Daniel Pink #1 New York Times Bestselling Author and Former Speechwriter for Al Gore

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Foreign.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Our guest today is Daniel Pink. He is the remarkable person who has changed the way many business people think and how companies operate. He's the author of multiple award winning books and millions of copies have been sold. Of these books. His titles include When a Whole New Mind and his most recent, the Power of Regret. Daniel worked in several positions in politics and government including Al Gore's Speechwriter and the host and co executive producer for the National Geographic series Crowd Control. He's been a business columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company. Daniel received a BA from Northwestern University, where he was a Truman Scholar and also received honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, the Pratt Institute, the Ringling College of Art and Design, the University of Indianapolis, and Westfield State University. You may have seen him on TV and radio networks including npr, pbs, abc and cnn. His articles and essays have been featured in numerous publications such as the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the New Republic. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now let's learn from the remarkable Daniel Pink. I stole a concept from you inadvertently called Map Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose and I put that in my book. And after the book was published I realized that I stole it from you and I gave you no credit for that. And so I reached out to you and I said, Daniel, I stole this from You. I didn't give you credit. I completely forgot. And so I just want to admit it up front. And you said to me, do you even remember this story.

A little bit? I don't remember. What did I say? I hope it was something gentle.

No, no, it was very good. That's why I'm telling you the story. So you said to me, guy, I know you stole it from me. And I figured that eventually you'd figure that out and you'd correct it. And that's my favorite Daniel Pink story.

Did you correct it? I don't even remember how this resolved itself.

I corrected it in a future version.

Everybody wins.

Everybody wins. But you took the high road. You gave me the benefit of the doubt. You showed such class and understanding and empathy that I was just blown away. Anyway, that's my Daniel Pink story.

I appreciate that. I'm glad you didn't bring up the story of the time that I hired a lawyer to go after another guy who massively plagiarized me. There was this one guy who basically wrote a book, and I would say he essentially reprinted 10 newspaper columns that I had written eight years earlier. Yeah. And the only reason I heard about it was that some readers said, wait a second, did you say something like this? But I know that you're a good dude. And since we run into each other over the years, I knew that there was no nefarious intent. And now look. And now we're talking together on your famous podcast. So everybody wins.

That's right. And you're about to release another book, so I hope this will help you. But, Daniel, you've been so prolific that we're going to spend a few minutes with your other things, too. Okay?

Okay.

But first, what I find maybe the most remarkable part of your remarkable career is that as far as I can tell, you started in politics. And so, you know, you work for Robert Reich and Al Gore, and then you became a free agent, and yet you're writing these great management books. I understand if you're Jack Welch and you ran ge, so you have all these stories and lessons and all this knowledge, but how did you do that with your career path to write such great books?

Thank you for the premise of your question. I won't be a jerk and argue with the premise of your question, but thank you for that. So I think you make a really interesting point about books. And the point is this. Whenever I read a book, a non fiction book, and someone is offering me insight or advice, you have to ask the question of, how do you Know it is a theory of knowledge question. It is. I'm going to use a 50 cent word on your show, guy. It is an epistemological question. All right, how do you know? And so when Jack Welch, may rest in peace, gives management advice is, oh, well, Jack Welch knows because he ran GE for 20 years. All right, for me, if you have to ask the question, how do you know? The way that I know or the way that I try to be more right than wrong is I do a massive amount of research. So for that book, Free Agent Nation, I spent over a year traveling around the country interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people who had decided to work for themselves. That's how I knew when I wrote a book about motivation. I went back and looked at 50 years of academic research on what scientists say about human motivation. That's how I knew when I wrote a book about timing. I had to enlist other people because there was so much material. Look back at something like 700 studies across 25 different disciplines about what we knew about timing. And now for this latest book about regret. How do I know? Among the things that I did is I went and I collected nearly 17,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. So you're exactly right. If I just sat in this office where I'm talking to you and started saying stuff like me, I disagree with that because you worked at Apple and you're an investor and you've done all kinds of things with starters. That's how you know. But I think it's a really important question. And so my how do I know? Comes from doing the really painful, sometimes tedious work of grinding out the research.

I might make the case. Let's take the two extremes here. So there's Jack Welch and Daniel Pink. So Jack Welch writes on the first person experience of what he did at General Electric, right? But Daniel Pink has looked at hundreds of sources of information. So arguably, Daniel Pink has a more scientific objective, controlled, et cetera, et cetera, data set than Jack Welch. One person. This is what happened to me. Maybe he's a unicorn who farted pixie dust and he's the only person who could do it this way.

I mean, I'll tell you, that's a way to look at it. I'll give you another way to look at it from the reader's perspective. And truly, this is how I operate as a reader. So I don't read a Guy Kawasaki book and say, oh, my God, that's all there is. I need to know if I follow God, my life is going to be full of bliss and I'm going to lead a wonderful life. No, what I do is I read a Guy Kawasaki book and say, oh, interesting. I like the way he did that. I don't agree with him on that. That's a really good point. I'm going to take that. Then I might rebate a let's go back to Jack Welch or another Bob Iger or something like that. I might read that and say, okay, there's one thing that he did that's kind of cool. I'm going to borrow that. Then I'm going to read a Daniel Pink book and I'm going to say, okay, Pink said these two things. I'm going to take that. And that's how you fashion understanding as a reader. You don't follow one person only. You actually synthesize other people's ideas. Take what works for you and take what doesn't. And so I don't expect anybody who reads any of my books to follow me over a cliff. It'd be nuts if they did that. But what I hope that they do is they read it and say, huh, that's really interesting. I never thought about it that way. I got these three insights and I got these two things to do. That's awesome. What a great deal for $22 in hardcover.

