The Power of Regret

Or, what happened when I stumbled across Daniel Pink's latest book

When I was a student in high school, I had a physics teacher who shared something with our class one day, something I’ve never forgotten.

It was in response to a question a friend of mine asked, during one of the occasional lulls when the discussion in the room slowed down and our teacher would open the floor to just about any question from the class. 

(If your experience was like mine, then you may remember how your mind scrambled to grasp the often-esoteric concepts of physics — especially if your class was in the afternoon — so any opportunity to escape the tedium was welcome.)

“Why does it feel,” my friend asked, “that time speeds up the older you get? Is that really real, or am I just imagining that?”

Our teacher, a man then in his fifties with glasses and a close-cropped graying beard, had the answer in his back pocket, it seemed, like he’d been ready for a question like this his whole career. And he answered it with math:

“When you’re five years old, a year is one fifth of your life,” he said. “That’s why everything feels like it takes so long when you’re really young.”

A few of us nodded; we could understand that.

“But when you’re twenty-five years old,” our teacher added, “a year is just one twenty-fifth of your life.”

In other words, your perception of time passing is completely dependent on your perspective — and that’s why, he said, you can’t stop the feeling of time going by more quickly the older you get. 

“It will only continue,” he said, “and it will keep going by faster, and faster, and faster…”

When I first started writing this newsletter to you back in early 2015, my wife and I had been married for just over two years. We had a baby who’d just turned one and my stepdaughter had just turned ten; my wife wasn’t even forty yet and my parents were still in their early seventies.

Since then, we’ve turned quite a few pages on the calendar. (To say the least!)

Our then-baby is now almost eleven and our daughter is a college sophomore; my parents, meanwhile, are now in their early eighties. A lot has changed.

I’ve always been a nostalgic person; my mind has always been pulled toward the past, especially when I’ve felt lonely or melancholy. I don’t even need a reason, in fact — an old photo on my phone, or even a scene from a movie can trigger my memory and take me back twenty or thirty years in an instant.

But it’s only recently, now that I’m in my fifties, that I’ve begun to feel like one of those cars where, when you see the odometer you say to yourself, “wow, this thing’s got a lot of miles on it.”

By that I mean, on day one life gives each of us a blank canvas. We spend our lives painting it, little by little; by now, a sizable part of mine has been painted.

I have big swaths of time I can look back on; enough things have happened in my life that I can make judgments about what I did, what I said, how I reacted. I can see how those things worked out (or didn’t). 

It’s that last part, in my quieter moments, that I’ve started to think more about recently. There was a time in my life when I’d feel the pang of regret over things I didn’t do, chances I didn’t take, things I left unsaid. I’ve definitely known what it feels like to have my emotions gnaw at me from the inside.

But over time, the sting of some of my past regrets has dulled. Time, it turns out, has a way of pulling the thorns out of our paws, I’ve found, especially as my life has taken different turns. Other regrets of mine, though, still lurk back in the shadows. They’re quieter than they once were, but they’re there nonetheless.

So, you may be asking, why am I sharing all of this with you? I pulled Daniel Pink’s The Power of Regret off my bookshelf earlier this week, and when I started into the book’s introduction I just couldn’t stop. (It’s been sitting atop the mountain of books next to our bed for the past two years, ever since I bought it when it came out back in 2022; some books call to me, while others it takes me time to hear them.)

What the book has done is help me to give a name to the different shades of regret I’ve felt over the years; until I came across his book, they all felt like one big mashup of negative, icky, unpleasant feelings.

But that’s because I hadn’t really ever teased out the reasons why I felt what I felt; I hadn’t brought those feelings into the light, so to speak, so I couldn’t put a label on them. They just felt bad, so I tried to shove them aside in the back of my mind.

Early in the book, Pink asks a really interesting question: what are thinking and feeling for, exactly? For the answer to the first, he travels to the headwaters of modern psychology: the work of William James, the legendary late 19th and early 20th-century philosopher and psychologist, whose 1890 masterwork The Principles of Psychology drills down to this essential truth: “My thinking,” James writes, “is first and foremost always for the sake of my doing.”

In other words, Pink says, thinking is a precursor to action. “But feelings are more complicated,” he adds. “What is the purpose of emotions — especially unpleasant emotions like regret? If thinking is for doing, what is feeling for?”

That’s a very, very good question, and one I’ve always wondered, especially when negative emotions like depression and regret bay like wolves at my mind’s back door.

The title of the chapter Pink writes about this, however, gives us a clue that he feels differently; it’s titled “Why Regret Makes Us Better.” He goes on to explore the different schools of thought on feelings — how, over time, we’ve assigned more or less weight to them, from counseling people to ignore their feelings to encouraging them to luxuriate in them.

But Pink arrives somewhere in the middle; “feeling is for thinking,” he writes, encouraging us neither to dodge nor to wallow in our emotions. Instead, “use them as a catalyst for future behavior,” he writes. “If thinking is for doing, feeling can help us think.”

He closes the chapter with a story I can’t tell any better than he already has, so I’ll share it in full:

In the fifteenth century, or so the story goes, a Japanese shogun named Ashikaga Yoshimasa dropped a Chinese tea bowl, which broke into several pieces when it hit the floor. He sent the damaged bowl back to China to be repaired. But what he received in return months later was an ungainly mess of an object, the bowl’s pieces held together by bulky metal staples. There’s got to be a better way, he thought, and he asked local craftspeople to find it.

They chose to repair the pottery by sanding down the edges of the broken pieces and gluing them back together using lacquer mixed with gold. The artisans’ goal wasn’t to faithfully reproduce the original work, or even to conceal its newly acquired flaws. It was to transform the piece into something better. Their work established a new — and now centuries-old — art form called kintsugi. “By the 17th century,” according to one report, “kintsugi was such a fashionable phenomenon that some people were known to smash their tea bowls on purpose in order to embed them with golden-veined repairs.”

And here’s the part that really made me push the book back and think (emphasis added):

Kintsugi (which translates to “golden joinery”) considers the breaks and the subsequent repairs part of the vessel’s history, fundamental elements of its being. The bowls aren’t beautiful despite their imperfections. They’re beautiful because of the imperfections. The cracks make them better.

I love, love, love this story, because what’s true of that 17th-century bowl is also true of us, Pink writes. Regrets can help us heal, if only we can figure out how to use them to.

There’s so much more to dig into with The Power of Regret, that I may keep going on this in future newsletters if you’re interested — just let me know.

And, if you feel comfortable sharing, I’d love to know: how has regret impacted your life? How has it changed you? Do you have any regrets lingering that you’d like to do something about?

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going — and have a great run out there tomorrow.

Your friend,

— Terrell