if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Daniel?

Yes.

You've, um, you've lived a really remarkable life. And obviously the, the most remarkable thing that, from my perspective, that I've seen from your— I don't know, the last 20 years of your life— is you became a person who's really remarkably good at communicating and understanding complex ideas and then conveying them in a way which is really engaging. Is there anything— and I was, I was looking through your childhood as much as I possibly could. It sounds creepy, right? Is there anything from your early years that when you look back set you up to become the man you are today? Are there any moments or experiences or traumas, dare I say?

Yeah. Well, I mean, thanks for that. Thanks for that nice compliment. I'm probably the worst person in the world to psychoanalyze me, but I would say if there's anything is, and it just shows you in some ways the circumstances of birth, I happened to live in a part of the United States that had one of the best public library systems in America. I lived walking distance to an excellent public library, and I lived a bus ride away from a giant downtown cavernous cathedral-like library. And so I spent an enormous amount of time as a kid in libraries. I always loved reading. I always loved words. I always loved books. And my hunch, and it's just a hunch, Steven, is that had the circumstances of my birth been different, had I been born in another city or another country, you know, maybe I would be just a really excellent dentist.

But at some point you became Al Gore's speechwriter. And I look at— when I look at people's skill stacks, you can sometimes point at the thing You're really looking for the quite unique but complementary skill, right? And for me, it's all well and good knowing a bunch of stuff, yeah, but being able to communicate that intelligence in a way that's engaging and compelling is a very unique part of your skill stack, which is probably the reason why your books do so well, your TED Talk was a smash hit, and everything in between. Where did that skill come from?

You know, I, I don't know. I think a lot of it comes— I, I think it comes from perhaps from 2 things. Okay. One of them is something that I feel like a lot of other people don't do, which is think about things from another person's perspective. What do they understand? What do they know? What are their reference points? I think that's extraordinarily important. It's something that I learned how to do probably a little bit later in life. The other thing, I mean, is work. For instance, so for my books, for instance, I will do multiple, multiple drafts. of every chapter. I will read aloud every chapter to my wife, often multiple times. What's even worse? My wife will read chapters aloud to me so I can hear it, to try to essentially make every word that I write fight for its life. That is, that word has to look at me and say, I deserve to live before I knock it out. And so I think that simplicity and conciseness that come just from effort are really the key.

And that's so evident, especially in the book that I just read, which is The Power of Regret, your new book. And even Harry, who read it as well in my team, when he walked into my office about an hour ago, he goes, he's very, very succinct with his points. And he— I think Harry said there's like no fluff.

Thank you, Harry.

Yeah.

That's my goal, truly.

And why is that important?

Because I hate reading fluff myself. I mean, you know, truly, Stephen, I wanna write books that the kinds of books that I want to read. And what I don't like is when I read a book and it is, let's say, 60,000 words long and there's 4,000 words of ideas in here. It's like, okay, why don't you just write me a 4,000-word article? There's so many nonfiction books I think that would be twice as good if they were half as long. And so I try to make it as lean as possible and make it as fluff-free as I possibly can.

And okay, let's start then with some of the things that you've written going back to 2001.

Sure.

Free Agent Nation. Why did you write that book?

Well, I think if you want to see a theme emerging here, you'll see the theme that all research is me-search. And so how did I write Free Agent Nation? I went and started working for myself. This is like 1998, '99. And I noticed that a lot of people were doing it. It was the first stirrings of that. I thought it was something big going on, and I decided to write about it by traveling around just the US and interviewing people who had gone out on their own, saying, I think this is going to be a big— this is an emerging big deal, and that a lot of people are going to work this way, and we better understand what it means, how it happened, what the implications are.

One of the key themes in that book that I found particularly— I mulled over, it's the thing that I stopped on and I was thinking a little bit about, is this idea that persistence trumps talent. What do you mean by that?

Here's the thing. The world is littered with people who have a decent amount of innate talent who didn't put in the work. And the people who really flourish are the people who show up, and they show up the next day, and they show up the next day, and they do their work, and they don't get freaked out by setbacks. And they show up the next day and the next day and the next day. They're consistent. They are tenacious, and they just worry about each day doing the work. And to me, that is how the best creators are, the best business people are, the best contributors of any kind are. If I had a— if I sat around and waited to be inspired to write, well, I don't— I wouldn't write a syllable. You know, I show up to write because that's my freaking job. And that's how you create stuff. You show up and you work, and you show up and you work. And so when I was starting out in writing, I looked around and I noticed that there— I felt like there were people who were more innately talented than I was, definitely. But I had to decide no one's gonna outwork me.

It's so funny because I obviously agree. I'm gonna play devil's advocate here a bit because the thing that I always try and get to the heart of when I talk about consistency and persistence, and I've seen your examples about compounding returns as it relates to finance, et cetera, is why aren't some people persistent? Well, I know there's many, many factors. Is it self-belief? Is it not being intrinsically motivated by the task itself and doing it for the wrong reasons? Is it a combination of all these factors?

I think that it's a combination of all of those factors. I think it starts at a pretty high level. I think part of it is that people don't know. They actually believe the opposite, that talent is more important than persistence. And so they believe they're talented and they think that great things will happen to them simply because of their status as a talented person. So they're wrong at like a meta level, right?

Mm-hmm.

The other thing is that I do think that part of it is a miss of intrinsic motivation, but it's different. It's intrinsic motivation not because every day is joyful, but because every day is necessary and every day is at least somewhat meaningful. And so there's an adage that being a professional is showing up to do something you love, even on the days you don't feel like doing it. And that to me is the key. Like, I like writing some days, but not every day. Some days it's a gigantic pain in the ass. Some days it's really, really hard, but I have to show up and do the work that day too. And that's what being a professional is, is showing up and doing the work even on the days where, you know what, I'm not that into it today.

In the self-development community, I think that there's been this growing feeling that you can like wake up in the morning, say some nice things in the mirror— I'm gonna be a millionaire, I'm amazing— and then life will somehow bring about all of these wonderful things that you've manifested. And honestly, when I, when I hear people talking about manifestation, I feel quite— in the, in the, in the cultural context, they almost like spiritual cultural context in personal development. Mmhmm.

They do.

I It's almost comical. And I, um... I feel sorry for them and their chances of achieving any of those things. What's your view on manifestation? In the, like— I'm not talking about setting yourself a goal and then going after it. I'm just like, this kinda fluffy, say it to yourself, write it in your notebook, and then it'll happen type stuff. I don't know. And have you seen that? Am I just—

Yeah.

Is it my observation?

I mean, you know... Yeah. I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical. Now, there is some— now, there's some interesting stuff. There's some interesting... research on this question that we can go to, because I always like things that are evidence-based, and I haven't seen a lot of evidence that manifestation is a winning technique. My view is like, if it works for you, you like it, God bless you, go for it, do it. But you're still going to need to show up to work. But there's some other very interesting research in what's called, in certain kinds of self-talk. Okay, so what you're talking about in some ways is self-talk. So how do we talk to ourselves? And there's some interesting research showing that if you say to yourself, before a big encounter, you can do it, you got this. Okay, so let's say I'm going in to pitch a new book. I can say to myself, you got this, you're going to crush it. You know, that, that's actually better than not doing anything. Okay, that kind of self-talk. But it's not the best thing you can do. The best thing we— you can do is something known as interrogative self-talk. Interrogative self-talk, where you turn it into a question. Now, the manifestation people hate that. All right, but instead What you say is, can you do this? And if so, how? Can you do this? And if so, how? You ask a question rather than make that bold assertion. And now here's the interesting thing. Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. I ask a question, you ask me a question, my wheels have to turn. But we ask ourselves a question, the wheels also turn. So if I say to myself, let's say I'm pitching a new book, can you do this? Well, yeah, I can do this because I've pitched books before, but this time I have to think about it because Harry over there has never liked an idea that I want. So I got to make sure that I really focus on Harry. Last time I talked too much and listened too poorly, so I got to chill out a little bit. What am I doing? I'm rehearsing, I'm preparing, I'm practicing. And that's actually more muscular than the nominally muscular thing of, you can do it, you got this, which is not terrible. So So that's my view on— that's my general view on manifestation. Manifestation without work is delusion.

Yeah.

Okay. But manifestation with work isn't the worst thing in the world. And self-talk rooted in evidence, especially interrogative self-talk, can be really smart.

Drive. That was the gateway piece of content that put me onto your work, specifically the TED Talk. Me and my girlfriend watched it. Uh, together. And we weren't planning on watching it. I think I clicked on it, and then it was so engaging in delivery that it held us for the entire— I think it was about 20 minutes?

Yeah. Wow.

And it's done some 10 million views, and then there's been, you know— I saw the illustrated version of it, which I think has done 18 million views. It's crazy, the numbers on that. Um, the base premise of that is obviously kind of debunking this thesis we had about how to motivate people and keep them engaged in work. And you assert and you prove that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are a much more compelling formula.

Sure.

That journey of writing that book and, um, going on— yeah, the journey of doing the research— how did it change your view on how to keep employees engaged? And if— I don't know if you, if you build companies now, but on how to treat people? Because I came away from it thinking, I understand, but what are the things I can do now as an employer to, to make sure that the team you see around me today are motivated?

Sure.

Yeah.

Sure. So again, I can summarize the— that book, it looks at about 50 years of science in what really motivates people. But I can summarize the main point very, very simply, which is this. There's a certain kind of motivator we use in organizations. Psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator. Again, let's go back to simplicity. That's a lot of syllables. Let's just call it an if-then reward, right? Makes a lot more sense.

Mm-hmm.

