The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(24)

    I let the fear of what others would say stop me from being more outgoing in high school. I regret not taking more chances and being so shy.



“Back then,” he told me in an interview, “I thought it was the end of the world if I got rejected; I thought it was the end of the world if they said no.” So he lowered his head, never talked much, and rarely announced his presence. Later in life, thanks to a more fearless college roommate, Zach unlearned some of that behavior. But he still knocks himself for the opportunities he missed and the contributions he didn’t make.

Several survey respondents used language almost identical to that of a thirty-five-year-old British Columbia man whose regret was “not learning to speak up for myself . . . in love, in school, in my family, or in my career.” Some described “fearing my own voice.” An enormous number of people of all ages and nationalities regretted being “too introverted.”

Introversion and extroversion are fraught topics, in part because popular belief and legitimate science often depart. The conventional view, reinforced by the ubiquity of assessments like the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, holds that we’re either introverted or extroverted. But personality psychologists—the scientists who began studying the subject a hundred years ago—have long concluded that most people are a bit of both. Introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types. This trait is better understood as a spectrum—one where about two-thirds of the population lands in the middle.[1] Yet almost nobody in either the quantitative or qualitative regret surveys described excesses of extroversion, while many lamented tilting toward the other side of the scale.

For example, a California man regretted using his “introvert tendency as an excuse” for “not speaking up” in the classroom, the office, and even “when competing athletically.”

A forty-eight-year-old woman in Virginia said:

    I regret allowing my shyness [and] introversion . . . to keep me from moving to a larger market where job opportunities, activities, and dating pools are better than where I am living now.



A fifty-three-year-old man from the United Kingdom said:

    I regret being too shy and polite as a teenager and young adult, always taking the safe path and not offending people. I could have taken more risks, been more assertive, and had more life experiences.



As a card-carrying ambivert who prefers the company of quiet people, I’ve cheered from the sidelines when others have decried the “extrovert ideal” in Western culture. Yet the evidence shows that modest efforts to move slightly in that direction can be helpful. For instance, Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.[2]

Similarly, many people who overcame their apprehensions and poured out even a small tincture of temerity reported being transformed—including this fifty-six-year-old North Carolina woman:

    I did not learn to find my own voice until having children and being their voice. Before that, particularly in school, I never said anything in classes where there were bullies or mean kids. I did not know how to speak up then. I wish I would not have been so quiet.





STEPPING UP AND STEPPING OUT


A few months after his encounter on the Eurail train, Bruce was living in College Station, Texas, when his mother forwarded him a letter bearing a French stamp and Paris postmark that had arrived at her home. Inside was a sheet of paper filled top to bottom with billowing handwriting.

The letter’s English was imperfect, and perhaps consequently, its sentiment was slightly inscrutable. Bruce now knew the woman’s name—Sandra—but not much else. “Maybe it’s crazy, but when I think about you, I’m smiling,” Sandra wrote. “I’m sure you understand what I feel about although you don’t know me well.” The words sounded tender—except for the oddly perfunctory conclusion: “Have a great day!” Sandra didn’t sign her last name, nor did she include a return address.

In the pre-internet era of the early 1980s, that halted communication. For Bruce, the doors had opened—and closed—again.

Rather than try to track her down, he chose to throw away the letter.

“I decided I could not keep it,” he told me, “because I would dwell on it.”

The pain of boldness regrets is the pain of “What if?” Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and other researchers have repeatedly found that people regret inactions more than actions—especially in the long term. “Regrettable failures to act . . . have a longer half-life than regrettable actions,” Gilovich and Medvec wrote in one of their early studies.[3] In my own American Regret Project survey, inaction regrets outnumbered action regrets by nearly two to one. And other research has likewise found a preponderance of inaction regrets even in less individualistic cultures, like those of China, Japan, and Russia.[4]

A key reason for this discrepancy is that when we act, we know what happened next. We see the outcome and that can shrink regret’s half-life. But when we don’t act—when we don’t step off that metaphorical train—we can only speculate how events would have unfolded. “Because regrettable inactions are more alive, current, and incomplete than are regrettable actions, we are reminded of them more often,” say Gilovich and Medvec.[5] Or as the American poet Ogden Nash once wrote in a long verse about the differences between regrets of commission and regrets of omission: