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00:01:34.600 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:42.440 | your life, money, and travel.

00:01:44.200 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited you're here.

00:01:46.520 | Now, today is an exciting episode because I'm joined by the one and only Dan Pink,

00:01:50.920 | who is the author of several provocative bestselling books about business, work,

00:01:55.320 | creativity, and behavior, including the latest, The Power of Regret, How Looking

00:02:00.200 | Back Moves Us Forward, which comes out the same day this episode will.

00:02:03.920 | His previous books, When, Drive, To Sell as Human, and A Whole New Mind were all

00:02:08.720 | New York Times bestsellers, collectively spending more than five years on the

00:02:12.440 | bestseller list.

00:02:13.240 | They've won countless awards, sold millions of copies, and have been translated

00:02:17.360 | into 42 languages around the world.

00:02:19.120 | And if that's not enough, his TED Talk on the Science of Motivation is one of the

00:02:23.240 | 10 most watched TED Talks of all time.

00:02:25.280 | Today, we'll talk about how regret works, how it can help us make smarter

00:02:29.080 | decisions, perform better at work, and bring greater meaning to our lives.

00:02:33.000 | We'll also dig into some of the best hacks he's learned about

00:02:35.680 | timing, motivation, and more.

00:02:37.360 | Oh, and I saved the best for last.

00:02:39.720 | Dan is actually a fellow All The Hacks listener, which makes

00:02:42.800 | this one even more special.

00:02:44.120 | So I'm excited.

00:02:45.360 | Let's jump in.

00:02:46.360 | Dan, I've enjoyed your books for years.

00:02:50.880 | Congrats on this one.

00:02:52.360 | Thank you for being here.

00:02:53.320 | Thanks for having me.

00:02:54.560 | I have a whole bunch of questions about how to maximize my frequent flyer points.

00:02:57.920 | So if we can begin with that.

00:02:59.720 | No, no, I'm a longtime listener, first time caller.

00:03:02.600 | I do love the, I do love the travel stuff.

00:03:05.360 | I also happen to be a Manu Ginobili fan and I couldn't believe you got him a

00:03:10.040 | couple of years or maybe about a year ago.

00:03:11.640 | Yeah, that episode was fun.

00:03:13.360 | He doesn't do a lot of podcasts.

00:03:14.680 | In fact, the one I had been able to find to try to get a sense of

00:03:17.920 | his style was all in Spanish.

00:03:19.280 | So I had to find it on YouTube with subtitles to try to get a feel for his flow.

00:03:23.080 | Yeah.

00:03:23.400 | I remember when he, when Manu Ginobili, so I'm a big basketball fan.

00:03:26.960 | My, my, my son is a big basketball fan.

00:03:28.960 | And, and when Manu was playing, my son would always say, because Manu

00:03:33.040 | was like lost a lot of his hair.

00:03:34.360 | He looks as old as you, dad.

00:03:36.280 | He looks as old as you.

00:03:37.600 | Yeah, it hurts.

00:03:39.360 | My daughter's just learning to speak and I'm like, I'm faithfully worried about

00:03:42.520 | all these comments that I'm going to get.

00:03:43.840 | Yeah, it's over.

00:03:44.560 | You don't want to, don't, don't teach your kids to speak.

00:03:46.560 | It'll just cause you trouble down the road.

00:03:48.600 | So, uh, before we jump in, I got to ask, is there, do you have

00:03:50.920 | a favorite episode from the show?

00:03:52.400 | Well, I liked the Manu.

00:03:53.400 | I liked the Manu and, but I have to say it like for me, it's the cumulative thing.

00:03:56.600 | It's like, I've learned so much about, especially about travel and what to ask

00:04:00.720 | for and contacting general managers and reaching out in advance and all that

00:04:06.120 | kind of stuff, it's been super useful to me because travel is such a pain in the

00:04:09.920 | ass sometimes that if you can do small things to mitigate that, it really

00:04:15.040 | enriches the experience.

00:04:16.080 | And the other thing that it does, I think in some level is it

00:04:18.240 | personalizes it a little bit.

00:04:19.440 | It brings a little bit more humanity to it.

00:04:21.080 | So it's not only the art of the deal, which I like getting the good deals,

00:04:25.240 | maximizing the points, but it's also some of the people you end up encountering

00:04:29.560 | in trying to maximize your travels.

00:04:31.840 | So thanks for, thanks for doing that.

00:04:33.000 | I mean, I love it.

00:04:33.960 | So expect more, but I read most of this book, you know, I've

00:04:37.680 | only had it a couple of days, but I'd like to just kick off for everyone listening.

00:04:41.480 | I think regret is something we throw around a lot and people say, oh, no regrets.

00:04:45.720 | And how would you actually explain to people listening?

00:04:48.760 | What regret is?

00:04:49.840 | Great, great question.

00:04:50.880 | So regret is an emotion and it's a negative emotion.

00:04:54.160 | It feels terrible.

00:04:55.680 | So it's that stomach churning sensation we have when we look back and say,

00:05:00.160 | oh, if only I hadn't done that, if only I had done that, if only

00:05:04.920 | I had made a different choice.

00:05:06.080 | And so it's actually an incredible capacity of our minds to be able to

00:05:10.760 | travel back and forth in time, but ultimately it's an emotion that makes

00:05:15.320 | us feel bad, that's why we try to avoid it, but it's also an emotion that is to

00:05:21.800 | my mind, the most instructive emotion that we have, but you said instructive.

00:05:26.240 | I saw somewhere online, you talk about the surprising path to the good

00:05:29.840 | life when talking about regret.

00:05:31.240 | So I got to ask, why does regret matter so much?

00:05:34.120 | Why can it be so powerful?

00:05:35.240 | Okay.

00:05:35.800 | Well, I mean, so that's a whole kettle of fish there, but

00:05:38.480 | let me take it in two parts.

00:05:39.520 | First of all, regret matters so much because everybody has regrets.

00:05:44.920 | I mean, truly every person, every, essentially every

00:05:47.960 | functioning person has regrets.

00:05:49.880 | The only people without regrets are five-year-olds who, because their brains

00:05:53.360 | haven't developed because it takes some cognitive firepower to even

00:05:57.120 | experience a process regret.

00:05:58.760 | People with brain lesions, people with neurodegenerative diseases often

00:06:03.200 | can't experience regret and sociopaths.

00:06:04.920 | The rest of us have regrets because it's part of the human condition.

00:06:09.080 | It's an essential part of our cognitive machinery.

00:06:12.040 | And the reason it's part of our cognitive machinery is because it's

00:06:16.600 | helpful if we deal with it right, that regret instructs, regret clarifies.

00:06:22.920 | Now we have to approach it right.

00:06:25.400 | We can blithely say, "Oh, I don't have any regrets.

00:06:27.920 | I never look backward."

00:06:28.800 | That's stupid.

00:06:30.080 | That's going to lead to delusion.

00:06:31.720 | You can also say, "Oh my God, everything is, I regret everything.

00:06:36.080 | I'm going to spin around and wallow in my regrets."

00:06:38.280 | That's an even worse idea.

00:06:40.120 | What we have to do is recognize that regret is teaching us, it's signaling to us.

00:06:44.320 | And if we do that, I mean, I'm telling you, it is the most transformative

00:06:48.520 | emotion we have if we process it right.

00:06:50.440 | I know I always regretted every financial investment decision I've made when it

00:06:54.960 | turned out that it was the poor decision, which is easy to do in hindsight.

00:06:57.960 | And a really good friend of mine once always asked me, I was like, "Oh man, I

00:07:01.960 | sold this thing.

00:07:02.640 | I should have held onto it."

00:07:03.480 | And he goes, "Well, with all the information you had when you did it, was

00:07:06.800 | it the right decision?

00:07:07.760 | Like if you had that information again today?"

00:07:09.440 | And I was like, "Well, I guess I would do it that way."

00:07:11.040 | And that kind of helped.

00:07:12.280 | But I'm sure we'll get into a few more tactics.

00:07:14.840 | Oh, sure, sure, sure.

00:07:15.760 | There are all kinds of tactics.

00:07:16.720 | And the other thing is, as you mentioned about the good life, is that, you know, I

00:07:20.960 | went out for this book and I collected 16,000 regrets from people in 105

00:07:25.320 | countries.

00:07:25.720 | I mean, I have this massive database of regrets because I was curious about what

00:07:28.680 | do people regret?

00:07:29.560 | And I felt like in the existing research, there were some holes in that.

00:07:33.000 | Or even in my own existence, I did another research project where I tried to figure

00:07:36.680 | that out and I hit a wall.

00:07:37.960 | But I also collected these 16,000 regrets.

00:07:41.120 | We're up to over 17,000 now from 105 countries.

00:07:43.960 | It's nuts.

00:07:44.560 | And what I found is that over and over again, people around the world regret the

00:07:50.080 | same four things.

00:07:51.320 | And that's what gives us a hint about the good life, that these four core regrets

00:07:56.400 | operate as kind of a photographic negative of the good life.

00:07:59.320 | That is, we understand what people regret the most.

00:08:01.440 | We actually understand what they value the most.

00:08:03.640 | And so in this weird way, you asked at the top, Chris, what is this thing regret?

00:08:07.440 | And I said, it's an emotion that makes us feel bad.

00:08:09.840 | But weirdly, this emotion that makes us feel bad contains the clues to what we

00:08:15.520 | ultimately want out of life.

00:08:16.640 | And what were the four core regrets?

00:08:18.760 | Well, so we've got let me not answer that question directly and give you a lengthy

00:08:23.480 | contextual buildup.

00:08:24.440 | So one of the things that you see in the existing research on regret, because I

00:08:29.480 | mean, developmental psychologists, other people in behavioral science have studied

00:08:33.160 | regret for many, many years.

00:08:34.200 | Economists have studied regret.

00:08:35.320 | Game theorists have studied regret.

00:08:36.720 | One of the things that you see is that when they try to figure out what people

00:08:40.480 | regret, they sort those by the domain of life.

00:08:44.600 | Let me give you a concrete example.

00:08:46.120 | This will be easier.

00:08:46.840 | So I have people who say my big regret is that I was in college and I didn't study

00:08:51.920 | abroad. OK, not the most calamitous regret, but hundreds of those hundreds of

00:08:56.760 | those. I actually think you could start a travel agency serving people who didn't

00:09:02.000 | study abroad in college and regret.

00:09:03.240 | I'm dead serious about that.

00:09:04.440 | There's a business in there somewhere.

00:09:06.120 | OK, so that's an education regret.

00:09:08.080 | Then I have people who say and this is an amazing one and I have literally hundreds

00:09:12.160 | around the world that say blankety blank years ago, I met a man or a woman who I

00:09:16.880 | really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, but I was too chicken to do

00:09:21.040 | that. And I've always regretted it.

00:09:22.680 | That's a romance regret.