If you do this, then you get that. If you do this, then you get that. 60 years of science now tells us that if-then rewards are actually pretty good for tasks that are simple to do and that have a short time horizon. Human beings love rewards. You dangle a reward in front of, in front of anybody, myself included, you've got their attention in that very narrow way. But if-then rewards, the science tells us, are less great for more complex tasks with longer time horizons, tasks that require judgment, creativity, discernment, conceptual thinking. And the reason is the same. If-then rewards narrow our focus for a lot of tasks, particularly the tasks that most people are doing, most creators are doing, most people in the creative economy are doing. You wanna have a more expansive focus. And so, so we gotta get rid of that way of motivating people for the bulk of things that people are doing today. And what the research tells us is you gotta pay people fairly and pay people well. You gotta pay people fairly and pay people well. And then you wanna offer, as exactly as you say, some autonomy, some, some control, some sovereignty over what you do, how you do it, when you do it, where you do it. Mastery, which is a chance to get better at something that matters, to make progress on meaningful work, and a sense of purpose. Do you know why you're doing it? Are you making a contribution? Are you making a— are you making a difference? So we can talk in more granular level about what specifically to do.

Did you ever figure out from your research why autonomy, mastery, and purpose— why they are the things that motivate us and keep us most engaged in work? Why, why those things?

It's a great question, and, and it's a question that I think is embedded in that work that most people don't see embedded in there, because that's who we are as human beings. We are innately autonomous. I'll give you an example, the best example. Go find me a 2-year-old anywhere on the planet. She's going to be self-directed. She's going to be resisting control. She's going to be engaged and interested and curious about stuff. That's autonomy. She is going to want to get better at something. She's going to want to learn and grow. That's who she is, right? 2-year-old. Why? Why is this? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? 4-year-old. It's the same thing. That's who we are. That's why these things are so important. They're part of what it means to be human. And so that's why they're so powerful. And I think what's interesting, Steven, is that for a long time in organizations of any kind, But certainly the business— most businesses today, certainly the business that you've built, what you have— for a long time, we've had to run organizations that went against the grain of human nature because that was efficient, that efficiency was the highest thing. And the only way to achieve efficiency was actually through some mechanisms of control by saying, it doesn't matter why we're doing this, just freaking do it. All right. So control and those kind of— there's a very, very tight measurements, those tight mechanisms. Now, I think the best businesses, the best organizations go with the grain of human nature. That's the key. That's why these things are so powerful, because it's part of who we are. And organizations that build contexts that go with the grain of human nature are going to be better. They're going to be better places to work because people aren't going to be miserable, but they're also going to be more effective.

I get— so I get the autonomy point, right? Understood. Mastery, what does that mean?

It means that people have an innate desire to get better at stuff, to learn and to grow. I'll give you an example. Think about, I mean, the most mundane example. Any weekend anywhere, here in London, in Washington, D.C., where I live, what are you going to have? You're going to have people who are playing musical instruments on the weekend. Why? Are they making any money off of it? No. Are they planning for a career as Professional musicians?

No.

Why are they doing it? Because they like it. And it's fun to get better at guitar. It's fun to get better at violin. In my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., there is a big soccer field, a big soccer pitch about 2 blocks away. Why on weekends are those things swarmed with guys my age running around in shorts? Are they going to be playing professional soccer? No. Are they going to get famous as soccer players? No. Why do they like it? Because it's interesting. Because it's fun. Because I like getting better at it. That is an innate part of what it is to be human. Human beings innately want to learn and grow. Now, here's the thing. I think that's our nature. This is important. I think that certain institutions can change the default setting on that nature. I think that when we ship— all right, let's think about human beings as products. All right? The default setting of human beings is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I am convinced of that. I think that sometimes in school or other kinds of experiences, that default gets flipped and people learn compliance. They stop caring about mastery. They care— they don't care as much about why. But I think that is because the context that they're in has thwarted their natural, their natural state.

And what's the consequences of when that dial is turned and they become compliant? And because that must be them going against their human innate—

Yeah.

wiring. So there must be a consequence of that, right?

I think the consequence is dull misery in some cases. I think the consequence is underperformance. And I think that there is a significant meta-consequence that people aren't reckoning with, which is that we are on this planet for a vanishingly small amount of time. And you're not using that time wisely. And at a certain point in your life, you're going to say, oh my God, I totally messed up. And one of the things you see— let's take autonomy, for example. The thing about these words, Steven, is that they're abstract. So a way that I try to think about abstract questions sometimes is to think about what's the opposite of a concept. So let's take the opposite of autonomy. Help us understand it. The opposite of autonomy is control. Human beings have only 2 reactions to control. They comply or they defy.

That's it.

I mean, in some ways, the history of human civilization is that human beings trying to control other human beings. They comply until they can't take it anymore and they defy. But if you're building an organisation, do you want people who are perfectly compliant? You want some compliance in certain things, but you don't want people who are 100% compliant all the time. They're not going to do great work. You want people who are defiant? No. You want people who are engaged. And the way that human beings engage is by getting there under their own steam. The way that human beings engage is through self-direction.

And then the last point about purpose.

Yeah.

When people think about purpose, especially I think younger generations, they always think about trying to save the world or doing something which is gonna help others. It's a really weird thing that's happened to my generation where we all wanna like, I don't know whether we wanna save the world or whether we wanna be seen as someone that wants to save the world. I'm not sure if it's virtue signaling or if it's an innate desire.

I'm not either. I think that there is a lot of virtue signaling there. And let me tell you. Social media. Yes. Let me tell you about purpose, though, because— and forgive me, I might owe you some money because I didn't get it quite right in that book Drive. What I've discovered since is that purpose is not one thing, it's two things. And it goes exactly to the question that you're asking. So one kind of purpose is what I like to think of as capital P purpose, large P purpose. And that is what you're talking about. I'm feeding the hungry, I am solving the climate crisis, whatever. And there's no doubt in the research that that can be a very powerful motivator, that people who are animated by that kind of purpose do good work. That's very, very clear. But day to day, it's hard to get that every single day. It's hard to get that kind of purpose on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and then show up again the next. It's hard to get that every single day. It's still important. But this is what I missed. There's a second kind of purpose that I call small p purpose, and that's just making a contribution, right? Capital P purpose is making a difference. Small p purpose is making a contribution. Did you help a teammate get the product out the door? Did you help this customer resolve its problem. There's a great piece of research, I love this, out of Harvard Business School where they had a cafeteria in Boston. And in the cafeteria, you know, the customers went through the line in the cafeteria putting food on their trays and being served food. But the people cooking the food were in the back. You couldn't see them. The cooks couldn't see the customers and the customers couldn't see the cooks. So these researchers rigged up an iPad just like the one you have in front of you that allowed the cooks to to see the customers. And what they were measuring— and this is— forgive me for getting in the weeds here of this research, but what they were measuring, the dependent variable, was not whether the cooks were satisfied with their jobs when they saw the customers. They were measuring the customer evaluation of the food. And so the question they were asking is, when the cooks can see the customers, does the quality of the food change? Customer ratings of the food change? And the answer was yes. Customer satisfaction went up 10% when the cooks could see the customers, even though the customers couldn't see the cooks.

Really? Yeah.

So that's what I'm talking about here. So those cooks back there, they're not feeding the hungry. I mean, people are hungry because it's lunchtime in Boston, but they're not feeding people who are destitute. What's going on here? That cook looks at somebody moving through the line and says, well, wait a second, another human being is going to eat my cheese omelet. So, wow, I know why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's not changing the world, but it's affecting one person's life. So I'm going to up my cheese omelette game 10%. And I think that that small-p purpose is extraordinarily important. And so, again, purpose is not one thing, it's two things.

And for organisations listening or for anyone in a team, I guess the key takeaway I had then is how can I make my teams more connected to the impact they're having with the work they're doing? Because if I do that, then their work will improve and they'll find more meaning and purpose in their work. And they'll— yeah.

Can I, can I give you a couple of ideas? Sure. Sure.

A million ideas.

So one, so one thing is that is, I think, woefully underused are testimonials and things. We often, we use— companies use testimonials from customers in an outward-facing way for marketing. They should use them as an inward-facing way to motivate employees. So if I see— if I'm working for a— let's say I'm working for a software company and I am working on a team of coders and I never— I very rarely see customers. I'm just working on my part of the code and as part of this team. But I start seeing letters from someone who said, oh my gosh, this software transformed my life. It made me run my business a lot better. Oh my gosh, this software was so incredible. It allowed me to— the efficiency was so great, it allowed me to hire 3 new people. Showing the individuals those letters reminds them of the impact of what they're doing.

Mm-hmm.

So that's one very powerful thing to do. The second thing as a leadership technique and something I've been doing, I don't have the kind of operation that you do, but I work with often like networks of people on projects and things like that, is this is again, Going back to the simplicity, I like interventions that are quick and cheap and actionable. Okay? Not, well, go take my 8-week course on autonomous leadership. You know, that's— I don't— or on purpose-driven leadership. You know, here's a simple technique, which I've been doing for probably 8 or 9 years. Each week, try to have— not try, do have— Each week, have two fewer conversations about how and two more about why. When we're leading people, we tend to over-index on how conversations, and we don't realize it. So we say, "Okay, all right, all right. Here's how you make that sales presentation." Okay, okay. Here's how you deal with that customer. And just twice, flip it.

Just change it.

Stop yourself. I mean, literally stop yourself. So when you say, "Here's how," stop yourself and say, "Here's why we're making that sales presentation. Here's why we're dealing with that that vendor." Just twice a week, and what you'll see. see, it becomes habitual. It becomes habitual. You have more— you have more why conversations. How conversations are still important, but you sprinkle in a few more why conversations, and you almost always see an uptick in performance.

That's really, really fascinating. Um, Bertha on my team, who's actually sat over there, um, one of the things she suggested doing was we added a section to our company chat just called Impact, and we, we did that. So In the Impact Chat, it just shows feedback from people that listen to this podcast.

Perfect.

And all that enjoy our content or whatever else. And it's a really— you're right, it's a really nice feedback loop because it's very easy to slip into the, the belief that this is actually just a bunch of numbers we see on the screen. A million people listen this week, or 2 million people.

And that's good, that's useful.

Yeah, but it doesn't, it doesn't hit like hearing Jenny, who was going through a divorce and was really suffering with her mental health, and then she listened to a certain episode, which actually sometimes it's interesting because It might be a certain episode that might not have had as many listens as another one. And to hear that that episode just impacted one person in such a profound way really does provide a huge sense of meaning to the whole kind of digital, you never get to see who we're impacting. You know, we're the chefs in the kitchen that never get to see the food being consumed, right?

Right, exactly.

So that's— yeah, it's such a small thing, but I think it's had such a significant impact.

And the thing is, we— it's interesting, we do it already. You see, you know, the salespeople, in any kind of company are toting around these customer testimonials in an outward-facing way. So shine a few of them inside. And again, these are— we don't have to reform and change everything. We don't have to pull up the roots entirely. We know how to do these things. And by starting small and establishing them as habits and regular practices, they are transformative.

Quick one. As the seasons have begun to change, so has my diet. Right now, I'm just going to be completely honest with you, I'm starting to think a lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of— probably the last 4 or 5 months, my diet has been pretty bad, um, and it started to show a little bit. Really over the last 2 months. I go to the gym about 80% of the time. So I track it with 10 of my friends in a WhatsApp group and this tracker online that we all use together. We call it Fitness Blockchain. And I'm currently at 81%. Um, so 81% of the days I've done a workout in the last 150 days. Right, so I'm going to the gym about 6 times a week. That's been a little bit impacted by the Diary of a CEO Live tour, but I'm trying to stick to it. And so one of the things I'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete in all I eat is I'm having the Huel protein shake. Thank you, Huel, for making a product that I actually like. The salted caramel is my favorite. I've got the banana one here, which is the one my girlfriend likes, but for me, salted caramel is The one. One of the things you said there, um, as you finished that piece, was, for me, the point about why instead of how was also a really good piece of sales advice. Right? And you wrote a book about sales, To Sell Is Human. 2012, you wrote that book. Um, when you write a book, I know because I've written one myself— not written as many bestselling ones as you have, or as many as you have, but even the journey of writing the book changed me. Because you do so much research that you—

Absolutely.

It almost seems like it does more for you than it does the reader. But what did you learn about sales that you took away and that stayed with you for the rest of your life from writing that book?

I mean, so much on both like the big picture and on the tactical level. So one thing is that, you know, the thesis of that book is, or the sort of the animating ideas of that book are that Like it or not, we're all in sales. So to some extent, I'm selling right now. I'm not necessarily selling the book. I'm selling, saying, hey, I have something interesting. I'm making these claims, and I think they're more right than wrong, and you should believe them. All right? So no money changes hands, but that's a form of sales. All of us are doing that. When we're leading people, we're selling. When we're dealing with our kids, we're selling. You know? But the thing is, which most people haven't realized, is that sales has changed more in the last 10 years than the previous 1,000. Yeah. Because everything we knew about sales, sales, sales has come from a world of information asymmetry where the seller always had more information than the buyer. In all commercial transactions since the beginning of civilization, the seller had more information than the buyer. This is why we have the principle of buyer beware. Buyer beware is entirely the result of information asymmetries where the seller has more information than the buyer. The buyer doesn't have any choices, and the buyer doesn't have a way to talk back. That's how commercial transactions were since there were commercial transactions. And then, boop, 10 years ago, it all flipped because now we have something closer to information parity. And most people haven't wrapped their minds around what a significant change that is. And to me, it's not a difference in degree, it's a difference in kind. And so to sell today, where we're in this landscape where we're selling all the time and we're doing it in this remade landscape, calls for an entirely new approach.

And what's caused that? That shift, is it because of the internet?

Yeah, totally.

And you can find out anything about what you want to buy, reviews that, you know.

Absolutely, absolutely. If you look at, say, even buying a car in the United States in the last 15 years, um, you know, literally 15 years ago, you went to a car dealer, that car dealer knows more about Toyotas, more about Camrys, more about cars than you ever will. All right, buyer beware. Now, literally, the last car we bought, I mean, my wife walked into the car dealership with the factory invoice price of the car. Hello, I know how much you paid to purchase this car for yourself, and I know what the going margin is for dealers in this area. Therefore—

Hmm.

But that's true in everything. It's true in B2B. It's true in hiring. You know, like, I, early in my life, I took a couple of jobs that were really stupid to take. And if had there been something like LinkedIn or Glassdoor, I would have known in advance what a hellhole those places were. And so this world of from information asymmetry to information parity is huge, and it calls for a different set of skills, the skills of, again, simplicity. If you look at the research, Right? And you pound on it for a year trying to make sense of this research, you find that there are 3 key principles, and they start with A, B, and C. That was basically luck. That was luck. Attunement, which is, can you get out of your own head into someone else's head? Hugely important. Buoyancy. You know, from being an entrepreneur, that when you're selling anything, you're getting rejected all the time. One seller told me that He says, I live in a sea, I live in an ocean of rejection. So buoyancy is how do you stay afloat in an ocean of rejection? And then clarity is how do you go from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems? Because here's the thing, problem solving as a skill, totally overrated. Because if your customer or prospect knows exactly what its problem is, they don't need you very much.

Hmm.

They can figure it out themselves. Where do they need you more? When they don't know what their problem is or they're wrong about their problem. So this premium has shifted from problem solving to problem finding. Can you surface problems? Can you identify hidden problems? And then also just think about information. It used to be that the very nature of expertise was that expertise meant you had access to information nobody else had. Now everybody has the information. So instead of being a good information access, you have to be a good information curator. A very different set of skills. Can you see the big picture? Can you synthesise? Can you simplify? Can you find the hidden patterns? Can you detect what's really going on beneath the welter of information? And so these are the skills that matter most in any kind of persuasive job, which is all jobs.

Interesting. I was thinking about the importance of building a being a bit of a chameleon when you're talking about empathy and being able to find out what the unknown unknowns about their challenges and stuff like that?

There is. Okay, so let's go to attunement here for a second. So attunement is perspective taking. Can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view? And there are some really, really good science behind that. What it shows is that actually being a chameleon is helpful in this regard. We've heard of— okay, so let's talk about— this is like the first cousin of manifestation. Okay? So it sounds like BS, but this one isn't. It's mimicry. Mimicry. So let's say, okay, I'm coming in to make a sales call on Steven. I'm going to sell you my lifetime subscription to rutabagas or something like that. All right? And I'm looking to see how you're sitting, and I'm seeing, okay, you're sitting like this.

For coffee, Jim.

Yeah. And then, okay, you have his hands clasped like that. And then, like, you're smiling, and then maybe you lean back in your chair, and I mirror. Okay, and you're told to do that. It seems like complete bunk. Uh-uh. There is a pile of research showing that the ability to chameleon like that, to reflect back people's words and gestures, is powerful, not as a way to deceive people, but as a way to understand where they're coming from.

Mm-hmm.

That is, the way we understand where people are coming from is in some ways, to inhabit them fully by appropriating their gestures and language. And so this is one of those. And there's a really famous paper by Adam Galinsky at Columbia University about the advantages of chameleons in negotiating, being able to shift your colors, shift the way you do things in order— but again, not to deceive, to understand. And so there's some really powerful research in that. One of the best things you can do Is, again, I mean, I see— I keep coming back to the theme that you sort of struck at the beginning, which is simplification. Is a lot of times, especially in technical sales— so we get in the weeds here a little bit— the reason technical salespeople go awry is they use their own specialized lingo and their own specialized language because they love it and it makes them feel proud and they feel like it makes them experts. And the customers and prospects have no idea what they're talking about. And the customers and prospects use simpler, less precise language. But you should use the customer's language rather than your own. When you use even something like I hear— I remember being in one circumstance where somebody was talking about trying to sell somebody something, was talking about KPIs, key performance indicators. The person clearly did not know what a KPI was. They didn't know the difference between KPI and KFC. And I'm like, okay, like, let me— I think I need to intervene here and say, okay, key performance— KPI is key performance indicator. But had that guy not done that, he would have completely lost the person he was trying to persuade because he wasn't using— he wasn't using that person's language. He was using his own specialized lingo.

Super interesting. I was thinking that as well as you said that when you're talking about mimicking, about a technique that's really proven to work when I'm in conflict resolution with my girlfriend, which is if I repeat what she just said back to me, it seems to defuse the situation remarkably. So she says— because usually when people have arguments, it's kind of you're not listening to them and you're not being listened to, so you're just kind of shouting on repeat like a broken record. But one thing that I've learned over the last, I think, 6 months, that when we do have an issue and it's clear that she doesn't feel heard, if I just say to her— I'm gonna like— I don't know how I say it. I usually say, um, Can I just repeat back to you what you said so I'm clear that I understand it? The broken record thing stops.

But part of it also is that it's— that's also— that's not— I think sometimes we position these kinds of things as tricks.

Yeah.

But when you say what she said, you better understand what she means!

Yeah, exactly.

It's not a trick!

Yeah.

It's actually an act of perspective-taking.

And I'm not doing it to trick her.

Yeah.

'Cause I'll say, I just wanna be clear, babe. This is basically how you feel. You're saying that, da-da-da-da. And the minute I do that, she goes, yeah, and that's it. And then she'll listen to my response, because I think she now feels understood. And I think there's kind of synergies with what you were saying with meaning.

Oh, there's no question. But that's basically, this is one of the areas where people go awry. They have a hard time getting out of their own head and seeing things from someone else's point of view. It's something we're not innately great at. It's something that I'm not innately great at. It's something that I've really, really worked on. I think it's central in any kind of persuasion, and it's obviously huge in any kind of writing, because I'm dealing with this vast army of people who I don't even know. I can't even see. The scary part is that if I am not attuned and if I don't take people's perspective in a book, I can't see them shrink their face and look confused. I've lost them forever.

Hmm. You also talk a lot about pitching, and pitching is a huge part of— I mean, pitching is everything. I know to get people to come on this podcast, sometimes we have to pitch, and to get, you know, someone to wanna date you, you're doing a pitch. To raise investment, I pitch. So, what have you learned about the art of someone that's good at pitching and a good pitch?

