You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hew. For the next week and a half, we are sharing a handful of talks, conversations, and podcast episodes from the TED Archive that spark some

inspiration in all of us. Since we're thinking about the end of 2025 and the intentions and

practices we hope to bring into our lives in 26, so we hope they inspire you too. For many of us,

reflection is a huge part of the end of the year, and with reflection can come some regret.

It's one of our most powerful emotions and also maybe one of the most misunderstood.

In this conversation from 2022, author Daniel H. Pink speaks with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers

about his work gathering more than 16,000 stories of regret from people in more than 100 countries in an effort to better understand this emotion.

They discuss the patterns that emerged from his research, which he says boil down to four core regrets and discuss steps to transform your own regrets in order to create the life

you've always wanted to live. Let's talk about regret. It is, to my mind, our most misunderstood

emotion. And so I decided to spend a couple of years studying it.

And one of the things that I did is I went back and I looked at about 50 years of social

science on regret. And here's what it tells you. I'll save you the trouble of reading a half

century of social science. The research tells us that everybody has regrets. Regrets make us human.

Truly, the only people without regrets are five-year-olds, people with brain damage, and sociopaths.

The rest of us, we have regrets.

And if we treat our regrets right, and that's a big if, but they're ways to do it, regrets can actually make us better.

They can improve our decision-making skills, improve our negotiation skills, make us better strategists, make us better. They can improve our decision-making skills, improve our

negotiation skills, make us better strategists, make us better problem-solvers, enhance our sense of

meaning if we treat them right. And the good news is that there's a systematic way to do that.

But I want to take just a few minutes to tell you about another aspect of regret that I think

is really,

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