00:09:24.040 | Then we have, again, hundreds who say, oh, I stayed in this crappy job.

00:09:30.160 | And if only I'd started a business, I always wanted to start a business, but I

00:09:33.280 | never got around to it. I never had the guts to do it.

00:09:35.480 | OK, that's a career regret.

00:09:36.920 | But to my mind, those are all the same regret.

00:09:40.000 | Deep down, those are all the same regret.

00:09:42.040 | That's a regret that says, if only I'd taken the chance.

00:09:44.280 | And that's one of the core regrets is the regret of boldness.

00:09:47.480 | If only I'd taken the chance.

00:09:48.800 | There's a little bit of a head fake going on in that we're looking at the domains of

00:09:53.600 | life, career and education and health and whatnot.

00:09:56.720 | And when what was going on was something actually much more important underneath.

00:10:00.400 | So one regret is boldness, regrets.

00:10:02.760 | If only I'd taken the chance.

00:10:04.000 | One big regret that people have are what I call foundation regrets, which is if only

00:10:08.120 | I'd done the work. And these are people who regret smoking, who regret not exercising,

00:10:12.880 | taking care of their body, who regret not saving money, not working hard enough in

00:10:17.400 | school, small decisions early that accumulate to big consequences later on.

00:10:22.360 | There are moral regrets.

00:10:24.200 | And those are interesting because a lot of these regrets begin at a juncture.

00:10:27.440 | You're at a juncture. You can do the right thing.

00:10:28.800 | You can do the wrong thing.

00:10:29.760 | People do the wrong thing.

00:10:31.000 | And a lot of them regret it.

00:10:32.080 | So I got all kinds of people who regret bullying kids in school, marital infidelity,

00:10:36.640 | huge things like that.

00:10:38.120 | And then finally, our connection regrets.

00:10:40.040 | And those are regrets about relationships that were intact or should have been intact.

00:10:44.480 | They come apart. Someone wants to reach out, but they say, oh, it's going to be really

00:10:48.720 | awkward to reach out. And the other side's not going to care.

00:10:51.040 | So they drift even further apart.

00:10:52.920 | And so connection regrets are if only I'd reached out.

00:10:55.360 | And to me, what these tell us, 105 countries over and over again, what do we regret?

00:11:01.840 | We regret not doing the work.

00:11:03.160 | We regret not taking a chance.

00:11:04.600 | We regret not doing the right thing.

00:11:06.520 | We regret not reaching out.

00:11:08.280 | And that tells us what we want.

00:11:10.400 | What do we want? We want some stability in our life.

00:11:12.800 | We want a chance to do something, to lead an interesting life and grow and have a

00:11:18.880 | psychologically rich existence.

00:11:20.960 | Most of us, I'm convinced, want to do the right thing.

00:11:24.080 | And we feel crappy when we don't.

00:11:25.640 | And what do we want? We want connection and love with other people.

00:11:28.560 | That's it. And so my trying to understand this emotion of regret took me to this

00:11:33.520 | unexpected place where I said, wait a second, these people who are expressing their

00:11:37.720 | regrets are telling me what they want out of life.

00:11:41.160 | And I think it's very clear now.

00:11:42.480 | Do they all apply to everyone or is there some kind of formula to know who they're most

00:11:47.000 | important to by age or by anything else?

00:11:49.760 | Super interesting question.

00:11:51.000 | So I also did a quantitative piece of research on a U.S.

00:11:53.760 | population where we did a pretty good public opinion poll of 4,489 Americans to try

00:11:59.840 | to get at some demographic differences so we can do crosstabs to say, OK, do men have

00:12:05.240 | different regrets than women do?

00:12:06.560 | Do African-Americans have different regrets from white people and so forth?

00:12:09.600 | And what we found is not that many demographic differences.

00:12:13.840 | The big demographic difference comes out on age.

00:12:17.880 | When people are young, let's say in their 20s, they have about the same number of

00:12:21.560 | regrets of action and inaction, same number of regrets about what they did and what

00:12:26.360 | they didn't do. But as people age, inaction regrets take over.

00:12:31.040 | People have many more inaction regrets as they as they age.

00:12:34.280 | Can you give some examples of inaction regrets that people older might have?

00:12:38.200 | If only I traveled more, if only I had reached out to my brother before he passed

00:12:43.080 | away, if only I had started a business, if only I had spoken up at work, those kinds

00:12:48.800 | of things. So fewer regrets about, oh, I did this.

00:12:52.040 | And if we were regrets, I heard somebody and I regret doing that.

00:12:55.240 | More about I didn't do the thing that I always wanted to do.

00:12:58.560 | I wasn't true to myself.

00:13:00.040 | I didn't lead a life of meaning and significance.

00:13:03.680 | Yeah, it's funny. We I spoke with Ben Nimton.

00:13:06.240 | I don't know if you know him, who was in this show called The Buried Life and went on

00:13:10.520 | to write a bucket list journal.

00:13:11.680 | And the whole thing was kind of inspired by the first of the five regrets of the dying,

00:13:15.880 | which is I didn't leave a life true to myself.

00:13:18.120 | And so we talked a bit about that, but it was more in the spirit of kind of all the

00:13:22.080 | things you can put on your list to do.

00:13:23.960 | So to kind of juxtapose that, I'm going to ask you now that you know all this, what

00:13:28.720 | advice do you have for people to use these regrets to kind of live the good life, if

00:13:33.720 | you will? I'll tell you one that changed me, Chris, and is on the connection regrets.

00:13:38.360 | I don't want to get woo on you here.

00:13:40.160 | You can, you know, at some level, when you work on a project, any kind of project, you

00:13:45.200 | know, if you're starting a business or doing a pot like you're a different person when

00:13:49.040 | you started this podcast than you than you are on this episode.

00:13:51.720 | Right. We change over time.

00:13:53.320 | And so I'm a different person than when I started this book a few years ago.

00:13:57.040 | Now that I spent all this time immersed in the research on regret and talking to hundreds

00:14:01.360 | of people about regret and reading thousands of regrets, I'm a different person.

00:14:05.400 | And the person I am today has a belief in essentially an unshakable belief now on this

00:14:12.280 | one dimension, which is this.

00:14:13.480 | If you if one, if I, you, anybody is at a juncture in your life and you're wondering,

00:14:19.240 | should I reach out? The fact that you made it to that juncture answers the question.

00:14:23.960 | Always reach out.

00:14:25.240 | If there is any single lesson for me in this research, it is always reach out.

00:14:30.160 | I got all these people around the world who say, oh, I wanted to reach out to my friend

00:14:35.080 | or to this person who I used to know, but I thought it was going to be awkward.

00:14:38.640 | So I didn't do it. And they wouldn't care anyway.

00:14:40.640 | And they're always wrong on that front.

00:14:42.960 | It's much less awkward than we think.

00:14:44.880 | And it's almost always well received.

00:14:46.760 | So one, I don't even want to call it a hack as much as it is a habit of the heart, which

00:14:52.920 | is always reach out.

00:14:56.120 | If you're thinking about it, reach out.

00:14:58.760 | Another thing, always go to funerals.

00:15:01.400 | I mean it. I guess I have that regret myself.

00:15:04.720 | A friend of mine, not a close friend, passed away several years ago.

00:15:08.160 | I worked with him and he was a little older than I was and he had a funeral and it's

00:15:14.680 | embarrassing to me.

00:15:15.640 | The funeral was literally, the service was literally walking distance from my house.

00:15:20.680 | And on that particular day, I intended to go, but I got swept up in some deadline or

00:15:25.480 | something like that and I didn't go.

00:15:27.000 | This was maybe 15 years ago and I still regret it.

00:15:29.920 | So always go to the funeral.

00:15:31.960 | Always reach out.

00:15:33.680 | I think you have to think very hard if you're at a juncture where you can do the right

00:15:37.240 | thing or do the wrong thing.

00:15:38.320 | I think you've got to think very hard about whether you want to do the wrong thing

00:15:41.280 | because I got people for whom doing the wrong thing is lingering in their souls for

00:15:46.600 | decades, for decades.

00:15:49.200 | OK, so that's kind of the moral and the connection.

00:15:52.440 | Yeah.

00:15:53.040 | What about knowing how much you might regret not being bold?

00:15:56.520 | Is there something you can do to kind of fix or prepare yourself for avoiding the

00:16:02.280 | regret of boldness?

00:16:03.440 | So one thing that you can do and we can talk more about how to take existing regrets and

00:16:06.880 | transform them because there's interesting practices to do.

00:16:09.400 | So I'll give you, in some ways, the best decision making hack that I know of any kind,

00:16:14.920 | but it applies very forcefully to regret.

00:16:17.760 | And it's this, what would you tell your best friend to do?

00:16:21.000 | Let's say you have a regret about boldness and you're at another juncture.

00:16:25.760 | You didn't leave a job to start a business.

00:16:27.520 | Now you're in a new job.

00:16:28.440 | You don't like that job.

00:16:29.120 | You want to start a business.

00:16:30.200 | Your friend comes to you with that regret.

00:16:32.400 | What would you tell him or her to do?

00:16:33.880 | And when you apply that, I'll see your hack and call it a heuristic, you know, a mental

00:16:39.720 | shortcut, right?

00:16:40.520 | When you apply that heuristic, what would you tell your best friend to do?

00:16:43.440 | People always know what to do.

00:16:45.280 | So that's one thing that you can do to act on a boldness regret.

00:16:50.040 | Now, is there a more systematic way to deal with and process your regrets that I think

00:16:55.680 | is useful to people?

00:16:56.480 | Yeah.

00:16:57.240 | So that's where I kind of wanted to go is some of these, I can plan for these future

00:17:01.480 | regrets and what I might do if I'm thinking, oh, should I reach out?

00:17:04.440 | The answer is always yes.

00:17:05.640 | But what about all the regrets we already have?

00:17:07.400 | I think there are three steps here in doing this.

00:17:10.240 | So the first step is to reframe how you think about the regret and how you think about

00:17:14.000 | yourself. Now, once again, a lot of the way we deal with emotions is a form of

00:17:18.880 | triangulation. All right.

00:17:20.320 | So in the same way that we don't want to ignore our regrets or wallow in them, we want

00:17:23.960 | to confront them. When we look at our regrets in ourselves, some of us are tempted to say,

00:17:28.720 | oh, I'm awesome anyway, boost our self-esteem.

00:17:31.440 | Other people are tempted to lacerate themselves with self-criticism.

00:17:35.200 | The better option is something called self-compassion, which is the brainchild of

00:17:41.040 | Kristen Neff, a psychologist at the University of Texas.

00:17:44.400 | And what she has found is it's very simple and straightforward.

00:17:47.640 | So when you have a regret, let's say that I have a regret about somebody bullied a kid

00:17:52.880 | in school and is really bothered by that even 20 years later.

00:17:56.080 | What you can do is you can you sort of show yourself some.

00:17:58.680 | So if a friend came to you with this regret, would you show them kindness or contempt?

00:18:02.560 | You probably would show them some kindness.

00:18:04.360 | So show yourself that kind of kindness.

00:18:05.840 | Do you think that this regret is part of the human condition or do you think you're the

00:18:10.120 | only one who's ever suffered from it?

00:18:11.520 | Believe me, you're not the only one.

00:18:13.640 | All right. So let yourself off the hook a little bit.

00:18:16.240 | And treating ourselves with self-compassion rather than self-criticism or

00:18:19.760 | self-esteem actually is the best way to avoid complacency.

00:18:24.520 | Self-compassion. Number two, disclose it, man.

00:18:27.400 | I mean, the research on disclosure is powerful that when we disclose our regrets, we

00:18:33.960 | should be talking about these things.

00:18:35.200 | We shouldn't be bottling them up.

00:18:36.280 | When we disclose our regrets, we unburden them.

00:18:39.160 | We lift the burden.

00:18:40.120 | The other thing that we do, which is when we take these blobby emotion that we talked

00:18:44.960 | about at the top of the show, right, regret is an emotion.

00:18:47.480 | It feels bad, but it's kind of amorphous.

00:18:50.320 | It's kind of it's a kind of abstract.

00:18:52.960 | When we take that abstraction and convert it into words by talking about it, even

00:18:58.640 | writing about it, you take away some of the steam.

00:19:01.160 | It makes it less fearsome.

00:19:02.840 | So the act of converting it to language makes the regret less fearsome.

00:19:06.320 | The other thing about self-disclosure is that we think that if we disclose our

00:19:09.880 | vulnerabilities, people will like us less.

00:19:12.120 | Nope. There's 30 years of research that says they like us more.

00:19:15.480 | Finally, extract a lesson from it.

00:19:18.240 | So the way that you extract a lesson from it is you do some self-distancing.

00:19:22.560 | You say, if I'm looking back on this in 10 years, what do I want to have done?

00:19:26.560 | If someone else were in my position, what would they do?

00:19:29.480 | You can even do self-distancing through language.

00:19:32.400 | So you, Chris, could say instead of saying to yourself, what should I do?

00:19:35.560 | Say, what should Chris do?

00:19:36.720 | Even changing to the third person.

00:19:39.360 | And so you reframe it by treating yourself with self-compassion.

00:19:42.640 | You disclose it and make it less fearsome by converting it into words and you

00:19:46.640 | extract a lesson from it.

00:19:47.640 | And so if I regret bullying somebody, I say, you know what, I'm going to treat myself

00:19:52.280 | with some compassion that doesn't fully define me.

00:19:54.640 | Two, I'm going to tell people about it because that's going to unburden it.

00:19:57.760 | And I'm going to make sense of it by talking about it.

00:19:59.640 | And three, I'm going to extract a lesson from it.

00:20:02.120 | And the lesson is that I'm not a kid anymore, but in my in my office, I'm

00:20:06.760 | certainly going to treat people with kindness.

00:20:08.640 | If I see someone in my office bullying somebody in a way that adults bully, I'm

00:20:13.640 | going to stand up and say something and I'm going to transmit this knowledge to my

00:20:17.360 | kids about this experience and what they can learn from it.

00:20:19.840 | Wow. But but again, I mean, I don't want to make it sound more more complicated than

00:20:23.400 | it really is, but it's really about sort of look inward, treat yourself with some

00:20:27.560 | kindness, express outward, disclose it, move forward, extract a lesson from it.

00:20:31.840 | That's the way to do it.

00:20:33.080 | And what you don't do is what you were saying earlier, where you say, I don't have

00:20:36.760 | any regrets, no regrets, no regrets.

00:20:38.560 | I bully kids, but I don't have any regrets.

00:20:40.080 | That's crazy.

00:20:41.040 | Once you've done this, so this is kind of dealing with all of your past regrets.

00:20:45.040 | Do you recommend just like sit down one day and kind of think about them and go

00:20:49.320 | through them? Or I would start with one.

00:20:51.240 | I would start with one that's bugging you and everybody has one that's bugging them.

00:20:54.480 | I know that because seventeen thousand people have disclosed the one that's bugging

00:20:58.840 | them to me. OK, so pick one that's bugging from you and work that through inward.

00:21:03.360 | Treat yourself with kindness outward, disclose and make sense of it forward.

00:21:08.240 | Extract a lesson from it.

00:21:09.480 | That's how you do it. You know, another thing that you can do in this in this process

00:21:14.000 | of reckoning with it is that there's certain kinds of events, certain kinds of

00:21:17.120 | regrets that we have that we can undo.

00:21:19.320 | Like I got people in my in my book who have no regrets tattoos.

00:21:24.040 | They have tattoos that say no regrets.

00:21:26.360 | And then I have a guy who said who got a no regrets tattoo and regretted it and had

00:21:32.640 | it removed. OK, so that's how you that's how you undo a regret.

00:21:35.880 | I'll give you another idea here.

00:21:37.520 | So let's let's talk about career regrets.

00:21:39.280 | Here is a hack, one of my favorite hacks.

00:21:41.880 | It comes from Tina Seelig at Stanford University.

00:21:44.520 | It's called a failure resume.

00:21:46.680 | This is one of the smartest things you can do as a professional.

00:21:49.320 | So we all have these resumes, these glistening things that talk about how awesome

00:21:55.000 | we are and all of our accomplishments and credentials.

00:21:57.080 | Tina Seelig at Stanford suggests that we also do a failure resume, which is the

00:22:01.720 | opposite of that, which is a list of all of our screw ups and failures and setbacks.

00:22:07.200 | You list those.

00:22:08.760 | You don't have to tell anybody about it.

00:22:10.760 | I've done this. I didn't tell anybody about it.

00:22:12.440 | It's I mean, I told people that I did it.

00:22:14.480 | I'm not showing anybody this thing because it's embarrassing as hell.

00:22:16.920 | A list of your failures, setbacks and mistakes.

00:22:21.120 | But you don't just leave it there.

00:22:23.120 | Then you say, OK, what did I learn from this?

00:22:25.440 | And then what am I going to do?

00:22:27.120 | The failure resume is one of the best things that professionals can do.

00:22:29.960 | And then just store it somewhere.

00:22:31.800 | And do you come back and reflect on it on some particular cadence or how do you use it?

00:22:36.000 | Oh, it depends. It depends.

00:22:37.280 | Because you can also like the way I did it, which is not exactly what Tina recommends.

00:22:41.240 | But the way that I did it is list basically three columns, list the failure, setbacks,

00:22:47.080 | screw up, whatever, list the lesson and then say next time I will blah, blah, blah.

00:22:54.080 | For me, what happened, though, it was interesting.

00:22:56.160 | And I think that the exercise itself is revealing, because for me, what I found is

00:23:00.240 | that, you know, some things that I did that didn't work out, that sort of flopped.

00:23:03.760 | But it was like the stock that you mentioned.

00:23:06.240 | It's like, yeah, I might do it again.

00:23:07.480 | It's like I was I was out of my control.

00:23:08.920 | It's actually not so much a failure as it is like life happens.

00:23:12.240 | And sometimes things work out and sometimes they don't.

00:23:14.120 | And that's OK. But on some of the things I found myself making when I looked at the list

00:23:20.000 | of lessons, I had two lessons that kept coming up over and over again.

00:23:23.840 | I was making the same two mistakes over and over and over again.

00:23:28.080 | And they were in some ways the infection at the heart of some of these problems.

00:23:33.400 | And I've done a good job subsequently of not making those mistakes again.

00:23:38.280 | But the only reason I was able to really surface those two mistakes was by doing a failure

00:23:42.480 | resume. And is that something that helps you in the future?

00:23:46.120 | Or I know you have a kind of a framework for regret optimization.

00:23:49.720 | And when you think about how to plan for a lot of people get worried about anticipating

00:23:54.440 | regret. Yeah. Is this a prereq to that framework?

00:23:58.200 | I don't think it's a it's a prerequisite.

00:23:59.760 | I don't think it's a post-requisite.

00:24:00.840 | I think it is it can live alongside.

00:24:03.880 | Again, I don't think that there is a single universal one size fits all prescription.

00:24:09.880 | What I want to try to do is get people to rethink regret, normalize it, recognize that

00:24:14.600 | everybody has it and try to learn from the regrets, learn what people regret, because

00:24:19.360 | I think it points a path to a good life and have some tools and hacks and things that

00:24:22.920 | they can do to deal with a particular regret or two in their own life as a starting point.

00:24:27.920 | So for some people, they care very deeply about their careers.

00:24:32.560 | And so I totally recommend it for that.

00:24:34.640 | Now we can talk about anticipated regret, which is a really, really interesting issue.

00:24:38.760 | You know, we can talk about why Jeff Bezos was right and wrong to some extent.

00:24:43.240 | We can also talk about, OK, so I'm into the hack thing now, Chris.

00:24:47.240 | All right. Here's a hack for all you kids out there stuck taking multiple choice tests,

00:24:52.360 | taking a multiple choice test. It's question 11.

00:24:56.320 | You think the answer is A. You move along in the test.

00:25:00.640 | I think, wait a second, maybe the answer to question 11 is C.

00:25:04.040 | So here's the question. Should you change your answer?

00:25:06.760 | Should you change your answer now?

00:25:09.000 | If this it would be great if like we had this is like a call in podcast where people would

00:25:13.360 | call in and tell me. But if you I've done a poll on this asking this question overwhelmingly,

00:25:18.360 | people say, oh, no, no, you got to go with your first instinct.

00:25:20.520 | And that's certainly what I was taught in the public schools of Columbus, Ohio, 100

00:25:24.880 | years ago. Always go with your first instinct.

00:25:26.680 | Don't change your answer. Your first instinct is going to be more accurate than changing

00:25:30.000 | the answer.

00:25:31.200 | We have research on this and the research says that's wrong.

00:25:36.040 | Change your fricking answer. People are more likely to switch from a wrong answer to a

00:25:41.320 | right answer than a right answer to the wrong answer.

00:25:44.600 | What hobbles them is anticipated regret gone awry because what happens is that they anticipate

00:25:52.420 | greater regret from the fear of switching from a right answer to a wrong answer than

00:25:59.280 | the fear of sticking with the wrong answer.

00:26:02.280 | And so they don't make the optimal decision.

00:26:04.920 | So a lot of times when we anticipate our regret, we actually end up making very risk averse

00:26:10.040 | choices.

00:26:11.040 | And so anticipated regret is not all good.

00:26:13.560 | It's mostly good, but there is a way to there's a way to reckon with.

00:26:17.600 | The other thing about anticipated regret is that, as you were suggesting earlier, Chris,

00:26:22.360 | we need to pick what we're going to focus on.

00:26:26.400 | And so if you say, oh, am I going to regret buying a blue car or a gray car?

00:26:32.200 | Am I going to regret wearing my black sweater or my blue sweater?

00:26:35.720 | Am I going to regret having macaroni and cheese for dinner or turkey Tetrazzini?

00:26:40.600 | I mean, you can go crazy on this, on our decision making, and I'm sure your listeners are familiar

00:26:45.880 | with this.

00:26:46.880 | I mean, you'll see it in any social psychology textbook or class.

00:26:51.280 | The difference between maximizers and satisficers, people who are maximizers try to make the

00:26:57.760 | best decision on every single thing they do.

00:27:02.600 | Satisficers say there's some things where good enough is good enough.

00:27:05.700 | And what the research tells us very clearly is maximizers are miserable.

00:27:09.020 | They're just miserable.

00:27:10.160 | And satisficers are happier.

00:27:11.560 | And the key really is to satisfice on most things, but maximize on the things that matter

00:27:16.680 | the most.

00:27:17.800 | And that is, again, regret points is that way.

00:27:19.920 | So if you're anticipating your regrets, you say, am I going to regret not doing the work?

00:27:23.760 | Yeah, you're going to regret not doing the work.

00:27:25.960 | Am I going to regret not taking the risk?

00:27:27.760 | Yep.

00:27:28.760 | You're going to regret that.

00:27:29.760 | Am I going to regret not doing the right thing?

00:27:32.000 | Yep.

00:27:33.000 | Am I going to regret not reaching out?

00:27:34.480 | Yep.

00:27:35.480 | Am I going to regret buying a blue car?

00:27:37.360 | Probably not in a few years.

00:27:38.880 | Am I going to regret taking a vacation to place A or place B?

00:27:43.040 | Probably not in a few years.

00:27:44.200 | So what you have to do is you have to maximize on what's important in your anticipated regrets.

00:27:49.600 | And satisfies on everything else.

00:27:52.800 | It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and the cracks start to

00:27:57.200 | emerge.

00:27:58.200 | Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many manual processes

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00:30:58.640 | What hacks might you have for someone who's in the middle of something they probably won't

00:31:02.580 | anticipate regret on but stuck, like, "Ah, you know, I got these two hotels, I can't

00:31:06.200 | pick between them.

00:31:07.200 | They both look great."

00:31:08.200 | Is it just, you know, it's easy to tell someone, "Just do this one," and maybe that's the question.

00:31:13.120 | Ask what your friend would tell them.

00:31:14.120 | You know, "What would you tell your friend?

00:31:15.360 | Just pick one."

00:31:16.360 | Okay, so multiple hacks on that one, Chris.

00:31:18.120 | Okay, so what would you tell your best friend to do, okay?

00:31:21.000 | Here's my favorite one.

00:31:22.000 | I don't know where I got this.

00:31:23.000 | Let's say you're trying to decide where to go.

00:31:24.420 | So I'm going to go to, you know, should I go to Croatia or should I go to Greece, all

00:31:27.960 | right?

00:31:28.960 | Let's say it's equally priced or whatever, all right?

00:31:30.200 | So we're sort of in the same more or less kind of sort of region, kind of.

00:31:34.720 | But you just can't decide, you're paralyzed by that, okay?

00:31:37.340 | First of all, you're going to be fine because you get to go to either Croatia or Greece.

00:31:41.320 | So you're going to be fine, all right?

00:31:43.000 | So you flip a coin, heads is Croatia, and tails is Greece, all right?

00:31:50.020 | You flip a coin.

00:31:51.540 | When the coin gets to its apex, you think, "How do I want this to turn out in that instant?"

00:31:58.400 | And that's your answer right there.

00:32:01.560 | I thought you were going to go for what it landed on, but I like it more now.

00:32:04.120 | No, no, no, no, no, no.

00:32:06.040 | Because the thing is, it's like you sort of know.

00:32:08.560 | You actually, you know, you're 50% in a peppercorn in one direction or another.

00:32:13.880 | And that moment when it hits its apex is when you say it sort of is revealed to you.

00:32:18.880 | But this is my point.

00:32:19.880 | It's like, you're going to be fine.

00:32:22.080 | You're going to go to Croatia and say, "Croatia is awesome."

00:32:24.480 | You're going to go to Greece and say, "Greece is awesome."

00:32:27.200 | The big thing there is like, gee, you know, should I take the risk of going to, you know,

00:32:31.800 | it's like, should I go to Croatia, you know, I don't speak Serbo-Croatian, and I'm not

00:32:37.400 | sure about some of the places to stay, and I've never been to that part of the world

00:32:42.480 | before, so maybe I should just play it safe and go to Hilton Head or something like that,

00:32:47.760 | you know.

00:32:48.760 | And there you will have a regret because that's about boldness.

00:32:52.680 | And we have a lot of, I mean, it's interesting for your show, Chris, we have a lot of regrets

00:32:55.760 | about people not traveling, not taking the chance to travel to cool places.

00:33:00.840 | Yeah.

00:33:01.840 | I've talked in the past about how easy it can be, right?

00:33:05.360 | One credit card can take a family on a vacation.

00:33:08.000 | My goal is to help people get rid of, you know, if there's a thing holding you back,

00:33:12.080 | it certainly can't be the cost, you know, at least if you have good credit, I guess.

00:33:16.500 | Free travel is available.

00:33:18.080 | Absolutely.

00:33:19.200 | But the barrier for people isn't when they admit it, when they confess in this online

00:33:22.920 | confessional called the World Regret Survey, they very rarely, they don't say, "Oh, I

00:33:26.880 | couldn't afford to go to Croatia."

00:33:29.240 | And so I decided it's not that.

00:33:31.240 | It was like, "Ugh."

00:33:32.240 | You know, it was a little bit risky because I hadn't traveled abroad and I wasn't sure

00:33:36.240 | where to stay.

00:33:37.520 | And I really regret not taking that risk.

00:33:40.520 | I've heard a lot of people worried about going places because they say, "Oh, you know, this

00:33:44.920 | place isn't safe.

00:33:45.920 | I don't know."

00:33:47.560 | And I think I've mentioned this in the past, but someone was like, "Ah, I read this thing

00:33:50.640 | in this book."

00:33:51.640 | And they said, "You got to bring the money belt and you got to hide all of your stuff.

00:33:54.400 | It just seems so dangerous."

00:33:55.760 | I was like, "Go read the guide for New York City.

00:33:58.200 | It says the same thing."

00:33:59.200 | And like, you know, I don't put my phone and my wallet in a money belt walking around New

00:34:04.880 | York City.

00:34:05.880 | And so, you know, everything's going to try to make you feel like it could be scary.

00:34:09.760 | But at the end of the day, I think you're going to be fine in most places.

00:34:12.920 | I mean, it's not, this is not a good thing, but I live in Washington, D.C. and our neighborhood

00:34:17.360 | listserv three days ago talked about a carjacking.

00:34:21.040 | That's my neighborhood here in Washington, D.C.

00:34:23.400 | So I'm telling you what people regret is not taking those kinds of trips.

00:34:28.240 | Yeah.

00:34:29.240 | Did we hit on everything when it comes to anticipating regret?

00:34:31.400 | So Jeff Bezos has this idea called the regret minimization principle.

00:34:35.720 | And so his view is like every decision you make, you should try to minimize your future

00:34:39.200 | regrets.

00:34:40.200 | And that comes from a famous story where, I don't even know if it's true, but he's told

00:34:44.200 | it, where he's working as a banker and he's thinking about starting Amazon and the guy,

00:34:49.160 | his boss says, "Ah, you're crazy.

00:34:50.280 | You don't want to do that.

00:34:51.800 | And you need to think about it."

00:34:52.840 | So he's taking a walk in Central Park and he's thinking about it and he says, "Well,

00:34:55.520 | what am I going to regret when I'm 80?

00:34:57.440 | Am I going to regret taking the chance or am I going to regret not taking the chance?"

00:35:00.680 | And he says, "I'll probably regret not taking the chance, so therefore I'm going to do that."

00:35:03.760 | Now, that's sensible.

00:35:04.880 | We can't minimize every single regret, we'll become paralyzed here.

00:35:08.800 | But when we look forward and again, ask these core questions, will I regret not doing the

00:35:14.600 | work?

00:35:15.600 | Will I regret not taking the chance?

00:35:17.200 | Will I regret not doing the right thing?

00:35:19.720 | Will I regret not reaching out?

00:35:21.040 | I think the answer, at least in the chorus of 17,000 people who've told me, is that,

00:35:26.400 | yeah, those are the things you're going to regret.

00:35:28.240 | So focus on making really good decisions there and just doing good enough for everything

00:35:33.120 | else.

00:35:34.120 | Is it fair to say those are the maximizer focus areas and the rest you can kind of satisfy

00:35:38.640 | us on?

00:35:39.640 | Totally.

00:35:40.640 | It's more than fair.

00:35:41.640 | It's essential to say that, that that's what you want to maximize on those things because

00:35:45.240 | those are the things that give our life meaning.

00:35:47.520 | And I mean that, we talked a little bit about being a different person.

00:35:50.820 | I am a different person having heard the voices of all these people for two years.

00:35:55.660 | They are all of them telling me what matters in their lives and they're all telling me

00:36:01.600 | the same things.

00:36:03.920 | And I look at what they're telling me and I'm like, yeah, what do I care about?

00:36:08.680 | I want stability for myself and for my family.

00:36:11.600 | Yeah.

00:36:12.600 | I feel like I haven't taken enough risks in my life and I need to be bolder.

00:36:16.280 | Yeah, I feel terrible when I've in my life when I've done the wrong thing and it's stuck

00:36:21.320 | with me and I hate that feeling and connection.

00:36:24.300 | It's like what, you know, ultimately what is life about except that do you have people

00:36:28.740 | in your life who care about you, whom you care about?

00:36:32.040 | It's like, yeah, there is an area, a realm of our lives where we absolutely want to maximize

00:36:38.580 | and that's it.

00:36:39.760 | But other stuff just satisfies, you'll be fine.

00:36:43.940 | So I'll share a minor regret.

00:36:45.540 | It's not one that's nagging me too much, but I've read a lot of your books and I feel like

00:36:50.020 | I would have loved to had the chance to start this podcast, I don't know, 15 years ago to

00:36:54.260 | be able to go through and have you on every couple of years and talk about them.

00:36:57.740 | But I can't go back in time.

00:37:01.060 | So I do want to see if I could pick your brain a little bit.

00:37:04.020 | Lay it on me.

00:37:05.020 | Yeah.

00:37:06.020 | Yeah.

00:37:07.020 | There's a lot more with regret.

00:37:08.020 | And to that, I'll say the book's out.

00:37:09.020 | Go pick it up and kind of dig into more of the research you've done.

00:37:11.580 | But there's two of them, Drive and When, that have some takeaways that I would love to chat

00:37:16.620 | about.

00:37:17.620 | And I'll start with Drive, which was the first book of yours I read.