OK. This, again— you asked earlier what this taught me, this line of research taught me, and One of the biggest things it taught me was about what I'm about to drop on you, which is that I had gotten pitching completely wrong. There's some really interesting research out of Stanford and out of UC Davis where they followed around movie producers who were going to studios to pitch. And they actually recorded these pitches, a few hundred of them, I think, and looked to see which were successful and which were not. And the most important criterion, the most important thing was Was the following: is was that the people who were successful looked at the people that they were pitching as partners. All right, and so instead of so I used to think pitching was like this kind of song and dance, like I do a little tap shoe da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da, and they like take out their checkbook. No, what you what you that's not the response that I mean that's great if you get that response. You don't get that response. The response you want is this. Hey, that's interesting. Have you thought about X, Y, or Z? That the goal of pitching is to invite in the other side as a collaborator. That's the key for any kind of pitch at a macro level. And that's totally changed the way that I pitch. I pitch in a much more collaborative way. In the past, when I was younger, I had this elaborate dog and pony show in my head thinking that if I executed that performance perfectly, I would get a cent, and that didn't happen.

I remember, it just reminded me of a time when I was running Social Chain. I remember pitching to— we just launched in America, and I was pitching to, I think it was Uber, for their global account. And, um, one day late at night, I was looking at the email thread, and I saw at the bottom of the email thread that we called our salespeople salespeople. And I remember thinking, like, is that— should we really be calling ourselves salespeople? Or, like, should we be calling ourselves— 'cause in the US, I think people call themselves partnership manager.

Sure.

And because the, the term sales, it's kind of like— I don't know if it's giving the game away, but it sounds transactional, like I'm trying to give you, you know. So what do you think about that? Should we be changing our titles to like something else?

Such an interesting question. So I intentionally— because this is sort of the way I like to do things— I intentionally put the word sell in the title of that book because that's what we're doing. But I faced some resistance because what I— I did some survey research in the US showing that when you ask people, when you think of the word sales or selling, what's the first word that comes to mind? And people had all these horrible words— pushy, sleazy, skeezy, pressure.

Pressure.

So it has a bad association. But I wanted to try to win back the word. Probably didn't do it that successfully. But for years, I don't think people like being sold to. I mean, I think one of the interesting trends I see is when they is referring to those folks as customer success. They're— we're in customer success. I want someone to help me succeed.

Yes. Oh, that's good news. We use that in our company in San Francisco at the moment. We have a customer success manager, and that's in fact all of our terminology is your job is to get customers from the door to success. So that's good to know. And we did actually kill the sales title.

Yeah, I think that— I think customer success is better than sales. I think that account executive is Sounds like someone trying not to say sales.

Yeah. And their job is to retain you at all costs.

Ahhh, yeah.

Um, the other thing that really stood out to me, and I didn't delve further into it because I wanted to hear you explain it, was this story about the blind man with the sign. And the sign said, I am blind. And when it changed from I am blind to it's springtime and I am blind, people donated more to this homeless man.

Yeah, that's a story. That's not a study. Okay, so it's an anecdotal finding. But the idea is that we need context, and in some levels, we need a why. That is, that people said that the fact that he was blind is significant, and there was some degree of empathy. But when people were reminded that it's springtime in New York City and he couldn't see anything, That changed the emotional tenor of it. And this is the thing about stories that we sometimes miss, is that we sometimes think about, oh, should I go with the story or should I go with the facts? And the answer is yes, because stories are facts in context delivered with emotional impact. So adding that it's springtime is a fact. Because it was springtime. It's a fact. We added a fact. But what you also did is you enriched it with context and delivered it with some emotional impact, and that's what made it persuasive.

I literally think the reason why my company was successful— and my company grew from like 0 people to 700 in about 6 years— was because from— and we never had a sales team ever until the point I resigned like last year. And I say this to entrepreneurs when I meet them all the time, and they go, can you give me one piece of advice? I'm starting an agency business. I'm trying to win clients. My one piece of advice was, from day one, I told stories. And the story that I told when we started in 2014 was, um, we are the social media Illuminati. We're the kids that decide what all the other kids talk about. And I would go around the world and the country showing this presentation which showed that we could make anything the number one trending topic in 30 minutes. And it was all this story. And I never ever in my life felt like there was one occasion where in that 6 years I pitched to anybody. I was just this storyteller. It was my full-time job. Go around and tell stories that make people feel uncomfortable to the point that they think we've got a power that they need. So when I, when I meet entrepreneurs these days, my singular piece of advice is like, please never pitch. If you get a chance to speak on stage, fuck graphs, right? Don't try to do— no one cares about your fucking business. But find a story. And it's funny, in my last 3 years at Social Chain, every single presentation I did, no matter what the stage was, no matter if there was 15,000 people and Obama was on stage, or if it was 20 people, I opened up with the same thing, which is I walked out and went, and that's exactly why she stopped talking to me. She put the phone down and told me she would never talk to me ever again. That's the first 2 lines I say. I don't say, hi, my name is Steve and I'm from Social Chain. And then people sit on the edge of their chairs and they start with this story about my mum, which is incomplete.

Exactly.

Until the end.

Exactly.

So, and I think that's so unappreciated, 'cause And I almost don't want to say it because now I'm like, my life's going to get harder because everyone's going to— but it just works so well for me.

And but this is, this is, this is, this is true for everything. I mean, one of the things that you want to do as a writer is you want to keep people turning the page. And the way— a way to keep people turning the page is to say what's going to happen next. So you lead with those 2 sentences. I'm like, okay, what's going on and what's going to happen next?

Yeah, exactly. All I want to know. Yeah, exactly.

Now, if you don't have something at the end that makes the customer's life better, all you have is a, you know, you're a wandering minstrel telling stories. You're not a business person. But if you have something that can land with an impact that can transform that person's life, then you win.

And then your other book, before we get on to your new book, When: Timing Is a Science, Not an Art. I was reading through all of the summary pages of that book. And I was reading about chronotypes, which I thought was a really interesting concept that there's— because it kind of challenges a lot of the conventional thinking. My understanding of chronotypes, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, is that different people are motivated and awake and alert and do their best stuff at different times in the day. Is that accurate, or is it slightly different?

No, that's exactly right. I was motivated— they're motivated in part— the motivation comes from the fact that there are some people who naturally wake up late and go to sleep late.

Naturally?

Naturally. There are some people who— it's biological.

Really?

There are some people who naturally wake up early and go to sleep early. And then there are plenty of us in the middle. And what the distribution tells us is that about 15% of us are very strong morning people, larks, naturally get up early and go to sleep early. About 20% of us are very strong owls. We naturally wake up late and go to sleep late. And about 2/3 of us are in the middle. And this, our chronotype changes over time somewhat. So little kids, very, very larky, wake up early, start running around like crazy people from the get-go. Teenagers, as you might remember, in general have a big shift toward lateness. We, you know, parents think teenagers are being lazy when they're sleeping in, when in fact they're actually, their bodies are changing. Teenagers have a move to a late chronotype from about age 15 to age 25 or so. And then over time, most of us go back to general larkiness. But about 1 in 5 of us naturally wake up late and go to sleep late. And a lot of those people are really disadvantaged in conventional work situations.

I feel like you're talking about me.

Oh, is that— is that you?

Yes.

Okay, so, okay, so here's else— here's what else we know about, about, uh, evening chronotypes. They test higher on intelligence tests.

Oh, now you're just—

No, they test higher on creativity. They're also more likely to go to prison.

Uh, yes.

OK.

Yes.

All right, so it's a mixed bag.

Yes.

All right?

Just edit that out.

But the problem is that— this is why a disproportionate number of owls become self-employed, because conventional work structures don't work very well for them.

Facts. My best friend said to me when I was 18, you're either gonna go to prison or be a millionaire. And I'm fundamentally unemployable. I can't get up— well... So, the reason why I wanted to talk about this was because I always thought I was bullshitting myself. I thought I was just an unorganized mess, but I genuinely like to wake up late, and I like to go to bed at 3:00 a.m.

OK.

Or 2:00 a.m., if, you know, on a good day.

What time do you typically wake up?

I go to the gym at midnight.

Oh my god.

And I work out for an hour and a half at midnight, like pretty much every day.

OK.

And I wake up maybe 9:30.

OK, so what time do you typically go to sleep?

Maybe 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m.

OK, and you wake up what, at...?

9:00, 9:30.

Okay, so—

Because I have to.

Because you have to. But if you were to let— but if you maybe sleep till 10.

Oh, yeah, I'd go— if it's the weekend, yeah, just go 11.

Yeah, yeah. So this is— you're clearly an owl. And here's the thing. It's like 20% of us are that way. And one of the disadvantages is that a lot of the kind of life-hacking advice says you got to get up at 4:30 in the morning and win the day. You got to get up at 4:30 in the morning and meditate for an hour and then Free journal for half an hour and then, you know, do high-intensity interval training for half an hour and then read 3 newspapers in 6 different languages so that—

Yoga, meditation, green juice.

So when you get to your desk at 6:30, you have already, you know—

Yeah.

And hey, some people can do that. I'm not one of those. Most people can't do that. I don't, you know, for me, you know, I'm not an owl at all, but I'm not a very strong lark. I'm kind of in the— I have the I have the most common chronotype there is, which is that I'm slightly larky. I'm not a full-fledged lark, but I lean toward that earliness. And the key for me is going with that.

Do you know the problem for me? My girlfriend wakes up at 6:00 AM, and she, I swear she's up at 5:00, but she gets outta bed at about 6:00 AM, and she's super early. She sleeps, she goes to bed at 10:00 PM. And I was like, what am I gonna do with this?

This is, there are differences between, you know, average differences between between men and women. Women in general are larkier than men. What's interesting is that as men age, they become larkier. So maybe as you get older, you'll have more compatible sleeping times.

Is there like a prehistoric or an ancestral reason why we have these different chronotypes and sleeping patterns?

