What I discovered, to my surprise, is that regret points the way to the good life.

That regret teaches us about the good life in ways that almost know where the topic does.

I think that's at the heart of why people are leaning in.

If you look at people's regrets, the guts of people's regrets, and synthesize them, analyze them, they tell you what makes life worth living.

So we've all been told, try to live a life without regrets.

But what if regret was actually a good thing?

That is a highly provocative question that today's guest, Dan Pink, asks, and then answers

with a whole bunch of researched and validated ways that regret can actually be an

incredibly valuable experience and even a power tool for a life well lived. In fact, a life

entirely without regret, he argues, might even do more harm than good. I've known Dan for

well over a decade now. He's been on the show a number of times over the years. A former White

House speech writer,

he left that world and shifted focus to writing books that really open our eyes to the human

condition and plant seeds to do life better. These include New York Times bestsellers, a whole new

mind, drive to sell as human, and when. His books have sold millions of copies, been translated into 42 languages,

and won many, many awards. And in Dan's new book, The Power of Regret, he takes on this topic

we've all grappled with and gives it this surprising reframe. He draws on research in psychology

and neuroscience, economics, and biology, to challenge widely held assumptions

about emotions and behavior, and using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret

ever conducted, as well as his own world regret survey, which by the way, has collected

regrets from more than 16,000 people in 105 countries, some of which he shares

during our conversation.

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