The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(17)

So, more than a half century after scholars and surveyors began probing individuals about their regrets, they had some answers to their two core questions.

What do people regret?

Lots of stuff.

Why do they have those regrets?

Something about opportunity.

The outcome remained intriguing, but unsatisfying.





OKAY, ONE MORE TIME


The world of survey research has changed considerably since 1953. For that very first regret poll, Gallup and his team interviewed about 1,500 people—often in person—and tabulated the responses without the assistance of even a mainframe computer. Today, my three-year-old smartphone packs more power than the computing might of all the world’s universities in the 1950s. And the laptop on which I’m writing this sentence connects me to billions of people across the globe and houses on its hard drive free, open-source software that can analyze massive amounts of data with such speed and ease it would astonish mid-twentieth-century statisticians.

I’m no George Gallup. But today’s tools are so powerful, and the costs are dropping so quickly, that even an amateur like me can follow his lead. So, nagged by the sense that we still didn’t truly understand what people regret, I tried to find out myself. Working with a large software and data analytics company, which itself contracted with firms that assemble panels of participants, we created the largest and most representative American survey on regret ever attempted—the American Regret Project. We polled 4,489 adults—whose gender, age, race, marital status, geography, income, and education level reflected the composition of the entire U.S. population.

The survey, a full version of which you can find online (www.danpink.com/surveyresults) asked participants seven demographic questions and eighteen research questions—including the big one:

    Regrets are part of life. We all have something we wish we had done differently—or some action we wish we had taken or not taken.

Please look back on your life for a moment. Then describe in 2 or 3 sentences one significant regret you have.



Thousands upon thousands of regrets came spilling into our database. We asked people to place their regret into one of eight categories: career, family (parents, children, grandchildren), partners (spouses, significant others), education, health, finances, friends, something else. And we posed several other questions, many of which you’ll read about later in the book.

In our survey, family took the top spot. Nearly 22 percent of respondents voiced a regret in this category, followed closely by the 19 percent whose regret involved partners. Running just behind, and bunched together tightly, were education, career, and finance regrets. Health and friends regrets rounded out the list.





Most common regrets (2021)


         SOURCE: Pink, Daniel, et al., American Regret Project (2021).





In other words, the largest and most representative survey of regret ever conducted reached a clear conclusion: American regrets span a wide range of domains rather than cluster into any single category. People do indeed regret a lot of stuff—family relationships, romantic choices, career moves, educational paths, and more.

Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, regret is universal. It’s a fundamental part of being human. Human life spreads across multiple domains—we’re parents, sons, daughters, spouses, partners, employees, bosses, students, spenders, investors, citizens, friends, and more. Why wouldn’t regret straddle domains, too?

What’s more, regret makes us better. It sharpens decisions, boosts performance, and deepens meaning. Why would its benefits not reach across life domains?

Yet even this outcome remains unsatisfying. It offered a glimmer of understanding, but not nearly the illumination I was seeking. And as I returned to the data, and collected thousands more entries worldwide in the World Regret Survey, I discovered the reason. The question was sound. I was just looking for the answer in the wrong place.

    “I didn’t practice or ‘give it my all’ while playing high school basketball. I think it’s because I was afraid of being compared and then being worse than my brother—which ultimately happened because of my lack of effort.”

Male, 24, Utah

//


“Pretending to be less smart and inventive than I actually am, simply to please/not upset others. This also includes business meetings with clients and then later hearing, ‘She’s useless in client meetings.’?”

Female, 39, Saudi Arabia

//


“I regret not learning more, sooner, about racism.”

Female, 78, Pennsylvania





6.


    The Four Core Regrets



Kevin Wang has an education regret. In 2013, when he was a senior biology major at Johns Hopkins University, he planned to become a doctor—just like all four of his grandparents. His grades were strong. The only step that remained was the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). But, as Kevin explained almost a decade later, he procrastinated “so badly on studying for my MCAT that I bombed the test and ended up not getting into medical school.” Today, he works in a New York City hospital, but as an administrator who monitors costs rather than a physician who sees patients.