00:37:20.660 | And for those who aren't familiar, the subtitle is "The Surprising Truth About What Motivates

00:37:24.780 | Us."

00:37:25.780 | And so I think, despite that I've read it, though it was years ago, I think the first

00:37:29.340 | place to start is kind of, maybe you could just share what is that surprising truth for

00:37:33.580 | those who aren't familiar.

00:37:34.580 | Yeah.

00:37:35.580 | I mean, it's that, again, this is a book based on science, based on the work of people like

00:37:39.420 | Edward Deasy and Richard Ryan and the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and many other people

00:37:43.700 | who have researched motivation over the years.

00:37:46.380 | And what it says is that human beings are complex.

00:37:50.000 | We have one motivation.

00:37:51.660 | We have a biological drive.

00:37:53.580 | We eat when we're hungry.

00:37:54.580 | We drink when we're thirsty.

00:37:55.660 | We have sex to satisfy those desires.

00:37:58.080 | We also respond very well to rewards and punishments in our environment in certain circumstances.

00:38:03.420 | But we also have another drive.

00:38:04.460 | We do things because we like them, because they're interesting, because they're meaningful,

00:38:08.380 | because it's the right thing to do.

00:38:09.980 | I don't think that, especially in organizations, we had a three-dimensional view of people.

00:38:14.580 | So that's one big idea.

00:38:15.860 | The other thing is that if you look at 60 years of research in motivational science,

00:38:20.620 | what it tells you is, I'll give you the one quick conceptual takeaway here of that book,

00:38:25.820 | which is this.

00:38:27.020 | There's a certain kind of motivator we use in organizations.

00:38:30.420 | Psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator.

00:38:34.140 | I like to call it an if-then reward, as in, if you do this, then you get that.

00:38:38.180 | If you do this, then you get that.

00:38:39.460 | I think it's a simpler way to understand it.

00:38:41.380 | Here's what science tells us about if—not about all rewards, but about if-then rewards.

00:38:45.940 | If-then rewards are great for simple tasks with short time horizons.

00:38:48.220 | They work really well.

00:38:49.380 | We love rewards.

00:38:50.440 | They get us to focus.

00:38:51.440 | So you want someone to stuff a lot of envelopes, pay them per envelope, give them a bonus for

00:38:55.580 | every hundred envelopes they stuff.

00:38:57.340 | For simple tasks where you know exactly what you need to do and you can see the finish

00:39:00.780 | line, if-then rewards are effective because human beings love rewards.

00:39:05.620 | But the same body of research tells us that if-then rewards are far less effective for

00:39:11.140 | more complex tasks with longer time horizons.

00:39:14.060 | Why?

00:39:15.060 | It's the same reason.

00:39:16.660 | We love rewards so much, they get us to focus very narrowly.

00:39:19.260 | That's a good frame of mind if the task is algorithmic.

00:39:22.580 | But if the task requires judgment, creativity, discernment, you don't want to have that

00:39:28.680 | narrow focus.

00:39:29.680 | You want to have an expansive focus.

00:39:30.780 | And the problem in organizations is that we're using if-then rewards for everything rather

00:39:34.260 | than for the small and increasingly smaller kind of work that people do.

00:39:40.720 | And there is a better motivational regime.

00:39:42.280 | You want to give people some autonomy.

00:39:44.340 | You want to help them make progress and get better at something that matters.

00:39:46.940 | You want to plug them into a purpose.

00:39:48.940 | Yeah.

00:39:49.940 | So you touched on that briefly.

00:39:50.940 | Then I remember that the kind of three elements are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

00:39:54.860 | Right.

00:39:55.860 | Are those things you can create for your own or are they things that organization has to

00:39:58.700 | give you?

00:39:59.700 | Well, I mean, that's a very profound question actually.

00:40:02.260 | I mean, seriously, I mean that because I think part of the whole field of behavioral science

00:40:09.020 | is basically the entire field of social psychology at the very least.

00:40:12.960 | But I think the entire field of behavioral science is when we look at people acting in

00:40:19.060 | whatever realm of life, how much of what they're doing is because of the person and how much

00:40:24.380 | is it of it because of the situation?

00:40:27.340 | You know, it's both, obviously.

00:40:29.180 | So certain people in certain situations will behave differently from other people in certain

00:40:33.700 | situations.

00:40:34.700 | So I think that for these kinds of principles, you want to work, you want to go to a place,

00:40:39.940 | an environment that has the nutrients in the soil for these things.

00:40:44.140 | It's not so much sort of giving you it.

00:40:45.900 | It's basically creating an atmosphere where those kinds of things can flourish.

00:40:50.460 | Let's take autonomy, for instance.

00:40:51.820 | We want to give people some sovereignty over what they do and how they do it and who they

00:40:56.880 | do it with.

00:40:57.880 | So there's some places that just where that soil is not rich enough, where no matter how

00:41:03.940 | autonomous you might be as an individual, you're not going to be able to drop roots

00:41:09.740 | in a soil where the whole enterprise is about thwarting autonomy and controlling people.

00:41:15.340 | So I guess this is a long-winded way, Chris, of my answering that question.

00:41:18.740 | It depends.

00:41:19.740 | - So let me rephrase it a different way.

00:41:22.180 | If you're finding yourself not very motivated to do something, is it safe to say that the

00:41:27.700 | first place to start to figure out how to maybe figure out whether you can be motivated,

00:41:32.860 | because maybe you just are in a place where it's not possible, is to kind of dig in and

00:41:36.100 | explore those three elements and try to figure out if any of them are missing and how to

00:41:39.980 | create them?

00:41:40.980 | - Yeah.

00:41:41.980 | I think that's a very, very good idea.

00:41:42.980 | So the question is, so ask yourself, do I have control?

00:41:46.240 | How much control do I have over what I do, how I do it, when I do it, who I do it with?

00:41:50.960 | If you come to that conclusion and say, you know what, I don't have much control over

00:41:54.220 | any of those things, that often is a very early warning sign of why you're demotivated.

00:41:59.740 | Now let me give you another one, because I can deliver a hack here, one of my favorite

00:42:03.180 | ones, a practice of my own.

00:42:05.580 | When we think about mastery, the second element, mastery is our desire to get better at stuff.

00:42:10.820 | And at some level, it's also about our desire to make progress.

00:42:14.820 | Teresa Mabule at Harvard Business School has some brilliant research showing that the single

00:42:18.700 | biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work.

00:42:24.460 | But here's the thing.

00:42:26.020 | We need information and feedback to know whether we're making progress.

00:42:30.060 | That's true for anything, right?

00:42:32.420 | So if you're driving somewhere, you need to know how fast you're going.

00:42:36.300 | You need to have the directions and the road signs and the GPS and whatnot.

00:42:41.440 | And for many people, especially in the workplace, they're in a world devoid of information about

00:42:48.060 | how they're doing.

00:42:49.460 | So now to the hack.

00:42:51.100 | One of my favorite things, and I have this on my laptop on which I'm talking to you,

00:42:56.280 | is what I call a progress ritual.

00:42:59.620 | At the end of every day, I stop and list what I got done that day.

00:43:06.320 | It takes me 60 seconds, but I don't leave my office without doing that, because it helps

00:43:13.380 | me see the progress that I'm making.

00:43:15.340 | And we know from the research that making progress is the single largest day-to-day

00:43:19.900 | motivator.

00:43:20.900 | So I have a giant list that just says basically a got done list, a progress list.

00:43:27.460 | I call it a got done list, but it's really a progress list.

00:43:29.700 | And so what I'll do is on the day that I'm talking to you, I will go to that list and

00:43:33.740 | I will type in everything that I got done today.

00:43:36.660 | And all of us know at some level how intuitively appealing this is, because many of us have

00:43:42.620 | done the thing where we have a to-do list, write it all out or type it all out.

00:43:47.580 | Then we do something that's not on the to-do list, and we write it on the to-do list and

00:43:52.180 | cross it out, because we know how satisfying that is.

00:43:56.000 | And so this progress ritual, 60-second punctuation mark at the end of every day, to me is one

00:44:00.820 | of the most important things that you can do to maintain your daily motivation.

00:44:05.780 | And just to get super tactical, where do you put that list?

00:44:08.220 | I keep it literally on a Word file.

00:44:10.260 | I never go back to it.

00:44:11.860 | That's the thing that's interesting about it.

00:44:14.260 | It's not for capture to review things.

00:44:18.780 | It's for the moment.

00:44:19.780 | It's for that punctuation mark, the ritual in that moment.

00:44:23.100 | And what I've found is that on some of the most frustrating days that I have, if I take

00:44:28.180 | that punctuation mark for 60 seconds, I realize I've actually made some progress that day.

00:44:34.140 | That buoys my motivation and it allows me to come back the next day.

00:44:38.280 | But I almost never look back on it.

00:44:41.180 | It's the ritual itself that is powerful.

00:44:43.620 | I love that.

00:44:44.620 | I've even applied something similar to my life, which is I need to make sure I do something

00:44:47.900 | exciting and memorable every month to just kind of keep up the progress of non-professional

00:44:53.020 | things.

00:44:54.020 | I think it's so easy to spend your days with making all the progress in life on work and

00:44:59.060 | forgetting that there's all of these other elements in life that you probably want to

00:45:02.780 | make progress on.

00:45:03.780 | But for some reason, for many of us, work is the one we focus on all the time.

00:45:08.020 | But it's a great point, Chris, because on my list, I put non-work things.

00:45:12.460 | I'll put, you know, ran four miles.

00:45:14.460 | I'll put had a phone call with my daughter.

00:45:17.100 | You know, I will put those kinds of things on there because that's a very important part

00:45:21.180 | of making progress.

00:45:22.180 | It's not only the work stuff.

00:45:24.140 | And how long is the list usually?

00:45:25.260 | Is it a couple of things or do you try to get pretty granular?

00:45:27.300 | It could be 10, 15, 20 things.

00:45:28.740 | It depends on the day, you know?

00:45:30.660 | Like there's not, sometimes a long list is less, there's less progress because I'm doing

00:45:36.420 | a bunch of different small things.

00:45:37.900 | Other days, if I say I wrote a thousand good words, that's a fricking awesome day, even

00:45:42.780 | if that's the only line item on there, you know?

00:45:45.140 | So it really, it really varies.

00:45:47.220 | But again, the key thing here, and I really want to emphasize, is that it is the act itself

00:45:52.380 | that is valuable.

00:45:54.260 | Simply doing it is important.

00:45:56.380 | You can always have it be an ephemeral list and get most of the value.

00:45:58.820 | If it was written in invisible ink or like it self-destructed after seven days, or if

00:46:03.980 | somebody, you know, if somehow Dropbox had some kind of calamity and it disappeared,

00:46:08.740 | I would be fine.

00:46:09.740 | Yeah.

00:46:10.740 | There's a lot of stuff I wouldn't be fine about if all the Dropbox files disappeared.