I think that many people do follow, especially self help gurus, off the cliff. But that's it. We don't need to go there.

I think when you start thinking about going off the cliff, that's the problem. Right. But I mean this seriously. I think it's really important that we as readers fashion our own understanding of the world by first bringing to bear all of other people's understanding and experiences. So I'm not going to sleep on first person accounts of experiences. They can be really instructive. But I want to base my own decisions on only that first person account. I would want something bigger and more contextual.

I just interviewed John List from the University of Chicago.

One of the great economists of our time.

Exactly. And I asked him this question, which is how much of what we believe is based on undergraduate students trying to get credit by being subjects. And he said, more than you think.

But it's interesting you say that because that's a big problem. In fact, there's a guy at Harvard, Joe Heinrich, who has written this idea of weird W, B, I, R D. So Western educated, industrialized, something R, something D. Whereas basically most of the research in psychological science has been conducted not only undergraduates, but basically white well educated Westerners and we're making claims. And that's something I think about a lot. This is one reason I went out in this latest book to gather my own research and didn't rely exclusively on the existing academic research in Regret. Because again, we go back to our epistemological question at the top of the show. How do you know? And I wanted to try to find that out by collecting all these regrets from all over the world.

I like that on your website you can click on a country and get regrets from that country. That's what you're talking about, right?

Yeah. It's really kind of amazing what we did. I was astonished. With almost no publicity, basically almost no promotion at all, literally. You have 105 countries and we have only two other languages besides English. We have it up in Spanish and we have it up in Chinese, but we have submissions in French. We have submissions and we have submissions in Portuguese. And again from all over the world, six countries, continents and so forth, of people saying, hey, Dan, this is what I regret. And for this book, the Power of Regret, that's what became the sort really important source material for this.

We're going to come back to Regret. But I just enjoy so much and have applied so much of your work to my life and career that I want to give my listener an exposure to the breadth of your wisdom. Is that a softball or what? So the way I would like to do this is I'm going to pick a few books and I want you to just give us the gist of those books. Hopefully then people will go and want to read the whole thing.

This has been traffic. I feel like I'm on a game show here.

So in the category of motivation for $150, what's the gist of Drive?

The Gist of Drive is a book again, where I went back and asked this question, what does motivate us? And to answer that question, I didn't say what motivates me. I said, what does science tell us about this? It tells us a lot of things. It tells us that human beings have a lot of drives. We eat when we're hungry, we drink when we're thirsty. We. That's a drive. We respond to rewards and punishments in our environment in many cases. But we also have other drives. We do things because we like them. We do things because they bring us meaning. We do things because it's the right thing to do. And that other drive, that third drive, I think has been neglected by business. More equally important. And I'll Give you the. The ultimate big idea in that book, which is this. There is a certain kind of motivator that we use in organizations. Psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator. I like to call it an if then reward, as in if you do this, then you get that. 50 years of science tells us that if then rewards are great for simple tasks and short time horizons, but they don't work very well or complex tasks with long time horizons. And yet organizations use them for everything rather than the area where they work. And if you really want to have a disdain motivation in organizations, what you want to do is you want to pay people very well. And then when you want to offer them a measure of autonomy, some self direction, some sovereignty over what they do, you want to offer them mastery, which is the chance to make progress and get better at something that matters.

Now we can figure it out. Motivation. Now, how do we sell?

Selling. Okay, so I wrote a book called To Sell as Human because I felt like we didn't take sales seriously enough. I think a lot of people who do what you and I do, guy, which is write books about this stuff, sometimes look down on sales. And I thought that's a colossal mistake. So two animating ideas in that book. One, like it or not, we're all in sales. So whether you have sales in your job title or not, we're selling all the time. And again, how do I know? I did a pretty interesting survey where I asked people how they spent their time, and we found that people are spending on average about 40% of their time convincing, persuading, influencing, cajoling other people, selling, essentially. So we're all in sales. Now. The second big idea in that book is that sales is not selling anything. Your, your idea, yourself, your product, your service has changed more in the last 15 years than the previous 1500. We used to have a sales environment that was defined by information asymmetry. That is, the seller always had more information than the buyer. That's how it was for almost all of human commerce. And then literally a decade ago, a decade and a half ago, that all changed. We don't live in a world of information asymmetry today. We live in a world of information parody. And in a world, a world of information asymmetry is a world of buyer beware. That's why we have buyer beware as a principle, because sellers have an advantage because of information. But now we're in a world of seller beware, where sellers cannot take the low road. So we used to be in this world where buyers had lots of information, lots of choices, where buyers had not much information, not many choices, and no way to talk back. That's most of commerce in our history. Now we're in this world where buyers have lots of choices, lots of information, and equally important, all kinds of ways to talk back. That's a world of sell everywhere. And so this book looks at how do you survive in a world of sale everywhere. And once again, we look to the social science for clues about how to do it effectively and ethically.

And what's the gist of how to sell in this new time?

There are the new ABCs. We know about the old ABCs made famous by the David Mamet play and then movie Always be closing, right? ABC A always B closings. Tough, predatory. That's how you do it in information asymmetry, where you have an edge as a seller. Always be closing that approach. It's a bad idea. What the the new approach tells us is a new set of ABCs. Again, total luck that they started with ABC. You know, just to be transparent here is that what does the social science tell us about what you really need to do to be effective in this new terrain? And the new ABCs are a attunement that is, can you get out of your own head into someone else's head, see their perspective? That's really important. Can you take someone else's perspective, see things from their point of view? We have very little power to force people to do stuff inside of organizations and in the market. So you need the opposite ability, which is, can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view? That's attunement. Be buoyancy. I got as a concept from a salesperson who said, dan, you don't understand how tough my job is. He said, every day I face this is his phrase, an ocean of rejection. An ocean of rejection. That's what it is. If we're persuading and selling all the time, we face an ocean of rejection. And so buoyancy is. How do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection? There's some things that we can do to deal with rejection. None of us like rejection. A lot of us, as a consequence of that, either are debilitated by it or we shy away from it. That's a mistake. The key is to stay afloat in the ocean of rejection. And finally, our sea clarity has two dimensions. One, go back to information. It used to be in the old days that you were an expert, that you had an edge if you had access to information that no one else had. So in some ways, the nature of expertise was that you had privilege access to information. But now everybody has the information, so you can't have privilege access. There's so much information out there. You need to be able to curate information, make sense of information, separate out the signal from the noise and information. So we got to move from information access to information curation. And finally, and I think this is one of the most intriguing things, is that we used to be in a world of problem solving. So that you had salespeople who would say, I'm not really in sales, I'm a problem solver. And that's cool. It is that today, if your customer or prospect knows exactly what their problem is, they don't need you. So what do they need you more? They need you when they're wrong about their problem or they don't know what their problem is. And so the skill they shifted from the skill of problem solving to the skill of problem finding. Can you identify hidden problems? Surface, latent problems? So attunement, buoyancy and clarity are the new ABCs of selling in this world where we're all in sales, but we're doing it in a completely remade landscape.

I, I wish people would internalize and understand this concept that if your lips are moving today, you are selling. It might be to get a aisle seat, it might be to get an upgrade, it might be to get an extra side of salad dressing, but you are selling. I don't know what people are thinking.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think part of it is that a lot of smarty pants people look down on sales. And I think that's a mistake. And one of the things that got me into this particular topic, guy, was that writing about business for all these years, I, you know, interviewed a lot of salespeople for other work that I did. And there's this sort of stereotype we have about salespeople. And none of these people were like it. They were like, they were really smart. They were really smart. They were among the savviest people there. They were curious. They had both like very strong intellect and strong emotional intelligence. And I'm like, okay, wait a second, like, why do we have this stereotype when the people I'm meeting who are in sales are actually really astute? And I think it's because sales has changed so much. I'm convinced, and I've said this before, that B2B sales today is essentially management consulting. You shouldn't even call it sales. It's essentially management.

Now tell me about perfect timing.

So you'll appreciate this. I'll give you the high concept pitch for this book. The high concept pitch was that there were lots of how to books, but there hasn't been a when to book. So this was the first when to book. And so I looked at, as I mentioned earlier, about 700 plus studies in timing. What was interesting about these is that you had all this research being done across many different disciplines. You had research being done in psychology and in sociology and in economics on how time of day affects us, how sequence affects us. But you also had this research being done in anthropology and in linguistics and in cognitive science and in microbiology and a whole field called chronobiology and in epidemiology and in endocrinology and in various kinds of other medical fields. And what was weird is that you had these, they had these skills, scholars who were asking literally at sometimes the exact same question, but we're talking to each other. And so it took basically a non expert, it took a non specialist to take three steps back and say, wait a second. What the economists are saying is very similar to what the microbiologists are saying. And so what this research yields is how does time of day affect what we do and how we do it? Why are breaks more important than we realize? So that's daily timing. And one of the things that comes out very strongly in daily timing is that time of day affects our brain power a lot more than we realize. And we don't schedule around that. We basically assume that our brain power remains constant over the course of a day. And that's wrong, that we can actually use this science to make better decisions about our daily timing. Some really incredible stuff about breaks. Like it shortly changed my view of taking breaks and then also episodic timing. So how do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? How do groups synchronize in time? How does the very way we think about time affect our behavior? So it's a wide ranging look at the science of timing and how we can enlist it to do better.

And, and when is my peak brain power?

So I know we can figure this out. Let's figure this out. So we start with, we'll do it right here. Okay, let's start something called a chronotype. A chronotype is essentially our propensity, our, you know, do we naturally wake up late and go to sleep late, or do we naturally wake up early and go to sleep early? So what, what do you think you are? We can test this in a moment, but what's your instinct then? You wake up early and go to sleep early, wake up late and go to sleep late or somewhere in between.

I wake up at about 4 to 4:30. I try to force myself to go back to sleep. So I'm, I'm an early riser. I go to bed around 9, 10.