I mean, I think we can make an argument for it. I think we can make an argument for an evolutionary reason for some of these things, which is that certainly there's an evolutionary argument for why people between 15 and 25 roughly have a dramatic shift toward lateness. And I think it's because imagine we're evolving on the savanna, all right? And it's nighttime. There's not electricity, there's no illumination. You need people to guard what's going on. the people who were able to stay up late, people who were young and fit and able to stay up late were actually incredibly valuable. So they were respected, they were nourished and so forth. And so theoretically, those genes then got passed along in the population so that the rest of us, 10,000 years later, teenagers and people in their 20s end up having evening chronotypes. There's also just something to be said for, it's also a very, very interesting form of cognitive diversity. that we sometimes overlook. So what you see is that our performance changes significantly within a day. So all times of day are not created equal. We tend to think that's the case. But generally what happens is that 2/3 of us, forget about the owls for a second, do better on analytic work, heads-down, focused kind of work, We do better on that kind of work early in the day rather than later in the day. Owls do better later in the day rather than earlier in the day. And so, but at the same point, owls sometimes do better on some of the creative tasks a tad earlier, not always. And people like me who are kind of in the middle will often do better on creative tasks a little later in the day because our mood is up, but our vigilance is down. So that gives us some kind of mental looseness. But that's one reason that I write in the morning. Interesting.

Interesting.

And it's something that I became even more dedicated to once I did the research on timing.

That's so interesting. I definitely feel more creative and I feel better equipped to, better able to express myself specifically with podcasts and stuff like that if they're slightly later in the day.

Yeah.

So my conversations are much, much better if I have them after lunch than they are if I do them in the morning.

It makes perfect sense if you're an owl. And so the idea here is, What I don't like with owls is that we—

Uh-oh.

No, what I don't like, the way that owls are treated, is that we try to put the onus on the people with these evening chronotypes to adjust, when it should be that organizations are adjusting to them, because you're losing 1/5 of the talent pool.

So interesting. And I always find myself actually doing my work in the evening. So during the day, I don't even endeavor to do my work. I do it when everyone else has gone, and it's about 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 at night.

Classic owl behavior.

Ugh. I need to get an owl necklace. Um, so you wrote this book, The Power of Regret.

Yes.

And, I mean, you know that the title, in and of itself, is challenging, because people don't perceive regret to be a thing that one should seek power from, or that— I mean, it's not a positive thing to have regrets in life, according to culture. I guess my first question is, why, of all the things you could write about— and you told me you've got some Google file of all these book ideas you have. Why did you have to write a book about regret?

Because, um, I was dealing with some regrets of my own. I'm at a point in my life where I suddenly looked up and I have mileage on me, which is kind of shocking. But I also have some mileage ahead of me, and I want to be able to use it well. And when I look backward, I've realized that I had some regrets. And what I found is that despite what exactly what you're talking about, this idea that we have in culture that, oh, we never talk about regrets, regrets are bad, they make you weak, no regrets, no regrets, forward thinking, positive, that when I talked to people about my regrets, they leaned in, they were interested, and they wanted to share theirs. And so I'm so glad you pointed that out, because I didn't go with a more elliptical side door title. I wanted to put that word regret in big blue letters on the COVID to challenge people and try to reclaim this word, because Regret is our most transformative emotion if we treat it right.

In the book, you talk about various types of regret.

Yeah.

What were the types of regret that inspired you to write this book? You said you had your regrets there.

Yeah, well, I mean, I had— so, well, it was really reckoning with these regrets. So I'll give you one regret that I had, which is— I mean, I had plenty of them, which was regrets about kindness when I was younger, when I was in primary school and secondary school and in University and even beyond. A lot of the regrets that I collect, and I collected a huge number of regrets. I had a lot of regrets about bullying people, regretting bullying other people. I was never a bully, but there were many, many times when I was younger where I saw people being excluded, not being treated right, being left out, and I knew I saw it. And I knew it was wrong and I didn't do anything. And that bugs me to this day. It bugs me to this day.

Really?

Hell yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have, yeah, it still bothers me. Even talking to you about it right now, kind of my cortisol level has spiked a little bit. And here's the thing about regret. So I could say, I could take that and say, no regrets, no regrets, never look backward, always look forward, okay? That's a really bad idea. Or I could say, oh my God, I am the worst person in the world. I'm just horrible. And that's debilitating. That's an even worse idea. What I want to do is actually listen to those regrets, because regret does 2 things for us. It clarifies and it instructs. So the fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that's telling me something. It's telling me what I value. It's telling me I actually value kindness, that it's something that's important to me. And as I think about that, I think, well, who are the people I admire? A lot of the people I admire are kind people, people who treat others well. So it's clarifying, and it's also instructing me what to do next. Now, this is mundane, but here's the thing. If I'm ever at a social gathering or any kind of gathering, and I see sometimes there are people clumped together talking, and every once in a while you see people sort of left out on an island of their own. I always reach out, pull that person in. And that is a consequence of being embarrassed and regretful about letting people be left out earlier in my life. So regrets clarify what matters to us, and they instruct us on how to do better.

Why use a couple of examples in the book, like, you know, Angela Jolie, her quotes and stuff like that? Why don't— why are we living in a culture where we don't ever want to admit we have regrets? What is it about humans where the idea of having a regret is such a negative thing?

It's several things. I mean, part of it is that regrets aren't fun. They're aversive, right? They don't feel good. They clarify and instruct, and we might want the clarification and the instruction, but you got to have a little bit of the pain to begin with. So that's one thing. Second thing is that No one ever teaches us how to deal with negative emotions. That's the big problem, I think, is that— and so what happens is, is when people, especially younger people, feel a negative emotion, they think, oh my gosh, there's something wrong. There's something wrong with me. I'm broken. What's— this can't be— everybody else is so positive. Everybody else is so positive. I must— there must be something wrong with me, when in fact, they're just human beings. And the other— the third thing I think is that— you alluded to this earlier— is that it's a very— We have become a very performative culture. We have a culture where we're performing all the time rather than being authentic. And we like to perform courage. So when we say no regrets, that is play-acting courage. Real courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them.

Interesting. And there's something, there's something about, I guess, This is like a wider point I wanted to ask you about the book, um, which was people don't seem to like— and I talk about this a lot on this podcast because it's something that I know. One reason I talk about it is because I know it's kind of slightly triggering, but I also think it's kind of true, which is people really don't like taking responsibility for their outcomes in life.

Interesting point.

And now this sometimes gets a little bit political or whatever. I'm really not a political person, um, but I've noticed this trend of people not liking responsibility, they're not liking to be attached to their outcomes unless they're good outcomes, right? So if it's success, we achieve something great that me. If something goes wrong, that is, uh, the political party in charge, that is someone else's fault, etc., etc. And I, I, as I was reading through this new book of yours, that theme kind of— it felt like much of the reason people don't like to own their regrets is because then they have to own the responsibility, and we're like shitty at that.

It's a good point, because here's the thing: regret requires agency, okay? It's a difference between regret and disappointment. Disappointment is, hey, things didn't happen and it wasn't my fault. Regret is your fault and you have to face that. Now, here's the thing. But when you do that, this is the thing that bugs me, is that when you do that, when you face it, first of all, it's a lot easier than people think. Second, it's a lot more beneficial than people think. Let's go back to some research again. There's 70 years of research on this question about regret. What it shows us is this. I'll give you a small example. Let's say you're negotiating. You're negotiating and you're in a negotiation. And let's say you make a first offer and it's not a great first offer. Okay? If you then think about that negotiation and consciously think about what you regret in that negotiation, you invite the negative feeling. Remember, regret doesn't feel good. You invite it. You do better in the next negotiation. You see this in problem solving. I'm trying to solve a problem. I didn't do it that right. Let me actually think about what I regret in that problem-solving exercise. Invite the negative feeling. You do better in the next one. Strategy, same thing. Over and over again, what you see is that when we deal with regret properly, when we think about it, when we think about regret as a message, as a signal, it is a powerful force In doing better, in making better decisions, in being better problem solvers, and finding greater meaning in our life. It is a powerful; it's an elixir if we deal with it right. The problem is we don't know how to deal with it right. So some of us ignore our regrets. We put our fingers in our ears and go ba ba ba. All right. Then others of us, when we can't do that any longer, become debilitated by it. We wallow in it. Those are bad ideas both. What we want to do is we want to. think about our regrets. We want to confront them and do something about them. And there's a systematic way to do that. And if we learn how to do that, teach people how to do that, they're going to be way better off.

Well, I was thinking about a particular friend of mine when you were saying that, specifically on the point of regrets debilitating somebody. And I was thinking about this one friend I have, and I know the prospect of them really ever taking responsibility or admitting their regrets. I feel like they're a little bit too fragile in the, I don't know, the self-esteem, whatever it might be, to invite negativity. You call it like inviting the negative feelings. So what they do is like a self-defense mechanism, is constantly, um, obfuscate their sort of responsibilities in any situation.

Yeah.

And the prospect of like thinking about things they regret, I know they would put their fingers in their ear and run off. So tell me, what is the systematic sort of process for me having a conversation with that person to get them to not be crippled by the prospect of inviting negative feelings? Because I think they would fall into the trap of, wallowing in their own deficiencies as opposed to being motivated by it?

Yep. Because they haven't been taught how to do it well.

Right.

Okay. So let's think about 3 broad steps. Think of it as inward, outward, forward. Inward, outward, forward. So inward, and this goes to exactly what you're talking about. How do we think about ourselves and our regret? So a lot of people, like the people you're talking about, just want to boost their self-esteem. All right, the evidence again on self-esteem, it's pretty good. Self-esteem is totally overrated, especially when it's unhinged from any real accomplishment. Now, self-criticism. I love self-criticism. There's just not a lot of evidence that it's very effective, right? The middle way is something known as self-compassion. Self-compassion. It's a term pioneered by Kristin Neff, who's a psychologist at the University of Texas in the US. It sounds a little gooey, self-compassion, but here's what it says. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The reason your friends want to boost their self-esteem is that if they actually heard their self-talk, it would be lacerating and vicious. The way we talk to ourselves is so brutal and so cruel, we would never talk to anybody out— anybody that way. That's true.