00:46:13.100 | No, that's what I'm saying, because I have, if Dropbox goes down, my life, it's over for

00:46:17.700 | me.

00:46:18.700 | I mean, I might as, I basically, if Dropbox goes down, I just go into a monastery for

00:46:23.540 | the rest of my life.

00:46:25.900 | Any other motivation hacks to get on?

00:46:28.100 | We can go to general stuff at the end, but just before we move on.

00:46:31.460 | I mean, one of the things that I like to do for motivating yourself and also for motivating

00:46:35.540 | other people is each week I try to have two fewer conversations about how and two more

00:46:42.100 | about why, particularly when I'm working with other people and have even a minor directive

00:46:48.140 | role.

00:46:49.140 | You know, it's like, here's how I want you to do that piece of the website.

00:46:51.660 | Here's how I want us to do that presentation.

00:46:54.380 | And just twice a week, you realize when you're working with people and you're in any kind

00:46:58.220 | of instructive mode, you have more how conversations than you realize.

00:47:02.340 | And what I have found is that just converting two of them a week to a why conversation is

00:47:06.980 | important.

00:47:07.980 | So catch yourself, say, okay, here's how, stop, here's why we're making that presentation.

00:47:13.620 | And I find it useful pointed inward as well, especially as a writer.

00:47:17.920 | So there are times when I will, if I'm struggling to write a chapter or struggling to write

00:47:24.300 | anything, I naturally want to say, okay, how can I finish this chapter?

00:47:28.220 | How can I get this section done?

00:47:30.900 | And then it's helpful for me to stop back and say, okay, why am I writing this section?

00:47:36.500 | Why am I writing this chapter?

00:47:38.460 | This is not just a couple of times, just both internally and externally, we're a little

00:47:43.300 | over-indexed on how conversations and we're a little under-indexed on why conversations.

00:47:47.380 | And there's a pile of evidence showing that why, that sense of purpose is, I think it's

00:47:52.420 | the most cost-effective performance enhancer we have.

00:47:55.820 | Wow.

00:47:56.820 | That's a great hack.

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00:49:10.740 | Do you all remember episode 122 when I spoke to chef David Chang about leveling up your

00:49:15.620 | cooking at home?

00:49:17.000 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen.

00:49:19.340 | But one of his top hacks was using the microwave more.

00:49:22.600 | I'll admit, I was a skeptic at first, but after getting a full set of microwave cookware

00:49:27.620 | from Anyday, I'm a total convert and I'm excited to partner with them for this episode.

00:49:32.460 | Anyday is glass cookware specifically designed to make delicious food from scratch in the

00:49:37.260 | microwave.

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00:49:43.260 | the process so much.

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00:50:17.000 | Again that's allthehacks.com/anyday for 15% off.

00:50:23.500 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

00:50:27.300 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:50:30.060 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to

00:50:35.100 | allthehacks.com/deals.

00:50:38.140 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

00:50:40.820 | Okay, I said I wanted to hit two books.

00:50:42.980 | So I'm going to move on to when, get some timing, try to make sure we have room for

00:50:46.780 | it.

00:50:47.780 | Which for anyone who hasn't read or seen, it's The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

00:50:51.340 | And I know we've all heard timing is everything, right?

00:50:53.820 | I bet that's a common phrase and a lot of us think timing's up to serendipity.

00:50:58.420 | But my takeaway was it's definitely not something that you should leave to serendipity or let

00:51:02.780 | coincidence run.

00:51:04.020 | Is that a fair takeaway?

00:51:05.580 | That is, once again, Chris, your concern about fairness is admirable, but it's an essential

00:51:10.540 | takeaway.

00:51:11.700 | The essentialness comes from the fact that timing is not an art, it's a science.

00:51:15.980 | And for that book written a few years ago, I went back and looked at, I mean, we looked

00:51:19.380 | at like, I don't know, 700, 800 studies across a whole array of different fields about timing.

00:51:26.100 | And what it shows is that our brain power changes over the course of a day.

00:51:30.100 | So we perform differently on different kinds of tasks based on the time of day.

00:51:33.940 | It shows that we have, I think, very seriously undervalued taking breaks, and even the way

00:51:39.140 | we think about breaks is distorted.

00:51:42.220 | But it also shows, even on episodic timing, that, you know, how do beginnings affect us,

00:51:46.860 | how do midpoints affect us, how do endings affect us, how do groups synchronize in time?

00:51:50.540 | So a lot of really, really interesting stuff that makes us more aware of the temporal aspects

00:51:57.740 | of our lives.

00:51:58.740 | And once we're more aware, we can be more intentional.

00:52:01.540 | We tend to be very intentional about what we do, who we do it with, but we're less intentional

00:52:06.860 | about when we do things.

00:52:08.180 | And there's a pile of evidence showing that when we do things, it has a material effect

00:52:13.020 | on our performance and our happiness.

00:52:14.460 | - I don't wanna go through the whole book 'cause that'd take a lot of time, and there's

00:52:17.820 | a book for people to read.

00:52:18.820 | But if we went one layer deeper there, like, when should people do things, or does it matter

00:52:24.500 | depending on the type of person?

00:52:25.940 | - Let's talk about that.

00:52:26.940 | Well, it does matter depending on the type of person.

00:52:28.700 | So let's just talk about daily timing, okay?

00:52:31.700 | And the day is a pretty fundamental unit of time because we can't do anything about it.

00:52:34.980 | You know, we're on a planet, the planet's turning, like, you know, we could say, like,

00:52:38.900 | a week is not a real thing.

00:52:40.500 | We could just declare a week as nine days.

00:52:42.400 | A week is a human invention.

00:52:44.200 | We could have say, a week is 13, I hereby declare, as president of the world, a week

00:52:48.140 | is 13 days.

00:52:49.380 | Fine.

00:52:50.380 | You just can't declare, oh, a day is only gonna be 14 hours.

00:52:54.060 | Nope, not gonna work.

00:52:55.620 | So daily timing is really important.

00:52:57.400 | Here's what we know.

00:52:58.400 | The most important thing is that our cognitive abilities change over the course of the day.

00:53:02.420 | They are not static.

00:53:03.420 | And this is the big mistake that we often make.

00:53:06.060 | We think that all times of the day are created equal.

00:53:08.260 | They're not.

00:53:09.260 | Our brain power changes over the course of the day.

00:53:11.900 | It changes in material ways, and the best time to do something depends on what you're

00:53:15.220 | doing.

00:53:16.220 | So this can't quite get to the level of, like, particular hack, but it can get to the level

00:53:22.140 | of design principles.

00:53:24.480 | And I think that a lot of the actual particular hacks in this realm are wrong.

00:53:28.940 | They're not scientific.

00:53:30.460 | So here's what we know.

00:53:31.900 | You have to begin with what's called a chronotype, and that is essentially your propensity.

00:53:35.860 | Do you wake up early and go to sleep early?

00:53:37.540 | Do you wake up late and go to sleep late?

00:53:39.100 | Are you somewhere in between?

00:53:41.600 | And what the distribution tells us is that about 15% of us are very strong morning people,

00:53:46.500 | 20% of us are very strong evening people, night owls, and about two-thirds of us are

00:53:50.420 | in the middle, but we tilt a little bit more toward the morning.

00:53:54.340 | An overly simplified way of thinking about this is you have night owls and everybody

00:53:58.860 | else.

00:53:59.860 | 20% of us are night owls.

00:54:00.860 | We naturally wake up late and go to sleep late.

00:54:03.060 | 80% of us are a little bit more the other way.

00:54:07.340 | And what it shows us is that the research tells us we move through the day in three

00:54:11.220 | stages.

00:54:12.220 | There's a peak.

00:54:13.220 | There's a trough.

00:54:14.220 | There's a recovery.

00:54:15.220 | The peak for most of us, 80% of us, is early in the day.

00:54:19.140 | That's when we're most vigilant.

00:54:20.980 | We're able to bat away distractions.

00:54:22.500 | So that's when we should be doing our heads-down analytic work.

00:54:25.920 | The trough, early to mid-afternoon.

00:54:28.180 | That is a terrible time of day.

00:54:30.300 | We joke about it, but the data are overwhelming.

00:54:33.460 | Like don't go to the hospital in the afternoon.

00:54:36.300 | There are more per capita car accidents between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. than at any time except

00:54:41.060 | for between 4 a.m. and 6 p.m.

00:54:43.060 | I mean, there's a downdraft in performance in that early to mid-afternoon that is staggering.

00:54:48.540 | So we all have that trough.

00:54:50.740 | We should be doing our administrative work in that period, the work that doesn't require

00:54:55.580 | a massive cognitive load.

00:54:57.300 | Now the final stage, peak, early, trough in the middle, recovery later in the day.

00:55:02.840 | In the recovery phase of the day, it's very interesting.

00:55:05.780 | Our vigilance, our mental vigilance is down, but our mood is typically up.

00:55:11.020 | And that can be a very potent combination for doing things like brainstorming or solving

00:55:15.700 | non-obvious problems or iterating ideas.

00:55:18.660 | And so for 80% of us, we should be doing our heads-down analytic work during the peak,

00:55:24.860 | which is most usually early in the day.

00:55:27.020 | We should be doing the least important stuff for those couple of hours in the middle of

00:55:31.300 | the day, and then we should be doing our insight, iterative, brainstorming kind of stuff later

00:55:36.420 | in the day.

00:55:37.420 | Now, the one caveat here is that if you're part of the 20% who are night owls, you're

00:55:42.140 | much better off doing your analytic work late in the day, because that's when you are most

00:55:46.660 | vigilant.

00:55:47.660 | And so one of the things that we see is that the traditional corporate structures are completely

00:55:53.200 | inhospitable to people who are night owls.

00:55:55.820 | They want people to be at like 7 a.m. staff or 8 a.m. staff meetings when these people

00:56:00.900 | are barely conscious at that time, but they're on fire at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.

00:56:07.180 | Yeah.

00:56:08.180 | Do you think the trend towards kind of remote work and multiple time zones kind of makes

00:56:12.020 | it better for these night owls?

00:56:13.540 | Yeah, I do.

00:56:14.900 | I think that remote work is a godsend to night owls.

00:56:17.700 | Not only remote, but also, again, autonomous work.

00:56:21.140 | Going back to Drive for a second.

00:56:22.860 | Autonomous work is great, because you want to give people some amount of control over

00:56:26.740 | what they do, how they do it, but also when they do it.

00:56:29.980 | And so, at some level, managers should be focused on results, not on whether Chris is

00:56:38.340 | at the Zoom meeting at 8.30 in the morning.

00:56:42.220 | If Chris is doing high-quality work and he's more comfortable doing it between 9 p.m. and

00:56:48.140 | 2 in the morning, I don't care if he's not on that 8.30 Zoom call, because he's delivering

00:56:53.100 | results.

