If Scottie P. ever does muster second thoughts about the words encircling his neck, he wouldn’t be alone. About one of every five people who get tattoos (presumably including people whose tattoos read “No Regrets”) eventually regret their decision, which is why the tattoo removal business is a $100 million-a-year industry in the United States alone.[6] Chase, though, doesn’t regret her tattoo, perhaps because most people will never see it. On that cold Calgary Sunday in 2016, she chose to locate her tattoo on her rear end.
THE POSITIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
In the early 1950s, a University of Chicago economics graduate student named Harry Markowitz conceived an idea so elementary it now seems obvious—yet so revolutionary it earned him a Nobel Prize.[7] Markowitz’s big idea came to be known as “modern portfolio theory.” What he figured out—if I may oversimplify in the service of getting on with the story—were the mathematics that underlie the adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
Before Markowitz came along, many investors believed the route to riches was to invest in one or two high-potential stocks. After all, a few stocks often produced humongous returns. Choose those winners and you’d make a fortune. Under this strategy, you’d end up picking lots of duds. But, hey, that’s just the way investing worked. It’s risky. Markowitz showed that instead of following this recipe, investors could reduce their risk, and still produce healthy gains, by diversifying. Invest in a basket of stocks, not just one. Broaden the bets across a variety of industries. Investors wouldn’t win big on every pick, but over time they’d make a lot more money with a lot less risk. If you happen to have any savings parked in index funds or ETFs, modern portfolio theory is the reason why.
Powerful as Markowitz’s insight is, we often neglect applying its logic to other parts of our lives. For example, human beings also hold what amounts to a portfolio of emotions. Some of these emotions are positive—for example, love, pride, and awe. Others are negative—sadness, frustration, or shame. In general, we tend to overvalue one category and undervalue the other. Heeding others’ advice and our own intuitions, we stuff our portfolios with positive emotions and sell off the negative ones. But this approach to emotions—to jettison the negative and pile on the positive—is as misguided as the approach to investing that prevailed before modern portfolio theory.
Positive emotions are essential, of course. We’d be lost without them. It’s important to look on the bright side, to think cheerful thoughts, to detect light in darkness. Optimism is associated with better physical health. Emotions like joy, gratitude, and hope significantly boost our well-being.[8] We need plenty of positive emotions in our portfolio. They should outnumber the negative ones.[9] Yet overweighting our emotional investments with too much positivity brings its own dangers. The imbalance can inhibit learning, stymie growth, and limit our potential.
That’s because negative emotions are essential, too. They help us survive. Fear propels us out of a burning building and makes us step gingerly to avoid a snake. Disgust shields us from poisons and makes us recoil from bad behavior. Anger alerts us to threats and provocations from others and sharpens our sense of right and wrong. Too much negative emotion, of course, is debilitating. But too little is also destructive.[10] A partner takes advantage of us again and again; that snake sinks its teeth into our leg. You and I and our upright, bipedal, large-brained sisters and brothers wouldn’t be here today if we lacked the capacity, occasionally but systematically, to feel bad.
And when we assemble the full lineup of negative emotions—sadness standing next to contempt perched beside guilt—one emerges as both the most pervasive and most powerful.
Regret.
The purpose of this book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion—and to show you how to use its many strengths to make better decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to your life.
I begin with the reclamation project. In Part One—which comprises this chapter and the next three—I show why regret matters. Much of this analysis taps an extensive body of scholarship that has accumulated over the last several decades. Economists and game theorists, working in the shadow of the Cold War, began studying the topic in the 1950s, when obliterating the planet with a nuclear bomb was the ultimate regrettable act. Before long, a few renegade psychologists, including the now legendary Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, realized that regret offered a window into not only high-stakes negotiations but the human mind itself. By the 1990s, the field widened further, and a broad group of social, developmental, and cognitive psychologists began investigating the inner workings of regret.
These seventy years of research distill to two simple yet urgent conclusions:
Regret makes us human.
Regret makes us better.
After I’ve reclaimed regret, I’ll move to divulging its contents. Part Two, “Regret Revealed,” rests in large part on two extensive research projects of my own. In 2020, working with a small team of survey research experts, we designed and carried out the largest quantitative analysis of American attitudes about regret ever conducted: the American Regret Project. We surveyed the opinion and categorized the regrets of 4,489 people who comprised a representative sample of the U.S. population.[*] At the same time, we launched a website, the World Regret Survey (www.worldregretsurvey.com), that has collected more than sixteen thousand regrets from people in 105 countries. I’ve analyzed the text of those responses and conducted follow-up interviews with more than 100 people who submitted regrets. (On the pages between chapters, as well as in the text itself, you’ll hear the voices of participants in the World Regret Survey and peek into every corner of the human experience.)