Framing Our Regrets, for Better or Worse
On the power of regret, pivotal moments, and somehow also curling.
Last week I finished reading Dan Pink’s book The Power of Regret.
I must admit I have a love/hate relationship with books like these (pop psych/business/leadership) because they are so frequently just excellent articles that have been drawn and quartered into the size of a marketable books.
I like the ideas you can find in these kinds of books, but sometimes they require a more economical reading strategy than you might bring to a novel or to other types of nonfiction (here’s one I use sometimes).
Anyway, I came to this book on a recommendation from a friend, and the book is actually quite good!
I think part of the reason is that it presents original research that adds to the body of knowledge about regret in a useful way, rather than just repackaging academic findings as though they were all but-actually insights and hidden secrets.
There are two things still rattling around in my brain since I finished reading the book. Here’s one:
People with college degrees were more likely to have career regrets than people without college degrees. At first that might seem surprising. Having a college degree generally affords people a wider set of professional option. But that could be precisely why college graduates have more career regrets. Their lives presented more opportunities - and therefore a larger universe of foregone opportunities.
Income presented a similar pattern. Regrets about finance, not surprisingly, correlated tightly with household income - the lower the household income, the more likely someone was to have a finance-related regret. But regrets about careers ran in the reverse direction. That is, the higher the income, the more likely it was that someone had a career regret. Again, more opportunities could beget more regrets about unrealized opportunities (p.153, emphasis mine).
What causes us to experience regret is our ability to imagine counterfactuals, what could/should/would have happened had things not happened the way they did or had we made a different choice.
It struck me that people with more opportunity would experience more career regrets, instead of being better positioned to minimize career regrets. I suppose the challenge is, as Pink notes, that more opportunities beget more unseized opportunities. Take the old saw every Millenial heard: you can be anything you want to be. If that’s the case (it’s not), then eventually one must also mourn all the things one has failed to be.
This is the kind of thinking that apparently causes silver medalists to experience less joy at coming in second than bronze medalists experience at coming in third (p. 33-36). As Pink describes in his book, this effect is a small illustration of how we tend to frame our regrets:
At Leasts make us feel better. “At least I ended up with a medal” [says the bronze medalist]. At Leasts deliver comfort and consolation.
If Onlys, by contrast, make us feel worse. “If Only I’d begun that final chase two seconds earlier, I’d have won a gold medal.” [says the silver medalist] If Onlys deliver discomfort and distress (p. 36, emphasis mine).
This little act of framing, often done passively, has the ability to imbue our counterfactuals with a sense of gratitude or gloom.
I think decision points in our lives get coded with these senses too. Looking back on those pivotal moments when you decided to double down or to ease up, to continue on or to quit, to move or to stay put, to care or not to care, from those moments do you carry more if onlys or at leasts in your invisible knapsack of regret?
In graduate school I had a professor who would sometimes compare careers and career decisions to the sport of curling (…he’s Canadian). It seemed like a silly comparison at the time, but it had some of that deep inward feeling of truth that a good metaphor can have, so I still remember it.
It went something like this: Career decisions are like curling, there are times when you have a hand on the handle (e.g., deciding what to do after graduating, leaving a job / finding a new job, taking time off, etc.), times when you have a lot more control over the direction and angle and pace at which you’ll send yourself out there; but once you let go of the stone, while it’s still possible to alter its course, you’re more likely making alterations of degree rather than of kind - you’re sweeping, not aiming.
It’s kind of an elegant metaphor. It’s also a bit fatalistic for my taste.
Indeed, by middle age it’s unclear to me how useful metaphors like this actually are; imperatives about making sure you make the right decision when it counts, they all seem primed to trigger if only regrets rather than the calls to action I think they intend.
Certainly, the more decisions we make, the older we get, the more entangled we become in the outcomes of our decisions, and making bigger, more life altering decisions may require more intention, more courage, and more energy; but none of that means you have to just slide next to the curling stone continuing to sweep, hoping to shape its arc toward some desired target (apparently called “the house”?) that doesn’t actually reside on that particular sheet of ice.
One can imagine the stubborn, uncritical writer extending the metaphor - describing the difference between continuing to sweep and picking up the stone to play on that different sheet of ice, aiming at another house. Or better yet absconding with the stone altogether and running to the waiting car in the parking lot. But I won’t get into all that.
Suffice to say, as the Chinese proverb goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
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