So it sounds like you're more of a, a lark than Al. So here's what we know about the distribution in the population. About 15% of us are very strong morning people larks. About 20, 25% of us are very strong evening people owls. And about 2/3 of us are in the middle. I'm more in the middle. So here's what we know. So most of us move through the day in three stages. A peak, a trough or recovery. And certainly everybody who's not a night out moves through the day pretty much in those stages. Peak early in the day, trough in the middle of the day, recovery later in the day. And so what we know about that peak, which for you is going to be early in the day, that's when you are most vigilant guy. So what does it mean to be vigilant? Vigilance means you're able to bat away distractions. So that's the time that you should be doing analytic work. Heads down, focused work, writing, analyzing data, going over a strategy. So instead of starting the day as many of us do, answering email or doing that kind of bs, we should be focused in on analytic work that requires vigilance. We do that better. 80% of us do that better early in the day rather than later in the day during the trough, the early to mid afternoon, terrible time of day, huge decrements in performance for almost everybody. The top takeaway from that book when is that people should not go to the hospital if they can avoid it in the afternoon because the doctors are troughing. Oh yeah, no, the numbers are incredible here. I'm not joking around. If you look at, I'm not kidding on this one. Anesthesia errors four times more likely at 9am than at 3pm Colonoscopies. Doctors find twice as many polyps in morning exams as they do in afternoon exams. The exact same population. Hand washing in hospitals deteriorates significantly in the afternoon. Doctors are much more likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics and opioids too. There's a recent paper on that in afternoon appointments versus morning appointments. So in my family, I'm not joking, if you have to do a serious medical procedure you do not do it in the afternoon. In my family you do it in the morning. I'm serious, that's do not. If you could, if you, here's the thing, like one of my kids gets hit by a bus, God forbid, and it's 3 o' clock in the afternoon, I'm not going to say, okay, you just got hit by a bus, you got to wait till the morning to go into the hospital. But if you have any discretion over it, don't go to the hospital in the afternoon if you can avoid it. I'm dead serious about that. Now some hospitals have done a good job of mitigating that through checklists and breaks and things like that, but still the numbers are pretty clear that going to the hospital in the afternoon is a bad idea.

So if you're going to the mechanic, you should take your car in at 7:30 in the morning, not at 1.

It depends on when they're going to work on it. Yeah, there is something to be said of that. And here's the thing, this is the great revelation of that research, which is that we think that all times of day are created equal, but our performance differs over time. Now the other thing that's interesting here, and I'll to round this out, is that for someone like you, a lark, pretty hardcore lark, in the late afternoon or early evening, your mood goes up but your vigilance does not. And that's a really interesting combination. So that makes us better at solving other kinds of problems. What psychologists call insight problems are problems that don't bend to mathematical logic, that require more iterative thinking, brainstorming, divergent thinking. And there's some really interesting experimental evidence that if you give someone like you like Guy, the hardcore lark, an analytic problem in the morning, you're more likely to get it right than you are in the afternoon. But if we give you an insight problem, a problem that, that requires divergent thinking, sort of non obvious solutions, you're more likely to get it wrong in the morning and right in the afternoon. And so one of the keys here is you have to do the right work at the right time. And there's a pretty simple recipe for that. Basically do your analytic work in the peak, your administrative work in the trough, and your insight work in the recovery. And I've changed my schedule to try to do that.

Really. So if I may translate, does this mean I should do email in the trough?

Yes, most email isn't worth it.

Exactly.

I mean, yeah, most you should, you should do your administrative stuff, you should do stuff that doesn't require massive analytic thinking or creativity. And unfortunately, that's part of our day. I mean, I have, you know, right now looking at my email client here because I was actually doing analytic work all morning. I've got. What is it here? So I've got 73 unanswered emails here. That's cool, because I had some important analytic work to do this morning and I wanted to focus on that rather than do bullshit email.

So maybe we should schedule our email clients to check the first time at noon.

You could do that. I'll admit I shouldn't reveal this on a broadcast that tens of millions of people are listening to. But I have been known basically answer emails but have them go out a few hours later, in part because they didn't want to receive an email right away during that period. So let's say that I wake up in the morning, I'd seen email, and I can answer it in 10 seconds. I will sometimes set it to go for one in the afternoon because I don't want someone emailing me in the morning during my good time because I might be tempted to deal with it.

I also think as a matter of courtesy, I have now instituted a practice where all the email that I respond to on the weekends I schedule to not go until Monday morning. So maybe I should make it Monday at lunch.

It could be. I sometimes will do that and sometimes I will put in the subject line, no need to deal with this until Monday.

Next book. And this is the last book I'm going to ask you before we get to regret. So Free Agent Nation. So today in a pandemic world, aren't we all, in a sense, free agents at this point?

Well, yes, we are in some ways. You mentioned earlier a guy that I work in politics. There's some politicians who, who they've said he or she are ahead of the voters. And I think that was a case where on that book for Nation, I was a little bit ahead of the voters. Because what I argue in that book is that more and more of us were going to be either working for ourselves, either literally or even more kind of, you know, our attachments to large organizations were going to weaken and weaken and we were going to be responsible to bear the risk and navigate our own way. And I even said in that book that the division between work and home is going to blur and that you're going to have lots of people working at home. And a lot of people, including like people like Jack Welch, said, oh, no, that'll never happen. You can't trust people to work at home. And then In March of 2020, hundreds of millions of people around the world did it in four days and it worked. Okay, that's a long winded way of answering your question. Yes.

And you think there really is a great resignation happening.

Maybe we might be making too big of a deal of that. And if you look at some of the data, what some of it suggests is that people at the older side of the labor market are actually retiring and exiting the labor market altogether and that younger workers are, because the labor market is tighter, feeling a little bit more empowered to bop along. But I do think there is something the other thing about the great resignation, I think at the lower end of the labor market market, you know, so the less skilled end of the labor market is that people are realizing that a lot of these jobs were just terrible jobs. I mean, they were terrible jobs and they were being treated in terrible ways. And they essentially said, okay, I don't want to deal with that anymore. And so this is one reason, I think, why you have right now, and as we're talking now, an incredible boom in self employment because I think some people are saying, okay, listen, I can not make much money and be treated like crap and not have any job security, or I can go out on my own and not have any job security, but actually have some self respect. And they say, okay, I'll take that second deal.

Up next on Remarkable People.

And what I found looking at these 16,000 regrets from around the world is that beneath those domains of life there was a deep structure of regret that around the world. And it's pretty amazing. Old regular. Overwhelmingly, people regret the same four things over and over and over. And these four core regrets are fascinating because they operate as a photographic negative of the good life.

The universe is ever expanding and with this expansion comes adaptation. Like the universe, a HubSpot CRM platform adapts and changes to the needs of your business. So the sky is never the limit. HubSpot's reporting dashboard gives you a satellite view of your marketing, sales and customer service performance so you can get ahead of any issues before they even happen. Automated marketing tools allow you to create consistent multi channel campaigns for clear, concise communications and fewer mixed signals. You can even use workflows to automate operational tasks at every stage of the sales process. This will cut out busy work black holes. Whether your business is Jupiter or Pluto sized, a HubSpot CRM platform is easy to implement and ready to scale with you. You're listening to remarkable people with guy Kawasaki. Now that everybody's listening. Oh my God. There's so many good ideas coming out of this guy. I gotta go get all his books. But now we're talking about the book. And the book is called the Power of Regret. And my first question is, what kind of person says I have no regrets?

Such a good question. You know, what kind of person says that? A five year old, a person with brain damage, or a sociopath. Those are the only people who have no regrets. And I mean that literally. Once again, I went back and looked at the research and what the research tells us is that everybody has regrets. Every human functioning human being has regrets. Regrets make us human. And truly, the only people. I'm not joking around, guy. The only people without regrets are little kids whose brains haven't developed that. We've developed our capacity for regret around age 7 or 8, people with severe brain injuries or brain diseases. So there are certain kinds of lesions that people will develop that will prevent them from experiencing regret. People with Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease often have difficulty dealing with regret. And then sociopaths. So this idea that we celebrate, especially here in America, no regrets, no regrets is complete nonsense. Like having no regrets is a sign of a grave problem.

I don't know if you want to answer this question. You can take the fifth if you want. But do you think that 10, 20 years from now, if they're still alive, you think people like Rudy Giuliani, Joe Manchin, Ron DeSantis, Mitch McConnell will ever look back with regret about what they're doing now?

That's an interesting question. And I don't know. And I think that those four people are very differently situated or somewhat differently situated. And I think there's a chance that they will. And let me give you an analogy to that. This country is always. We have this mythology that America has always been less sort of like common together and when in fact our whole history is like. It's been roiling for a long time. Most periods in American history, there's been stuff going on and dissension and so forth. And if you look at some of the people who in the 1960s voted against some of the civil rights initiatives, including the father of my old boss, Al Gore senior, who was a senator from Tennessee, many of those politicians who voted against civil rights, many of them who voted against Medicare, which is now sacrosanc, barely passed in the mid-1960s. And so a lot of people who look back on those actually do express some regrets. So maybe people will regret that they didn't do their part to preserve our democracy. And maybe some of us, like you and me, will regret that we spend time making podcasts and writing books rather than standing up for our democracy, which is, to my mind, in peril right now.

That last part of the statement, I completely and utterly agree. And I am just appalled that there's a group of so called influencers who, when you ask them about political issues, they say, I'm not political. I'm not discussing that. I'm an influencer in fashion or tech or something. That's not my wheelhouse, that's not my responsibility. And I think that is a total cop out.

It's tough because here's the thing. I don't talk a lot about politics, and certainly on social media, that's like the worst possible forum for doing that. No one has ever changed their mind or learned anything arguing about politics on social media. But it is an interesting point about the sorts of things that we regret. And one of the things that comes out in the research that I did was that one of the big categories of regret that people have were moral regrets and also regrets about not speaking up. And so I wonder if some of us, given the times that we Americans are living in right now, might 10 years from now, 20 years from now, look back and say, ooh, wow, I should have spoken up. I should have done more.

I had an aha Moment in about 2016, I was over in Germany and I met with some people. They're about 40, 45 years old. I had dinner with two or three friends and they said to me, you know, Guy, to this day we question our grandparents, how could they let Nazi Germany happen? How could they let Adolf Hitler come to power? And then they said, you know, Guy, it's 1930 for you in America, so do you want your grandchildren to wonder if you resisted? Holy shit. I felt so convicted. I went back and I was all in on politics. Anyway, that's my story.

This is a great and fascinating. Is a great and fascinating issue. Let's take straight white men born in America like me. I think a lot of us would look back and say, well, if we were around in 1850s, we would have been totally against slavery. Yeah, I would have been helping Harriet Tubman. And I don't know if that's the case. Yeah, my grandparents, my. My ancestors were not in the United States at that time. But have they been? I. I don't know. It's a fascinating question. I think that there are things happening right now, leaving aside the political stuff that Their grandchildren right now might look back and say, oh, my God, my grandfather or great grandfather. He was deplorable. He was an idiot. The whole planet's burning up and he didn't do a goddamn thing. Or look at the way we treat animals. Or wait a second, like, they were driving around these cars that were burning fossil fuel for 100 years and destroying the planet. And no one said. Everyone said, oh, that's all right, that's cool. Let's build some more. You know, So I think there are all kinds of. I think that there are all kinds of things. We might look back and say, wait a second. How could he live in Washington, D.C. and live with himself on a day like today, Monday in January, when if I walk eight blocks from my house, I might walk by an unhoused person and not do anything? So it's a very interesting moral question. And so I don't think that, you know, any of us are paragons of virtue here.

Yep, we certainly went down a path.

There on that happy note.

Okay, so just give us the gist of this book.