00:56:54.100 | What I would do as a manager is default to autonomy to let people find the way of work

00:57:00.460 | that is best for them and that contributes to the larger whole.

00:57:03.860 | Now, I know you said 80% of people should be doing that analytical work in the morning.

00:57:08.380 | And if I remember right, one of the takeaways was that you hate breakfast.

00:57:12.100 | Is that...

00:57:13.100 | Oh, no, no.

00:57:14.100 | I don't hate breakfast.

00:57:15.100 | I don't hate breakfast.

00:57:16.100 | No, I don't hate breakfast at all.

00:57:17.100 | It's like, you know, I sort of see things a little bit like an economist, as like pricing.

00:57:20.500 | And so, I think that breakfast is over...

00:57:22.580 | The evidence that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is almost non-existent.

00:57:26.300 | I mean, breakfast isn't bad.

00:57:28.300 | I eat breakfast.

00:57:29.300 | It's not bad.

00:57:30.300 | The idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is really a legacy of breakfast

00:57:35.980 | cereal advertising from the early part of the 20th century, truly.

00:57:40.180 | But I actually think that in some ways, breakfast is overvalued and lunch is undervalued.

00:57:44.500 | Lunch as a punctuation mark in the middle of the day, lunch as a break in the middle

00:57:48.540 | of the day, I think is undervalued.

00:57:51.020 | And I think that breaks in general are undervalued.

00:57:54.300 | We have this...

00:57:55.300 | Even the many of us who have zero connection to the family connection to the Puritans have

00:58:00.780 | absorbed this very Puritanical view that the way to get work done, more work done, better

00:58:07.300 | work done, is to power through all the time.

00:58:10.420 | And also, this idea that powering through is morally virtuous.

00:58:13.980 | That's not what the evidence tells us about high performers.

00:58:16.560 | The evidence on high performers in music, in sports, in so many realms shows that they

00:58:20.580 | are systematic break takers.

00:58:22.780 | They treat their breaks very seriously and so should the rest of us.

00:58:27.340 | - Is there a kind of general principle or a hack for, here's how many breaks you should

00:58:31.220 | be taking or how often or what types?

00:58:33.820 | - So here's the thing, if we're gonna follow the science, we have design principles.

00:58:38.240 | This is why I go crazy where the advice is like, "Wake up at 4.30 in the morning and

00:58:42.420 | win the day."

00:58:43.620 | You know what?

00:58:44.620 | A lot of us don't do that.

00:58:45.620 | A lot of us, our brains and physiology are not built for that, I'm sorry.

00:58:50.980 | I don't think that there is a certain number of breaks to take in the day.

00:58:55.180 | However, there are design principles very clearly rooted in the science about the kinds

00:59:00.960 | of breaks that you should take.

00:59:02.460 | So one principle is that something is better than nothing.

00:59:06.220 | So even a short break is better than no break at all.

00:59:09.140 | Two, outside is better than inside.

00:59:11.740 | I think, again, one of the things we haven't fully reckoned with is the importance of being

00:59:16.860 | exposed to nature and being in nature, even in urban environments.

00:59:20.380 | There's a whole pile of research on this as well.

00:59:22.300 | So outside is better than inside.

00:59:24.900 | Moving is better than stationary.

00:59:26.140 | A break where you're in motion is better than a break where you're sedentary.

00:59:30.260 | Social is better than solo.

00:59:32.020 | So breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own, even for introverts.

00:59:37.180 | And finally, last and certainly not least, you gotta be fully detached.

00:59:41.300 | So a break where you're walking around with your face in your phone is not a break.

00:59:44.860 | You gotta be fully detached.

00:59:46.260 | So I've always thought that you wanna sort of a meta change the country and increase

00:59:52.900 | labor productivity by 0.6% in a year hack, which would be an incredible accomplishment,

00:59:59.960 | is that if everybody in the American workforce took a 15-minute walk every afternoon, took

01:00:06.620 | a 15-minute walk outside with someone they liked, talking about something other than

01:00:11.260 | work and leaving their phones behind.

01:00:13.140 | I think that would be how we are at a market increase in productivity and also mental and

01:00:17.860 | emotional well-being.

01:00:18.860 | - Well, I can't change the entire country.

01:00:21.500 | Talk about something, an easy hack, right?

01:00:23.540 | - Totally.

01:00:24.540 | - It costs nothing.

01:00:25.540 | - Totally.

01:00:26.540 | - And adds a lot of value.

01:00:27.540 | - And the hack would be, since most of the people who listen to a podcast about hacks

01:00:31.700 | are not gonna do it sort of impulsively, just put it in your schedule, set it for a week.

01:00:38.260 | You know, 2.15 every afternoon, I'm gonna take a 15-minute walk break with someone I

01:00:42.020 | like outside, talking about something other than work and not bringing my phone with me.

01:00:47.060 | And I actually think, Chris, that if in organizations, if managers, if the leaders of these organizations

01:00:51.420 | start doing this, then that actually could be a game changer.

01:00:54.260 | - I mean, could everyone just do it at the same time?

01:00:56.500 | Would it be like the bell, you know, rings, the production line stops?

01:01:00.300 | - Well, you're making a very interesting point there, right?

01:01:03.160 | Because if you think about these design elements, outside, in motion, detached, with people

01:01:09.540 | you like, that's basically recess.

01:01:11.420 | So, you know, I have long advocated that we should have, you know, maybe we do it en masse.

01:01:16.340 | We have a 2.30 every day, we have the Great American Walk Break.

01:01:19.900 | - Or recess, can we just call it recess and bring back the childhood spirits?

01:01:23.900 | - We can call it the American Adult Recess Initiative.

01:01:27.380 | - Ari, no, that doesn't quite work there, the Adult Recess Initiative, Ari, Ari, no,

01:01:32.740 | yeah.

01:01:33.740 | - We can work on it.

01:01:34.740 | - Yeah.

01:01:35.740 | - So this is all for the day, right?

01:01:37.140 | You talked a little bit about how to schedule this for the week.

01:01:39.500 | Did you learn anything about timing?

01:01:41.180 | You know, I know you said weeks, months, years, they're all kind of concepts that we made

01:01:44.540 | up, but is there something important to good timing over longer periods of time?

01:01:49.180 | - Well, yes and no.

01:01:50.980 | I mean, I think to me, the most important piece of research there is by Katie Milkman,

01:01:55.820 | Jason Rees, and Hengchen Dai, who did something where they discovered what they call the Fresh

01:01:59.420 | Start Effect, which is that certain days in the calendar operate as temporal landmarks.

01:02:07.380 | That is, they stick out in the calendar, they stick out in time the way that physical landmarks

01:02:12.740 | stick out in space, and they give us a way to orient ourselves, and there's certain kinds

01:02:16.340 | of temporal landmarks that are these, that they call these fresh start dates, that where

01:02:22.180 | we essentially relegate our past, our bad selves to the past, and open up kind of a

01:02:27.740 | fresh ledger on our new selves.

01:02:30.060 | So they found, for instance, that in college, okay, so they looked at a large university

01:02:36.780 | where students are swiping in and out of the gym.

01:02:39.740 | Winter students going to the gym, so it's a brilliant study because you can get data

01:02:43.420 | on students taking their ID, swiping into the gym and not.

01:02:47.180 | Students more likely to go to the gym on the first day of the semester, on Mondays,

01:02:52.340 | on the day after a holiday.

01:02:54.020 | And so there's certain days of the year where we are more likely to begin behavior change

01:02:59.060 | and therefore more likely to continue with that behavior change, and those are the fresh

01:03:03.860 | start dates.

01:03:04.860 | First of the month, beginning of a semester, first day of a quarter, the day after a federal

01:03:09.820 | holiday, that kind of stuff.

01:03:11.780 | - What about making big decisions?

01:03:13.580 | I'm gonna switch my career, quit my job, or something like that.

01:03:18.020 | Any science to timing those?

01:03:20.180 | - Those big decisions accumulate.

01:03:22.060 | And so it's not the kind of thing where people decide right away, in terms of a given day.

01:03:29.020 | There is some evidence showing that we are more likely to resort to a kind of default

01:03:36.180 | no later in the day than earlier in the day.

01:03:40.540 | If you're going back to a boldness regret and you want to ask out someone who you're

01:03:45.380 | interested in, if you wait until later in the day, there's some evidence that you're

01:03:49.980 | gonna just give up.

01:03:50.980 | Whereas if you do it early in the day, you might be able to summon a little bit more

01:03:56.020 | moxie.

01:03:57.020 | - Well, there's plenty more in the book and we didn't even hit on four or five other books.

01:04:01.860 | So lots to check out, lots of links in the show notes.

01:04:05.860 | Before we go, you mentioned you had some hacks that span outside of these books.

01:04:09.820 | There's some boxes in the corner you referenced.

01:04:12.180 | I'd love to hear some of the general things that you do or recommend to kind of optimize

01:04:17.460 | life and everything else.

01:04:19.100 | - Well, I mean, I do a lot of different things.

01:04:20.980 | So you're seeing in my office here, my garage behind my house in Washington, DC, I have

01:04:25.660 | these box.

01:04:26.660 | These are banker's boxes that you sometimes will see in a law firm in the 1980s.

01:04:31.460 | I love them.

01:04:32.580 | And what I do is that when I have projects that I'm not working on right now, the projects

01:04:37.520 | that I'm imagining for the future, some of which may go somewhere, some of which may

01:04:41.500 | not, what I will do is I will establish a physical box for each of those things.

01:04:46.460 | And then when I see something, a newspaper article, or I hear about a book, I heard about

01:04:50.940 | a book today, somebody mentioned a book that was related to something here.

01:04:54.540 | So when I get the book, I'm not going to read that book right now, but I'm going to take

01:04:57.900 | that book, plop it in that box, because that way is a way for me to collect all the material

01:05:04.260 | that I think might be relevant to that particular project, but that I'm not ready to deal with

01:05:09.340 | right now.

01:05:10.340 | So these boxes for me are an incredible organizing tool, even though it's very analog.

01:05:16.260 | I still use, I use Evernote sometimes, I still use Dropbox, but for me, the physical boxes

01:05:22.260 | are so useful.

01:05:23.940 | I see a magazine story or I see something online, I print it out, pop it in the box.

01:05:29.100 | I get a book, pop it in the box.

01:05:31.940 | And what happens then is, to my surprise, it's like a holiday morning.

01:05:36.940 | It's like, "Oh, well, I was thinking about working on that, make a documentary about

01:05:41.300 | X, Y, or Z."

01:05:42.300 | And then I look at the box, it's like, "Holy moly, who put all this stuff in here?

01:05:46.060 | This is great.

01:05:47.060 | I got all kinds of research material right here."

01:05:49.500 | If I didn't have a system for that, I would be lost.

01:05:53.340 | And so for me, having various kinds of systems to capture ideas is super useful.

