The Power of Regret, Motivation and Good Timing with Dan Pink
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If you want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at allthehacks.com slash oracle. That's allthehacks.com slash oracle. Allthehacks.com slash oracle. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited you're here. Now,

Now, today is an exciting episode because I'm joined by the one and only Dan Pink, who is the author of several provocative bestselling books about business, work, creativity, and behavior, including the latest, The Power of Regret, How Looking Back Moves Us Forward, which comes out the same day this episode will. His previous books, When, Drive, To Sell is Human, and A Whole New Mind were all New York Times bestsellers, collectively spending more than five years on the bestseller list.

They've won countless awards, sold millions of copies, and have been translated into 42 languages around the world. And if that's not enough, his TED Talk on the science of motivation is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks of all time. Today, we'll talk about how regret works, how it can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work, and bring greater meaning to our lives. We'll also dig into some of the best hacks he's learned about timing, motivation, and more.

Oh, and I saved the best for last. Dan is actually a fellow All the Hacks listener, which makes this one even more special. So I'm excited. Let's jump in. Dan, I've enjoyed your books for years. Congrats on this one. Thank you.

Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I have a whole bunch of questions about how to maximize my frequent flyer points. So if we can begin with that. No, no, I'm a longtime listener, first time caller. I do love the I do love the travel stuff. I also happen to be a Manu Ginobili fan, and I couldn't believe you got him a couple of years or maybe a year ago. Yeah, that episode was fun.

He doesn't do a lot of podcasts. In fact, the one I had been able to find to try to get a sense of his style was all in Spanish. So I had to find it on YouTube with subtitles to try to get a feel for his flow. Yeah, I remember when he won one Manu Ginobili thing. So I'm a big basketball fan. My son is a big basketball fan. And when Manu was playing, my son would always say because Manu's like lost a lot of his hair. He looks as old as you, Dad. He looks as old as you. Yeah.

Yeah, it hurts. My daughter's just learning to speak and I'm like, I'm faithfully worried about all these comments that I'm going to get. Yeah, it's over. You don't want to, don't teach your kids to speak. It'll just cause you trouble down the road. So before we jump in, I got to ask, do you have a favorite episode from the show? Well, I like the Manu. I like the Manu. But I have to say, for me, it's the cumulative thing. It's like, I've learned so much about

especially about travel and what to ask for and contacting general managers and reaching out in advance and all that kind of stuff. It's been super useful to me because travel is such a pain in the ass sometimes that if you can do small things to mitigate that, it really enriches the experience. And the other thing that it does, I think, in some level is it personalizes it a little bit. It brings a little bit more humanity to it. So it's not only the art of the deal, which I like,

getting the good deals, maximizing the points, but it's also some of the people you end up encountering in trying to maximize your travels. So thanks for doing that. I mean, I love it, so expect more. But I read most of this book. I've only had it a couple days, but I'd like to just kick off for everyone listening. I think regret is something we throw around a lot and people say, oh, no regrets. And how would you actually explain to people listening what regret is? Great question. So regret is an emotion.

And it's a negative emotion. It feels terrible. So it's that stomach-churning sensation we have when we look back and say, ugh, if only I hadn't done that. If only I had done that. If only I had made a different choice. And so it's actually an incredible capacity of our minds to be able to travel back and forth in time. But ultimately, it's an emotion that makes us feel bad. That's why we try to avoid it. But...

It's also an emotion that is, to my mind, the most instructive emotion that we have. You said instructive. I saw somewhere online you talk about the surprising path to the good life when talking about regret. So I got to ask, why does regret matter so much? Why can it be so powerful? Okay, well, I mean, so that's a whole kettle of fish there. But let me take it in two parts. First of all, regret matters so much because...

Everybody has regrets. I mean, truly, every person, every essentially every functioning person has regrets. The only people without regrets are five year olds who because their brains haven't developed because it takes some cognitive firepower to even experience a process regret.

People with brain lesions, people with neurodegenerative diseases often can't experience regret and sociopaths. The rest of us have regrets because it's part of the human condition. It's an essential part of our cognitive machinery. And the reason it's part of our cognitive machinery is because.