So this book looks at regret, which is our most misunderstood emotion. And as we were talking about earlier, we have this ridiculous notion that the way to leave life is to have no regrets. And that's wrong. All of us have regrets. Regrets make us human. But what we don't know, what we haven't realized, and if we. Again, we can look at the science on this, is that regret not only makes us human, it makes us better. If we deal with our regrets properly, they make us better. They can help us improve our decision making. They can boost our performance on a whole array of tasks, and they can deepen our sense of meaning. And so how we reckon with our regrets is incredibly important. So what we should be doing is not ignoring our regrets and not wallowing our regrets, but using our regrets as signals to do better. So that's one big idea in the book. The other thing is that as we mentioned earlier, I went back and looked at. I collected, you know, over 16,000 regrets from around the world. And what I realized is that the way that scholars were understanding regret was wrong. We were looking at what people regretted based on the domains of their life. This is a family regret. This is a career regret. This is a romance regret. And what I found looking at these 16,000 regrets from around the world is that beneath those domains of life, there was a deep structure of regret that around the world. And it's pretty amazing, overwhelmingly, people regret the same four things over and over and Over. And these four core regrets are fascinating because they operate as a photographic negative of the good life. That is, if we understand what people regret the most, we understand what they value the most. And so this negative emotion of regret gives us a path to a good life. What are the four foundation regrets? Foundation regrets. People around the world regret not exercising enough, not taking care of their bodies, not studying hard enough in school, not saving money. So things that where you didn't do the work and as a consequence your platform is a little wobbly. You'll appreciate this next one. Boldness regrets. Overwhelmingly, in my research and in other research, people regret inactions way more than actions. They regret what they didn't do way more than what they did do. And so these boldness regrets are all over the place. So people regret not starting a business, staying at a lackluster job and not starting a business. They regret. I got huge numbers of people around the world regret not asking someone else on someone out on a date. It's like literally hundreds of regrets where they say, oh, I met this man or woman X years ago and I wanted to ask her out or him out and I did it. Lots of regrets about speaking up. So boldness regrets are, if only I taken the chance, more regrets. Fascinating category. I have hundreds of people once again, who regret bullying kids in school when they were younger. I have 60 year olds, they're 67, who regret bullying kids. I have a. I had a woman who I interviewed who broke into tears recounting the story of bullying a kid when she was 8 years old and she's in her 50s. So we regret not doing the right thing, which is heartening in a way. And then finally our connection regrets. Connection regrets are regrets where there was a relationship or there should have been a relationship and somehow it drifted apart. Among the things I discovered in looking at these is that the way our relationships come apart typically is not dramatic. That is, we think that relationships come apart by some kind of blowout fight. And, and that's rarely the case. A lot of times they just kind of drift and drift and drift. And what happens is that nobody wants to reach out. They say, oh, I would reach out, but it's going to feel really awkward and the other side's not going to care. And what the research tells us is that it doesn't feel awkward and that people do care. And these connections to other people, whether it's, you know, children or spouses or siblings or friends, friends, friends, friends are so important in people's lives that these connection regrets are are the biggest category. And so what these regrets show us is what do we want out of life? We want a stable platform, want some stability. We want a chance to do something big and bold and take a chance and lead a psychologically rich life. We want to do the right thing and we want to have close connections to others. That's what life is about, and everything else doesn't matter. And so, in a weird way, this negative emotion, regret, actually tells us what makes life worth living.

And do you believe by learning this or listening to other people's regrets that people can learn to optimize their lives?

Absolutely.

Like, if I tell my son, oh, I regret not studying harder in high school, you think my son is going to say, oh, yeah, dad's right, I'm going to study harder, maybe, but I.

Think there's a better chance of him studying harder than if you didn't say that. You have to ask yourself, compared to what? And so one of the things about our regrets is that some of the things we can do something about, we can repair them, we can undo them. But other times, especially as we get older, the best use of our regrets is to give advice to. Is to give advice to other people. And for you, I'd rather have you, if that is a legitimate regret of yours, I'd rather have you offer that to your son rather than not offer it to your son. I'm not saying it's some magic elixir that's going to change things, but it's better than doing nothing. More important. What also the research tells us is that when we disclose our regrets, disclosure itself is really important. It makes us feel better. So there's some interesting research showing that when we disclose our regrets, we feel better. When we simply write them in a diary, we feel better. We live the burden. What's more, and this is where your son comes in, we sometimes think that if we, say, reveal negative things about ourselves, particularly our regrets, people will like us less. Like, I don't want to admit that I was an idiot. People are going to think less of me. And what the research tells us is, that's wrong. They actually think more of you if you reveal those kinds of things. So self disclosure itself is valuable both internally and externally. And it's one of the most important ways that we reckon with our regrets. Another one of my favorite ideas is what Tina Selig, whom you might know at Stanford, calls a failure resume. That we should have a failure resume, that what we should do is that along with our resume, which is this list of all the incredible things we've done in our life, we should have a failure resume and list all the screw ups and setbacks and blubs and fuck ups in our life. And I've done that. And, and then list those. But then the next step is to look at them and try to extract a lesson from them going forward. And when I did this, when I did a failure resume, I realized that if I looked at a lot of my failures and setbacks, I was making the same two mistakes over and over again. And that helped me cure that mistake. So in some ways, we've overdosed on positivity. In America. We think it's always important to be sunny and positive and optimistic, and it is important to do that sometimes. But these certain negative emotions, including our most prominent negative emotion of regret, give us clues. They give us information, they give us direction, they give us clarity about how to live better and work smarter.

And what divides regret from guilt?

Oh, interesting. So it depends. Some of these moral regrets are infused with some degree of guilt. Guilt essentially means that we wronged somebody else. We violated some kind of moral code. So a lot of the moral regrets involve a measure of guilt, the boldness. Regrets are less about guilt. There's some interesting distinctions here. So there's a difference between guilt and shame. So guilt is feeling bad about what you did. Shame is in some ways feeling bad, bad about who you are. Shame is debilitating. But guilt about particular actions is useful if you use that as a signal to do better the next time. There's also a difference between regret and disappointment. So one of the key elements of regret is that you have some control. So, for instance, I'm an NBA fan and I live here in Washington. Against my better judgment, I'm a fan of our hometown team, the Washington Wizard. And so I'm disappointed when the Wizards don't win the NBA championship. But I can't regret that, right? Because I had no control, you know, I had no control over that. But I might regret that I didn't go to a game this year with my son because that's always fun and a great way to make connections. And I, you know, I might regret that because that's something I had control over. Do.

Do you think that the concept of regret and the study of regret and this analysis of regret is also sort of an American phenomenon, that only we Americans have so many choices that we can express regret. Whereas if you're completely impoverished and, you know, barely making it and have no control over your life, what can you regret? You don't have any choice.

See, I think that's a really interesting question. I tried to answer that in this, and this is why I got regrets from around the world. And my view of it is that the answer is in some ways yes and no. So here's some of the things that I saw in my own research is that it turned out that people with the most education had the most career regrets. Now you say, wait a second, they have so many options, right? That's exactly why they had more, because they had so many options. So it's a double edged sword of, of the double edged sword of opportunity. On the other hand, the people with most education regrets were people who had some college but had never graduated because there was a kind of a thwarted opportunity there. So a lot of regret hinges on opportunity. And so if we have this vast vista of opportunities, we actually have more chances of things to regret. But if you think about connection regrets, there's very little correlation between income or anything like that. Because everybody, whether you're rich or poor, want to connect with other people. And when you think about things like foundation regrets, it gets a little complicated. Because if I say I really regret that I didn't work hard enough and that I didn't do well in college, well, is that because you were lazy or is that because you went to a crappy secondary school that didn't prepare you for the rigors of university education? And so it's entirely your fault. But one of the things that comes out in the research on regret at its core that you're identifying is that our lives are a mix of opportunity and obligation. We want opportunity and obligation. That's what makes a good life. So a life of only opportunity and no obligation, that's hollow, right? A life of obligation and no opportunity, which is true for some people, that's very crimped. But a life where you have both obligation and opportunity, that's a good life. And I think that's one of the things that regret teaches us.

You think we should add regret to the hierarchy of needs of Mr. Maslow?

Here's the thing. We're coming back. This is the Guy Kawasaki Theory of Knowledge podcast, because we're coming back to another epistemological question here.

I don't even know what that word means. I look it up after this.

Just keep saying, I don't know what it means either. I just like to say it. But it's an important question. How do you know? All right, how did Maslow know? And Maslow, whom I admire, he just Kind of said stuff. He was basically a philosopher. Yeah. He didn't do experiments in the way that many modern social scientists do. He was like a philosopher, and he just asserted this hierarchy of needs. And it's a very interesting idea. It gives us a common way to frame things. But I don't think it's that super empirically sound. What's interesting, very good instincts here is that when I thought about these foundation regrets, I started thinking of them as a hierarchy. And then I realized they're not that. It's not a building. It's more of a soup. They all go together.

Now, a slight aside here, because I'm interested in your technique. So when you say you research 700 studies and all this kind of stuff, what are you using to do this? Are you a member of every scientific journal organization? And where do you go? You go to the American Psychology Journal and you just type in regret and you find all the keyword searches.

I'm glad you asked. So I do subscribe to many journals, but one of the great resources out there is Google Scholar, which is a massive database of these kinds of things. But this is why it takes me so long to write these. These books and. And I'll talk to academics. Okay, so, all right, so I want to know about this topic. Who should I read? Like, oh, my God, you got to look at the papers of Tom Gilovich. And so I'll pull the papers. Who's a professor at Cornell, social psychologist at Cornell. You get. So I go and I get the papers of Tom Gilovich, and I'll read them through, and then I'll look at the footnotes and I'll pull those and I'll read some of those, and then essentially you start falling in on yourself. But what I have, since I'm old school, I do almost all of this on paper. So what Guy and I are talking via video call, but I'm pulling out. This is what's known in ancient times. I don't know if you remember these things. These kinds of folders, they're called red welds. They're these giant expandable folders. And I have. I mean, just pulling out here. So I have these papers. I will print them out and read them on paper and underline them and make notes. And that's why I only write a book. Every four years, I'm here grinding through all that stuff. So you find one that leads you to another, leads to another. You call people and ask questions. You type notes. And like anything, you begin to. You begin to start Hearing the same things over and over again. And that's when you realize that you've hit the ceiling. Wow.

Man. It's hard to write a book the way you do.

Yeah, it's really hard. Listen, I'd rather be like Maslow and just sit in my office. What do you think? Like, you're looking into my office. What do you think? You think, like, in that corner over there, I just put on a smoking jacket and a pipe and think great thought.

And you write with a fountain pen and how hard could that be?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have like. Like assistants who go on and find quotes from Greek literature and they. They scurry off and bring me a cup of tea. No, no, no, no, no. It's like anything guy. You know this better than anybody. Think about entrepreneurship. Is entrepreneurship this like, oh, wow, here's what we do? As an entrepreneur, I think great thoughts and then riches fall from the sky. No, you try something and it doesn't work. And then you feel like it's all going to go to hell. And then you try something else and you pull it back from the brink, and then you grind it out and grind it out some more and grind it out some more, and then a few things work and a few things don't. And I think that's like any enterprise. I think that's true for art. I think it's true for entrepreneurship. I think it's true for sports. Good stuff happens. You gotta like the grind in order to get good stuff done.