01:05:58.180 | I also use something called a Spark file.

01:06:00.740 | I don't even know where this even came from, which again, it's just a running document

01:06:04.540 | that I store in Dropbox.

01:06:06.620 | And let's say that I have a question.

01:06:09.060 | Let's say that I have an idea, I think of a phrase, "Hey, that would be a good book

01:06:13.540 | title."

01:06:14.540 | I just pop it on that Spark file.

01:06:16.660 | And periodically, we go back to that maybe every three or four months to see what's on

01:06:21.260 | there.

01:06:22.260 | It's a long list of things.

01:06:23.260 | So it could be a question.

01:06:25.380 | Maybe I say, "Oh, wow, our left-hander is more likely to be libertarians."

01:06:29.220 | I've noticed a lot of left-handers are libertarians.

01:06:32.020 | Is that a thing?

01:06:33.020 | And I don't feel like researching that right now.

01:06:35.140 | It's kind of an intriguing question.

01:06:36.820 | It's not that urgent and essential in my life at this moment, but it's kind of intriguing.

01:06:41.900 | Put it on the Spark file, out of my head, into a system.

01:06:45.220 | Or even things like I'll think of a book title.

01:06:47.740 | And I don't even know what the book is, but put it on there.

01:06:51.380 | And I go through it.

01:06:52.380 | And a lot of this stuff, when I look at it later on, it's like, "Okay, this is not that

01:06:55.460 | interesting."

01:06:56.460 | But some stuff sticks.

01:06:57.460 | So again, having systems, getting stuff out of...

01:07:00.460 | I'm a big believer in the getting things done methodology of David Allen from 30, 25 years

01:07:05.540 | ago.

01:07:06.540 | I still am a devotee of that.

01:07:08.940 | But basically, devotee especially of the core principle, which is get it out of your head

01:07:14.060 | into a system.

01:07:15.340 | Don't rely on keeping things in your head.

01:07:17.500 | Use your head for the things that you really need your head for, which is problem-solving

01:07:22.340 | and creation, not for storage.

01:07:24.660 | Yeah.

01:07:25.660 | Two things I've used.

01:07:26.660 | One is a Chrome extension called OneTab.

01:07:28.900 | And sometimes I'll just be researching something.

01:07:30.660 | I have all these tabs open.

01:07:31.780 | I'm like, "I don't have time for this."

01:07:33.460 | Click one button, all the tabs disappear.

01:07:35.940 | You can always go back and find them grouped by whenever you click the button.

01:07:39.460 | And what I'll say is, it's kind of like a graveyard of things that actually didn't matter.

01:07:44.580 | I go back there.

01:07:45.580 | I'm like, "Gosh, why did I go down a rabbit hole here?

01:07:47.460 | I don't even care."

01:07:48.460 | Right.

01:07:49.460 | And there's this great "Delete this.

01:07:50.460 | I never need it."

01:07:51.460 | And then the other is whenever I find links that someone shared, posted on Twitter, and

01:07:54.660 | I'm like, "Oh, I want to read that."

01:07:55.660 | I just send it to...

01:07:56.660 | I think I send it to Reminders on my iPhone.

01:07:59.940 | And I'm like, "One day, I can go back and scroll through that."

01:08:02.500 | And oftentimes, I don't.

01:08:04.260 | But at least it gives me the satisfaction of I acknowledge the link without having to

01:08:08.580 | read it now.

01:08:09.580 | Interesting.

01:08:10.580 | I don't feel...

01:08:11.580 | Yeah.

01:08:12.580 | To go back full circle, I don't feel the regret of not clicking.

01:08:14.740 | I can eliminate the regret of not looking at it by saving it for later, but not actually

01:08:19.180 | looking at it.

01:08:20.180 | Out of your head into a system.

01:08:21.500 | I use something similar to that.

01:08:23.100 | I've been using it for a long time.

01:08:25.580 | And I think what happens sometimes...

01:08:27.140 | It's called Instapaper, which is simply a...

01:08:29.900 | There are extensions or buttons on, I think, every browser now where you see an article

01:08:34.700 | online.

01:08:35.860 | Let's say it's a long-form article.

01:08:37.260 | It's 3,000 words.

01:08:38.260 | I'm not going to sit there in the midst of a maw of a day and read a 3,000-word article

01:08:42.540 | on my computer.

01:08:43.740 | But if I hit the Instapaper button, it saves it.

01:08:46.420 | And then I go on my iPad and read the stories like that.

01:08:49.140 | I love Instapaper.

01:08:50.140 | That's great.

01:08:51.140 | Yeah.

01:08:52.140 | There's another app called Pocket, which I think is kind of the same thing.

01:08:54.020 | Same thing.

01:08:55.020 | It's...

01:08:56.020 | Pocket is...

01:08:57.020 | The only...

01:08:58.020 | It's like I use Instapaper because I started using Instapaper.

01:08:59.900 | If I started using Pocket, I'd be using Pocket.

01:09:01.900 | But it's the same basic principle.

01:09:03.620 | Yeah.

01:09:04.620 | Any other final hacks?

01:09:05.660 | I got so many, man.

01:09:06.900 | So one of the smartest things I've done is I keep a notebook next to my bed, and it's

01:09:15.460 | called a line-a-day notebook.

01:09:17.900 | And every day, I write down one line that I've heard, a sentence, a phrase, a question,

01:09:23.300 | a quotation that I've heard.

01:09:25.940 | And I usually capture them on my phone.

01:09:28.140 | I take a photograph of it.

01:09:29.580 | And then I just render it, but actually with a pen, in this book.

01:09:33.440 | And so I've done this every...

01:09:35.120 | This book now, I'm on year four.

01:09:38.500 | So every day for three-plus years.

01:09:41.940 | So there's way over 1,000 little entries in there.

01:09:44.340 | Wow.

01:09:45.340 | And what do you do with them?

01:09:46.340 | I go back and look at them.

01:09:47.700 | Sometimes I write down jokes.

01:09:49.180 | And so it allows me to remember jokes that I wouldn't have remembered before.

01:09:53.860 | Other times, I'll write down a sentence that I read that's really intriguing, that just

01:09:56.780 | helps me think through.

01:09:57.780 | It's like, "Oh, why does that sentence work so well?"

01:10:00.000 | But again, I have to say the habit of it on that one is also really important.

01:10:04.820 | Because what it does, more than anything else, it makes me pay attention in the day, makes

01:10:08.740 | me attuned to hearing and seeing great things.

01:10:11.580 | Because you know you're going to need to write one down.

01:10:12.900 | Because I know I'm going to write something down, yeah.

01:10:15.220 | I like that a lot.

01:10:16.220 | I feel like it's very easy to get distracted throughout the day and not pay attention.

01:10:20.140 | But if you have a goal at the end of the day of, "I'm going to write one thing down," you've

01:10:23.340 | got to find that thing.

01:10:24.340 | Right.

01:10:25.340 | And when you find that thing, you just take a picture of it or I sometimes will send myself

01:10:27.980 | an email.

01:10:28.980 | Here's today's.

01:10:29.980 | So the story in the Washington Post that I read, it happened to be about the NFL.

01:10:32.500 | There's a very good sports writer for the Washington Post named Adam Kilgore.

01:10:36.720 | And he was writing about the NFL.

01:10:39.580 | And he had a couple of lines about football and the NFL that I just thought was just brilliant

01:10:44.460 | writing.

01:10:45.460 | And I literally took a photograph of it.

01:10:48.700 | And tonight, I'll transcribe that into my little notebook.

01:10:51.540 | The book, we talked about "Regret" a lot at the beginning.

01:10:54.000 | The book's out today.

01:10:55.820 | Other than buying the book and reading it and enjoying it, where can people follow you

01:11:00.060 | online?

01:11:01.060 | Well, you can go to my website, which is danpink.com.

01:11:04.660 | And there's all kinds of groovy stuff there.

01:11:07.380 | And you can find the books, as they say, wherever books are sold.

01:11:12.500 | There's a lot of stuff.

01:11:13.500 | A lot of research reports.

01:11:14.500 | We'll link up to all of them in the show notes, as well as the book.

01:11:17.020 | Cool.

01:11:18.020 | Thanks for doing that.

01:11:19.020 | I appreciate it.

01:11:20.020 | I just hope that Manu Ginobili listens to this.

01:11:21.420 | Yeah.

01:11:22.420 | I will.

01:11:23.420 | He was the one that sent me a list.

01:11:24.420 | He's like, "Hey, if you could have a couple of these people on," and he had your name

01:11:27.060 | on there.

01:11:28.060 | I was like, "Okay.

01:11:29.060 | I got to reach out.

01:11:30.060 | I should have reached out."

01:11:31.060 | Oh, really?

01:11:32.060 | Really?

01:11:33.060 | Because actually, I got some street cred with my son a few years ago when I showed him

01:11:35.380 | that Manu Ginobili and Pau Gasol followed me on Twitter.

01:11:39.980 | Wow.

01:11:40.980 | So that's pretty good, I have to say.

01:11:43.080 | That's how the Manu thing started for me, was I noticed he followed me and I sent him

01:11:46.040 | a note.

01:11:47.040 | So he's quite responsive.

01:11:48.040 | Nice.

01:11:49.040 | You should reach out.

01:11:50.040 | Yeah, I should.

01:11:51.040 | Well, cool.

01:11:52.040 | Thank you so much for being here.

01:11:53.040 | Chris, what a pleasure being with you.

01:11:54.040 | I really enjoyed it.

01:11:55.040 | I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

01:11:58.000 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:11:59.680 | If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

01:12:04.480 | I would really appreciate it, especially Spotify, since they just added podcast ratings.

01:12:09.720 | And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi,

01:12:14.120 | I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

01:12:18.600 | That's it for this week.

01:12:19.600 | I'll see you next week.

01:12:29.520 | I want to tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things money.

01:12:34.080 | That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early retirement.

01:12:37.900 | It's called the personal finance podcast, and it's much more about building generational

01:12:42.240 | wealth and spending your money on the things you value than it is about clipping coupons

01:12:46.560 | to save a dollar.

01:12:48.120 | It's hosted by my good friend, Andrew, who truly believes that everyone in this world

01:12:52.060 | can build wealth and his passion and excitement are what make this show so entertaining.

01:12:57.240 | I know because I was a guest on the show in December, 2022.

01:13:01.240 | But recently I listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow

01:13:05.800 | your mind, and it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating

01:13:11.360 | in their employer's retirement plan.

01:13:13.520 | And that's just one of the many fascinating stats he shared.

01:13:17.160 | The personal finance podcast has something for everyone.

01:13:19.920 | It's filled with so many tips and tactics and hacks to help you get better with your

01:13:23.560 | money and grow your wealth.

01:13:25.420 | So I highly recommend you check it out.

01:13:27.560 | Just search for the personal finance podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you

01:13:32.000 | listen to podcasts and enjoy.