Right?

And so here's the thing. It's like that old joke where a guy goes to a doctor's office and he says, doctor, it hurts when I do this. And the doctor says, don't do that. All right?

Mm.

Don't do that. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Treat yourself with the same kindness you treat somebody else. Recognize that your mistakes and missteps are part of the human condition. All right? Think about my regrets about kindness. I've collected regrets from thousands of people around the world. Believe me, I'm not that special. There are plenty of people with regrets about kindness. And also recognize that any single mistake or misstep is a moment in your life. It doesn't fully define your life. So that's the reframing inward. Now, what else you can do, and here's the thing, we're totally wrong on this. Talk about it. Disclose it. Disclosing isn't unburdening. I'll give you— I mean, I, as you know from reading the book, I put up a website called the World Regrets Survey. With 2 tweets, I got 15,000 regrets from people in 100 countries. It's crazy. Why? Because they want to talk about it. Disclosing is an unburdening. The other thing, again, let's go back to negative emotions and how we deal with them. Emotions are blobby. They're amorphous. They're abstract. That's why positive emotions feel so good and negative emotions feel so bad. So with negative emotions, writing about your regret or talking about your regret converts that blobby abstraction into concrete words, which are much less menacing. So that's the second. So express outward. And then finally, you've got to draw a lesson from it. Okay. And here's the thing about us human beings. We stink at solving our own problems. We're terrible because we're too close. We're too enmeshed in the details. So what you should do is actually get— do some techniques known as self-distancing. And so for that, you can do things like— it sounds goofy— talk to yourself in the third person. You're deciding what to do, how to respond to a regret. Don't say, what should I do? Say, what should Steven do? Some good evidence of that. Other kinds of things.

And talk to yourself out loud. Or both.

Either way, any kind of self-talk, like talking to yourself in the third person, is actually advantageous. There are other things you can do. You can imagine having a conversation with yourself 10 years from now, because I have a pretty good sense from analyzing all these regrets what I'm going to be concerned about 10 years from now. And it's not going to be whether I bought a blue car or a gray car. It's not going to be whether I had pizza tonight for dinner or a hamburger. It's going to be other things. And then another way to draw a lesson is the single best decision-making tool that I know, which is that you're faced with a decision about what to do. Ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? When people— you give people— people come to me saying, oh, Dan, I don't know what to do. Well, what would you tell your best friend to do? Oh, that's easy. You got the answer right there. So express inward. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Express outward, make sense of it through disclosure and language, and extract a lesson from it by getting some remove. And it's very simple. It's a very— it can be very habitual, and it is a way to transform these negative emotions into positive forces.

Quick one. As you might know, Crafted are one of the sponsors of this podcast, and Crafted are a jewelry brand, and they make really meaningful pieces of jewelry. The really wonderful thing about Crafted jewelry is it's super affordable, it looks amazing, The pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made. I think I've worn this piece for almost a year. It hasn't broken, hasn't changed color because it's really, really good quality and it costs roughly £50. People will be surprised when they hear that. They'd probably assume that all of my jewelry is like solid gold and costs thousands and thousands of pounds. But what's the point when you can achieve the exact same effect from a piece of jewelry that's high quality and costs £50? That's why I buy crafted. Counterfactual thinking.

Yes.

Really interesting topic that I was, uh, delving into your book in, I think, chapter 3 about, um, this idea that people have more if-onlys than they do, um, uh, at-leasts, right, in their life. And the example that you gave, and I, I'm thinking about the graph in chapter 3 in my head, is about bronze medalists and silver medalists. I found that really compelling. Can you talk a little bit about counterfactual thinking and how we can live better, more motivated lives by kind of—

Well, it's something that— counterfactual thinking is something that human beings do sometimes. For all of our flaws, our brains are freaking amazing. We can do all kinds of things. We can travel back and forth in time. We can imagine things that never happened. Our storytelling capacities are a very part of our— essential part of our cognition. And counterfactual thinking is just imagining what the word says, events that run counter to the existing facts. And so there's some interesting evidence from the Olympics. If you show people photographs of Olympic medalists on the medal stand without showing them the medals they received themselves, what you'll find is that gold medalists look really happy. Not surprising, they've just won a gold medal. However, you know who else looks really happy? Bronze medalists. Bronze medalists are usually beaming. Silver medalists? They often don't look so happy, even though they finished second in the world. Here's what— and it's all about counterfactual thinking. The bronze medalist is doing what's called a downward counterfactual, imagining how things could have been worse. And so she says, well, at least I didn't finish in 4th place like that schmo over there who's going home without any medal at all. The silver medalist does what's called an upward counterfactual. She imagines how things could have been better. Oh, if only I had Pedaled a little bit harder, if only I had taken that turn a little bit faster, I would be a gold medalist. Here's the thing. Regret is an upward counterfactual. It begins with if only. If only blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At least make us feel better, but they don't make us do better. If onlys make us do better, make us feel worse, and they help us do better. They make us do better. By making us feel worse. That's the thing. This is why we have a problem with it. In order to get the instruction, you need a little bit of discomfort. You need a little bit of pain. And what's interesting about us, and this is the thing, exactly as you say, we are much more likely to conjure an if only than an at least. We're much more likely to do counterfactual thinking that makes us feel worse than feel better. Why are we masochists? No, because we are programmed for survival, and regret is part of our cognitive machinery. By imagining how things could have been better and even— and dealing with a little bit of that pain, we improve in the future. That's how we learn. It's how we grow.

But in the world of social media, where every time I open up Instagram, I engage in upward counterfactual thinking because everyone's life is better than mine, yeah, that's maybe a little too much feedback for a stable mental health?

It's like, let's go back to the joke. The doctor says, you go to the doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this. And the doctor says, don't do that. You know, so, I mean, here's the thing. We know a lot about this. We know a lot about social comparison in the research and social comparison in general makes people feel worse. And so what you should be doing, the best way to improve, is to compare yourself to your previous self. That's the best kind of counterfactual thinking. That's the best kind of regret. So if I go— let's go back to my kindness regret. I have a kindness regret not because, oh my God, my friend Bill was kinder than me and he posted on Instagram all of his acts of kindness.

Who cares?

I have regrets about kindness because I wasn't as kind as I could have been. But current me is kinder than old me, and that's progress, and that brings meaning to our lives.

Yeah, it's really tough, isn't it, in this day and age to have a smaller context of comparison? And I guess, as you say, the most— the healthiest and the fairest context of comparison is actually just like, am I better than yesterday or the month before?

Absolutely. But here's the thing, if people started sharing their regrets on Instagram, I think it would transform the conversation. Well, again, I've collected regrets now from 18,000 people in 109 countries just by putting up a website. People want to share their regrets. And the thing is, when people— and here's the other thing that we mistake. This is important for leaders, too. We fear that when we share our screw-ups, our mistakes, our vulnerabilities, our regrets, people will think less of us. There's 30 years of research telling us in general, not in every case, but in general, they think more of us.

Okay, let's play a game.

They admire our courage. They admire our authenticity. Yes, sir.

You said it would be a much better world if everybody shared their regrets. So let's share our regrets. I'll go first. We'll do 3 each. You've given one already, so you need to think of 2. Okay. My first regret would actually be something, and it's the first thing that came to mind, is something you kind of alluded to there, which is Um, moments where I didn't practice enough empathy, and I reacted without empathy.

Yeah.

So, especially being an employer over the years, um, of course there's days where you are busy or you are trying to solve a bunch of other problems, and your empathy slips in moments. And I think those are the things that I still have as lasting regrets. And you know what's funny? When you told me about the story about being bullied, someone being bullied, and you not— you seeing them being excluded but not necessarily speaking up about it, and I played devil's advocate to say, really? Really? I thought of a kid. I thought of a kid. And it's funny, because I remember a couple of months ago thinking about him in my office, and it's been 20 years. And I still remember that kid being bullied for having, like, black nail polish and being, you know, wearing all black and having long hair and being a little bit different to the rest of the guys. And I still think about— I still worry about where he ended up.

Yeah.

And about how I, at the time, 'cause I was trying to fit in too, was definitely not stopping it.

Yeah.

I'm not saying I was leading the charge, but I was definitely not stopping it. And that's funny that that stayed with me for 20 years.

That tells you something.

What does it tell me?

It tells you what you value. You know, think about all the things that happened 20 years ago that you have no recollection of.

Yeah. Okay.

But that stays with— the fact that it's— this regret stays with you for 20 years is a signal. It's a signal. It's telling you, you know what? I value kindness. I value embracing people who might be different. And it's also instructing you as a leader, as a friend, as a human being to say, I'm going to do a better job next time. That's why it's valuable. If you plugged your ears and said, I don't care about that, if you didn't have— if we're not having this conversation, you might not— you might understand less what you value, and you might be actually a less kind person in the future. That's how regret is transformative. And you don't seem too traumatized by having this conversation.

I'm not. No, I'm not traumatized by it.

Yeah, that's my point. It's like, it's like we're completely over-indexed on how threatening it is. The specter of it is, we find quite threatening. But once we disclose it, we're fine. And also, people don't think less of us. That's because what just happened here is the power of regret. I shared a regret with you. You didn't think less of me for that, I don't think. All right? And then what happened is, like, it triggered you to share another, to share a similar regret.

Yeah.

Which you said, wait a second, I have a regret like that. Maybe I'm not such an oddball. And I didn't think less of you for doing that. I actually admire your willingness to share it with your legions of listeners that you have this seemingly You know, this person with this seeming ideal life, this titan of the universe, this guy who's on Dragon's Den, is like, has a regret about something 20 years ago and being unkind. I think that's actually powerful, you know? And so this is, this is why we should be talking about our regrets.

You go.

Oh, okay. So another regret that I have—

You tried to get out of that.

No, I wasn't.

I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking.

So I did something called a failure resume.

Oh, yeah, I read about it.

Yeah, a few years ago where I listed my professional failures and screw-ups, and there were plenty of them. And what I realized is that a lot of my big regrets— and here's what it is. It's like I have committed to projects. Okay, I'll give you an idea. So I have a regret about a business that I tried to start with taking some of the ideas in Drive and turning it into like a training business. And it was a total flop, complete disaster. And I realized the reason was is that I don't want to run a training business. That's not what I want to do with my life. And yet I did it. I was— I had the wrong motivation. And I— yeah, I had the wrong motivation and I wasn't fully committed to it. And as a consequence, It flopped. And so that is a regret. Now, I could say, oh, no regrets, no regrets. Every business, you know, a lot of business fails. But for me, the lesson is don't take on projects you're not fully committed to, period. And, you know, there's an old adage, I think it's Derek Sivers, the guy who founded CD Baby, that I try to adhere to now, which is that if it's not a hell yes, it's a no.

Yeah.

And that's an important lesson. flop in my past, and, and I regret it. But what I really regret is not the flop itself, but the decision-making screw-up that I had underneath it.

And that regret and the lesson you look— you garnered from it will be— is going to be a tremendously informative thing if you're— if you have the humility, the self-awareness.

Exactly.

To confront it, write it down, and hold it out in front of you.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Okay, so I think you owe me one.

Okay, so I was thinking about— I was thinking a little bit about what my next one would be, and I think my next one is It's an ongoing regret, interestingly. It's actually one that I'm aware of and haven't corrected, which is my relationship with my family.

OK.

Like, I'm well aware, whether it's from sitting here, reading the studies, whatever else, or even Bronnie Ware's thing where she interviewed people on their deathbed and asked them their number one regret before they died, I'm well aware that one of my big regrets in my life will be not being close to my family. But I'm not seeming to do a ton about it. I'm like inching over the— if, you know, if you looked at my... The effort I invest in my family, it's definitely going in the right direction, but just way too slow.

OK.

And my parents, my dad in particular, is not getting any younger. He must be 70 years, roughly about 70 years old now. And I know I'm gonna regret it. I know I'm gonna regret it when my dad is gone. I regret it now. But I don't seem to be shifting my behavior, um, as much as I should be, because it's almost like I'm waiting for the day when it's too late. It's a weird thing. It's a really weird thing. So that's a big ongoing regret that I— anyone listening to this goes, well, call your mum, like, or call your dad. But I just, I seem to struggle with it for a number of reasons. So, yeah.

OK, so one of the— so in all these regrets that I collected around the world, there were 4 core regrets that people had. One of them was that regret right there, connection regret, which is the regret, if only I'd reached out. And it's regrets about relationships, not only about romantic relationships, mostly not about romantic relationships, about the full spectrum of regrets of relationships in our lives. And I have so many stories, so many around the world where people, they want to reach out. It's going to feel kind of awkward, and the other side is not going to care. So they wait a little longer. Now it's even more awkward, and they're not going to care. And too many times it's too late, and the door closes fully. And that is a regret that does not go away. That does not go away.

Be right back.

Well, Here, where's my phone?

Yeah, put mine down.

A few pieces of advice here. All right. And again, as always, this advice is rooted in the research. So let's talk about feelings of awkwardness. We feel like it's going to be awkward. There is a pile of evidence showing when we do something like this, it's way less awkward than we think.

All right.

Second, we think the other side is not going to care. We're wrong about that. The other side always cares. And so, um, so I'll give you, I'll give you a trick though. All right, here's what you do. If you're wavering, and you shouldn't be, but if you're wavering, make a phone call to the Steven of 10 years from now. Steven 2032. What does Steven 2032 want you to do?

Oh, fuck.

Yeah, so—

No comment.

Yeah, when we're done, yeah, when we're done, I think we know what to do.

Really interesting. I think sometimes as well ego can play a role in it. Maybe not so much with family, sometimes with family, but The ego always seems to be very concerned with victory. And, you know, and that seems to get in the way of—

We are completely over-indexed on our feelings of awkwardness. And that's also part of it. Because it's a little awkward. It's a little awkward to reach out. But here's the thing. Get over that. Push past the awkwardness. Again, piles and piles of research on this. We see it with some work on giving people compliments. Sometimes we don't, especially at work, we don't give people compliments because we think, oh, they're going to think it's creepy and they're not going to care and it's going to be awkward. Nope. People appreciate compliments. We say— bosses say, oh, I don't know if I should thank people because it seems gratuitous and they're not going to care. Oh, no, they like it. You know, we're completely overindexed on awkwardness. We think everybody is watching us and rating us like, you know, figure skating judges. Oh, you know, like your dad. You're going to— you're going to call your dad and your dad is going to like, oh, that was a 6. No, your dad's just going to be psyched that you called. You know? And so that's what it is.

I'm gonna call my father within an hour of this podcast finishing, OK? That's my promise. But you owe me another regret.

I do. You know what? I have a regret, and this is something I'm wrestling with right now.

Can I ask you a question?

Yeah.

When you tell me the regrets, does it make you feel uncomfortable? In any regard?

A little bit, yeah.

'Cause your body language changes.

Yeah. No, it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable.

So does mine. Yeah.

And that's OK. Because, but here's the thing, initially, but it's a great observation. I would think I'm not watching my own body language, but my guess is that once I disgorge it, I'm cool.

You're open. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's all, yeah. But here's the thing, it's a little bit aversive. But the thing is, don't run from that. Just deal with it. Because once you disclose it, it's fine. So one regret that I have is that I, this is gonna sound weird. I mean, it won't sound weird to you because you've done this, is that I regret never having built something with a team that is more than a single product. You see what I mean? Something that is more enduring, something that is— Than a book? Yeah, well, something that is more of an organism that lives on and that has a greater, wider impact. So whether, I don't know what that is, whether it's a nonprofit or a business or anything like that, but I've always been, think I've always been sort of more artisanal rather than even inching towards something even more industrial. And I regret not taking on that challenge. Now, here's the thing, I got time.

Hmm.

And so I'm thinking about that. Now, on the other hand, the other thing to think about is like, is that something that, I really want to do, and it might not be. But that sort of bugs me a little bit. It bugs me a little bit. That is, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm, I, I'm proud of all the books that I've written, and I'm proud that I created these things, but they're all just one-offs. That is, you can stack them all right here.

Okay.

Every about 20 years of work you can put between my two hands right now. It would be interesting. Part of me thinks, God, I wish it was something bigger. I wish it were out there more in the world.

It's really interesting. It makes me ask why. Like, than a book? Books are seen as something that live on beyond the author. Yeah, could be right. And have tremendous impact.

Yeah.

But maybe it's— I don't know, some people tend to be intrigued by the thing that they didn't do. So entrepreneurs are thinking, I wish I wrote a book. And maybe authors are thinking, maybe I wish I built a business. You know what I mean? It's like they say basketball players want to be rappers. and rappers wanna be basketball players. So I don't know, maybe.

But it's possible to be both. So that one doesn't linger with me as much as the others. I have another regret about, and this is, you know, it's pathetic. I just can't believe I'm not fluent in another language.

Yeah, same.

Yeah, I mean, it's just pathetic. And, you know, and I've like, I've studied French, I've studied Japanese, I've studied Spanish, and I'm not fluent in another language. That's pathetic. Now, if I had— now, again, even the way I'm talking about it is not good, because if you—

if—

okay, here we go. I'm violating my own rule here. So I said pathetic, right? If you had told me, um, you can't speak another language, I would not have said, that's pathetic, Steven. But I say it to myself. So what I should do is treat myself with kindness rather than contempt and look for ways to move forward. But the good part of all of this is that, you know, for me, I'm at a point in my life where, again, I got mileage behind me, but I got some mileage ahead of me, so I can do something about these regrets. What I don't— what worries me are people who get further along and the clock runs out. That's a terrible place to be. I don't wanna be there.

Okay, my last regret. My last regret is, again, an ongoing one, which I seem to kind of— it doesn't bother me. burden me, but it's definitely something that I have on a daily basis, is just my health decisions. So, every day, every week, I probably consume a little bit too much sugar that I don't actually need to consume. It's not doing anything for me. It feels like a lack of discipline.

Yeah.

And also, I think I'm gluten-free, so every time I eat bread or pasta or anything like that, I have to suffer the consequences for about 2 days. And I do it over and over again, because I love bread and pasta. But I pay the price. Every single week, it's like this ongoing battle with who I wanna be and what my body wants me to do and what I end up doing. That seems to be a rolling, recurring regret. And the pandemic taught me that our health is like our first foundation, which is funny, 'cause you described this as a foundation regret.

Right.

Um, and I realized during the pandemic that there's this tectonic plate that sits under everything I've built and achieved in my dreams and my relationships, which is my health. And if you take away that tectonic plate, in fact, I have nothing. So I've got really obsessed about— not obsessed, but I've got really focused on my health, and I even went and did a health check for the first time ever in my life for no reason. A full-body, £2,000 health check, because I really wanna—

What did you learn?

Nothing. I haven't— I'm a perfect specimen of health. The doctor said, stop eating so much salt, and I was like, fuck, how'd you know that? But other than that, it was all good.

Yeah. Well, I think the solution there, a solution there, is, is to, um, don't depend on willpower, depend on your environment. Like, change your choice architecture. So yeah, you know, if you order food from the grocery store, order food— first of all, order food after you've eaten, and then make sure you order food without added sugar.

Yeah. And you talked about habits earlier on. I understood like what my habit cycle was. So there was a drawer over there full of sugar And I videoed myself pouring it into the bin.

Great.

And I replaced it with like healthier options.

Perfect.

So when I go through the cycle now, I've interrupted the cycle.

Perfect.

The types of regrets we have, something you talk about a lot in the book, and you identify this difference between genders as well, which I find really interesting. But one of the things as well you say, which I think is a really important point for people, is that people end up regretting the things, the opportunities they didn't take versus the ones they did.

Absolutely.

That's a really guiding principle for our lives, right?

I think so. I mean, you see this especially as people age. There aren't a huge number of demographic differences in regret, but one of the biggest ones is that when we're younger, we tend to have about the same number of action regrets and inaction regrets, same number of regrets about what I did and what I didn't do. But as we age, inaction regrets take over. And I think there are a few reasons for that. I think, I mean, one of them is that if we have an action regret, we can sometimes resolve it or undo it. If I hurt somebody, I can apologize, and maybe that can extinguish it a little bit. But what really nags at us over time is what we didn't do, regrets of inaction. And I think that there's a lesson in here, which is that I feel like human beings, we should have a slight bias for action. We should have a slight bias for action that when in doubt, act. And one of the things that I've learned, not through this research, but just through living, is that a lot of times we try to Figure everything out and then act. And that's hard because we can't figure everything out, but that acting is a form of figuring it out. And so taking small steps and having a bias for action, I think, is generally healthy life advice and consistent with avoiding those big regrets when you're 70 or 80, saying, oh, if only I had traveled, if only I had started a business, if only I had reached out to people who are now gone.

Yeah, I was reflecting then as you're speaking about the advice that I've shared on this podcast before about Barack Obama, him saying that when he had the big decisions he faced in his life, like taking out bin Laden or whatever, he would get to 51% and then make the decision and be at peace. And I reflected on that from my business perspective because over time I'd learned that the consequence of like procrastination tended to be much worse than the consequence of like trying, failing, and then going back to the drawing board.

Right, right.

It was because the time wasted in procrastination— sometimes you waste 2 years thinking about doing something, right? Whereas you could have ran the experiment in 3 months and found without the answer to be yes or no. And so yeah, I think in my companies over the years, I tried to create this, as you call it, the bias of action where we would set really diligent timeframes and then we'd also be at peace with the consequences. We wouldn't reward the teams based on the outcome. We'd reward them or incentivize them based on doing the experiment.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I think that's actually really important 'cause one way that I think about the world is sort of through an economic lens, which is like, what is overvalued and what is undervalued? Okay, so almost like assets, right? So to me, the planning as an asset, overvalued. Acting as an asset, undervalued. Certainty as an asset, totally overvalued. Experimentation as an asset, undervalued. And then when we think about that, we just sort of, okay, let's think. I'm gonna buy what's cheaper. and sell what's more expensive.

Experimentation is just the— for me, is the everything. Uh, you know, not even— I mean, we talk about that word so much here you wouldn't believe. But the reason why, as you sit here today, this podcast is number 1 in the Apple charts, at least number 2 on Spotify because of Rogan, but number 1 is literally because I think we as a team, um, have a culture of experimentation where we like look forward to it. And we're always, as we call it, say around here, trying to find the 1% marginal gain somewhere, right? It's like, try When the music— you walk in, if we make it house music, to try changing the temperature and see the impact that has, and that, that kind of thing. This whole podcast, the setup of it, you're looking at the, the lighting, everything. Can we find a 1% somewhere? And those 1% compounding over time in our favor, will they have a significant impact? And it, it always has in my life, so it's my religion now.

Uh, experimentation is a good religion, and, and I wish in our schools we taught people better, we did a better job of teaching people just the overall scientific method, because that's how we should approach— especially in business, that's how we should approach our lives. We should say, what do scientists do? We want to think like a scientist. What do scientists do? They have a hypothesis. They test the hypothesis. They run a randomized controlled trial. Let's try A. Let's try B. Oh, wow. A is a lot more effective. Great. I know that now. Now let's run another. And that's how we should be thinking about it. But we have this notion, especially in business, that to be in business, you have to be this omniscient creature who's all-knowing and is infallible. And that's really, really dangerous.

And going back to your point about drive, the principles which are most conducive for the experimentation are that—

You got it.

Autonomy, mastery.

That's a great, great point. That's— I hadn't actually even made that connection until just now. That's a great point. That threaded through experimentation is you got to have some self-direction. The whole point of experimentation is to get better. That's mastery. And you have to have a purpose behind it. Great point.

And then this difference between genders you described. So men tend to regret their career more and women tend to regret more than men. Her family regrets.

Yeah, those were not massive differences. Those are not massive differences, but they were present. They were present as one of the demographic differences. The other thing, which doesn't come up in my own research, but there's some existing academic research, one gender difference is, to oversimplify, but not by much, is that it's on sexual regrets. So men tend to regret the people they didn't sleep with, and women tend to regret the people they did sleep with.

Really?

Yeah.

Makes perfect sense. Rings true. The failure résumé thing, when I saw that in the— I think it was the 7 points in the book about things to try, um, it felt quite depressive, the idea of creating a résumé of— I mean, on the surface, if I said to a friend of mine, listen, what you wanna do is write down all the things you failed at in a long list, it feels quite depressive.

'Cause you don't stop there.

Right.

You put that in one column. If you stop there, yeah, you're totally right. It'd be a total downer. But what you do is you put those failures and screw-ups and mistakes in one column. In the next column, you list the lesson you learned from it. And in the third column, you list what you're going to do next time. But without those next 2 columns, yeah, it's an exercise in self-flagellation, but it's an exercise in introspection and improvement if you explicitly find a lesson from it and then commit to taking action that benefits from that lesson.

And as this book goes off into the world now, What is the impact or the shift in perception that someone listening to this podcast now, or someone that picks up the book in the bookstore, and what is that shift in perception you're hoping as the author to create or inspire?

What I want to try to do is reclaim this emotion of regret and show people that it's not a badge of shame. It's actually a potent and powerful part of their life if they if they deal with it well, that everybody has regrets. Regrets make us human. And if we treat them right, if we're grownups and think about them, they can make us better. And if we do that, you end up with this cascade where people— we normalize certain kinds of negative emotions, and we have this cascade where we're more open talking about it, and people get better and better and better.

It's a brilliant book.

Thank you.

And it's a brilliant book because as someone that doesn't love reading books, to be honest, I like listening to stuff. Um, as Harry said, it's fluff-free. So you know that every second or minute invested in this book returns a minute of value, as opposed to you trying to hit a publisher's word count, which I see a lot of the times because I end up reading a lot of books when I do this podcast. So thank you for writing a very important book, one that's very challenging because it does debunk a conventional form of thinking that regret is this awful thing that we have to hide from and conceal. And I think in getting people to be more open about their regrets, as you've seen from our conversation here, You inspire, and you also liberate people from the bullshit that is weighing them down or making them feel inadequate in certain ways. And it creates a culture of transparency and authenticity, which, as we all know, is good on all bases of life, to be open in yourself and to be living in line with yourself. So thank you for writing such a brilliant book. I hope everybody goes and gets it because it's one of the books that I'm really, really glad I read, irrespective of the fact that you were coming here. So thank you. We do have a closing tradition on this podcast, which is—

Yes.

The previous guest writes a question for the next guest, and I don't get to see what it is until I open the book. Okay, they've got great handwriting. Okay, interesting. There was one singular idea that had the most profound impact on your life, what would it be? Brackets, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Okay, the first thing that comes to mind The first thing that comes to mind is a concept originally from, I think, John Rawls, who was an American philosopher, that is known as the birth lottery. The birth lottery. And here's what it is, that too often we look at our situation in life and we don't realize how much of it is a circumstance of our birth. And that's true when things go south, and it's true when things go well. So I'm a case in point. I fucking lucked out. How did I luck out? Because I was born in America after World War II, and my parents both had university educations, and I'm a white man, and I'm straight, and— And you're a good guy. I won the fucking lottery, okay? And if I didn't do something with my life, it would be pathetic. Now, here's the thing. Suppose that I were born same me, but I was born in a village in Guatemala in 1850. I might not have lived to be 30 years old. How about if I go back even further in time? Sorry, is okay. So you can see by looking at me, I have glasses on. I have terrible vision. All right, I can't see. Like, like, like, like I asked my ophthalmologist, well, what is my vision in numerical terms? And she says, you're legally blind. Okay, so imagine if I were born 400 years ago.

There's—

I'd be, I'd be a dead man. All right. And so a lot of times our circumstances are the product of this birth lottery. And when we realize that, we actually can use our privilege as a force for good. But we can also have empathy for people who didn't who didn't win the birth lottery and actually try to create a world in which everybody has a fair chance.

It weirdly, unfortunately, can also create a bit of entitlement in some people.

Absolutely. If they don't realize it. That's my point. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, so, you know, so you look at some people and it's like, oh, I work for everything I have. And that's true. You did work. But the thing is, you won the birth lottery. You also won the birth lottery. You had a— you had a huge advantage, you know, and you look at You look at people who are— you look at people in this country or any— in the United States who are immigrants, particularly if they were forced out of their home country and had to remake a life in a place where they didn't speak a language that, you know, I didn't have to do. I didn't have to do that. And you look at people, and one of the things that I've discovered over time is You know, even things like what you look at, it looked like, is a form of a birth lottery. Like, in America, as, like, a tall, straight white man, I walk into a room, nobody immediately says, oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Oh, he's here because of special privilege, right? If I were a woman, if I were a person of color, if I were disabled, if I were gay, they would say, wait a second, I don't know.

Mm-hmm.

And so, And so now, now, does that mean that, again, it's sort of like— I mean, I hadn't thought about this. It's sort of like dealing with regret. Okay, so I could ignore that saying, oh, no, no, birth lottery, that's nonsense, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or I can say, oh my God, I deserve to be punished because of this. Or I can say, let's think about it. What do I do? I have an obligation to use my privilege as a force for good, and I have an obligation to make the world fairer. And that's what I do with it.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Daniel, for your honesty. It's, uh, tremendously inspiring. And, uh, thank you for your time today. You're someone that I followed for a long, long time, so it's a real honor to sit here with you.

I have so enjoyed this conversation. I really have. Thanks for having me.

Amazing.