And that's why Angela Duckworth gave you such a great blurb for this book, right?

Angela Duckworth, who brought the concept of grit there, which is it. It's passion and perseverance for things that matter to you. And that's what it is. But I don't think there's anything to do with me. I think it has to do with anybody who's trying to do stuff. I think it's true for you, guy, what do you do? You show up, right? Yep. You show up. You show up and you do your work, and then you show up the next day and do your work, but. And you show up the next day and do your work.

But some people say, or the saying is that showing up is 90%. I don't think that's true. I think showing up is about 10%. It's the grit. You got to keep showing up.

Oh, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. If I show up in my office and watch watch ESPN highlights for six hours, I'm not going to get a Lot of work done. It's showing up and doing the work. It's like what Julius Irving, the great hall of fame basketball player, Dr. J. Said, Being a professional is doing what you love to do, even on the days you don't feel like doing it. There are many days when it's like, oh, crap, you know, here are 26 studies that I need to read and a lot of them are poorly written and half of them I don't understand. And I'm not sure any of them are going to pan out. But I show up and I do my work.

The great philosopher.

It's like. But again, I just. Again, this is what teachers do. You think teaching first grade is easy? You think teaching first grade is the sea of bliss all the time? No. You make a lesson plane. You show up and on that day, you reach some kids but lose other kids and you deal with some kind of hassle you didn't expect. And you know what you do as a first grade teacher? You show up the next day. What do you do as a professional athlete? You show up the next day. What do you do as a musician? You show up the next day and do your work. That's what it's all about, man. It's just you show up and you do your work.

Yep. I interviewed Mark Manson for this podcast. He's the guy. The subtle art of not giving a fuck. And one of the most. One of my most favorite moments in this podcast was when he told me, you know, guy, you know, you've truly discovered what you love to do when it's a shit sandwich and you love the shit sandwich. And I think editing a podcast is a shit sandwich, but I love that shit sandwich. So it's all about finding the shit sandwich that you love.

Yep. Or that you can tolerate. I'll see you and raise you a little bit on this. This is one reason Guy, why I hate. The question that people ask is, what's your passion? I freaking hate that question.

It's idiocy.

Yeah. Because I'm a writer. I've been writing books for 20 years. And if you say to me, dan, is writing your passion? I would say, I don't know. Writing's really hard. And there's some days I hate it.

Yep.

Truly, there's some days I hate it. But it's what I do and I can't help myself. I think that's one of the things that we can help younger people understand is get out of this very managed, social media, prettified view of what works and accomplishment is and instead focus on the process. I'm a sports fan and I hate to analogize the sports for everything, but if you look at some of the very best athletes in any domain, they're also some of the hardest workers. They're the people who are the basketball players who when everybody else is gone, are shooting 200 free throws after practice. And Angela Duckworth really nailed that. That ends up being one of the best predictors of being able to make a reasonable contribution is are you willing to stay after practice for another hour and shoot 200 free throws?

Going back to your diatribe about writing, I heard two great quotes about writing. So one was the only thing worse than writing is not writing. And the second one is that writing is opening a vein and pouring your blood onto the page.

That's exactly right.

That's what it is.

I think it was Hemingway or something like that. Oh, writing is. Maybe it was not Hemingway. Somebody. Yeah, writing is. Writing is easy. Just open up a vein and bleed. And that's what it is. But this is true for anything. It's like I want a non glorified, non gridified, non cosmetic view of what work in certain kinds of fields are like, because I think there's something actually really ennobling about that. It's ennobling to see a great tennis player spend four hours a day hitting only backhands. That's how you become a great tennis player or some great violinist. Working only on one small movement of one piece in order to get it exactly right. That's how you do it.

So we're over an hour already, but I want you to just drive it home for this book about regrets.

Yes, sir.

What's the takeaway? Why should people buy this book?

They should buy this book because it offers a way for them to take their regrets not as something to deny and not as something to wallow in, but it's something they can use to lead a better life. And you'll understand what they regret, what other people regret. And there's a process in the book, three step process where you can take your existing regrets, extract a lesson from it and use it to live better. And I also have something in the book called the regret optimization principle which debunks Jeff Bezos's regret maximization principle. It's smarter, more science based and, and more helpful. So I think this book will help you see your life differently and live your life differently.

There you go. And I will tell you that one of my regrets in life was stealing map from you. But I recovered from that.

You undid it. I undid it. That we do.

Yes.

So it's a regret of action. Regrets of action. One of the things we do with regrets of actions. We can undo them. We can make amends. There you go. And here we are.

Daniel Pink, you are the man. Thank you so much. I hope everybody buys every book we mentioned today. There you have it, Daniel Pink. This stuff is good enough to steal. And believe me, not everything is good enough to steal. So I hope you learned about motivation, why you're always selling, what to do about your regrets, and finally, what time to get a colonoscopy. You heard it all here. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C. And Shannon Hernandez. Alexis Nishimura, Louise Magana, the Drop in Queen, Madison Nismer. Until next time. I hope you're motivated by working in a place that provides a map, mastery, autonomy and purpose. Remember, if your lips are moving, you're selling. Life is full of regrets. What matters is what kind of regrets do you have? And finally, get a colonoscopy in the morning. All the best to you. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.