It's helpful if we deal with it right. That regret instructs. Regret clarifies. Now, we have to approach it right. We can blithely say, oh, I don't have any regrets. I never look backward. That's stupid. That's going to lead to delusion. You can also say, oh, my God, everything is I regret everything. I'm going to spin around and wallow in my regrets.

That's an even worse idea. What we have to do is recognize that regret is teaching us. It's signaling to us. And if we do that, I mean, I'm telling you, it is the most transformative emotion we have if we process it right. I know I always regretted every financial investment decision I've made when it turned out that it was the poor decision, which is easy to do in hindsight. And a really good friend of mine once always asked me, I was like, oh man, I sold this thing. I should have held onto it. And he goes, well, with all the information you had when you did it,

was it the right decision? Like if you had that information again today and I was like, well, I guess I would do it that way. And that kind of helped, but I'm sure we'll get into a few more tactics. Oh, sure, sure, sure. There are all kinds of tactics. And the other thing is, as you mentioned about the good life, is that, you know, I went out for this book and I collected 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. I mean, I have this massive database of regrets because I was curious about what do people regret?

And I felt like in the existing research, there were some holes in that. Or even in my own existence, I did another research project where I tried to figure that out and I hit a wall. But I also collected these 16,000 regrets. We're up to over 17,000 now from 105 countries. It's nuts. And what I found is that over and over again, people around the world regret the same four things. And that's what gives us a hint about the good life.

that these four core regrets operate as kind of a photographic negative of the good life. That is, if we understand what people regret the most, we actually understand what they value the most. And so in this weird way, you asked at the top, Chris, what is this thing regret? And I said, it's an emotion that makes us feel bad.

But weirdly, this emotion that makes us feel bad contains the clues to what we ultimately want out of life. And what were the four core regrets? Well, so we've got, let me not answer that question directly and give you a lengthy contextual buildup. So one of the things that you see in the existing research on regret, because I mean, developmental psychologists, other people in behavioral science have studied regret for many, many years. Economists have studied regret. Game theorists have studied regret. One

One of the things that you see is that when they try to figure out what people regret, they sort those by the domain of life. Let me give you a concrete example. This will be easier. So I have people who say my big regret is that I was in college and I didn't study abroad. OK, not the most calamitous regret, but hundreds of those, hundreds of those. I actually think you could start a travel agency.

serving people who didn't study abroad in college and regret it. I'm dead serious about that. There's a business in there somewhere. Okay, so that's an education regret. Then I have people who say, and this is an amazing one, and I have literally hundreds around the world that say, blankety blank years ago, I met a man or a woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, but I was too chicken to do that, and I've always regretted it. That's a romance regret. Then we have, again, hundreds who say, oh,

I stayed in this crappy job. And if only I'd started a business, I always wanted to start a business, but I never got around to it. I never had the guts to do it. OK, that's a career regret. But to my mind, those are all the same regret.

Deep down, those are all the same regret. That's a regret that says, if only I'd taken the chance. And that's one of the core regrets is the regret of boldness. If only I'd taken the chance. There's a little bit of a head fake going on in that we're looking at the domains of life, career and education and health and whatnot. And when what was going on was something actually much more important underneath. So one regret is boldness regrets. If only I'd taken the chance. One big regret that people have are what I call foundation regrets, which is if only I'd done the work.

And these are people who regret smoking, who regret not exercising, taking care of their body, who regret not saving money, not working hard enough in school. Small decisions early that accumulate to big consequences later on. There are moral regrets. And those are interesting because a lot of these regrets begin at a juncture. You're at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. People do the wrong thing. And a lot of them regret it. So I got all kinds of people who regret bullying kids in school, marital infidelity, being

Huge things like that. And then finally, our connection regrets. And those are regrets about relationships that were intact or should have been intact.

They come apart. Someone wants to reach out, but they say, oh, it's going to be really awkward to reach out and the other side's not going to care. So they drift even further apart. And so connection regrets are if only I'd reached out. And to me, what these tell us, 105 countries over and over again, what do we regret? We regret not doing the work. We regret not taking a chance. We regret not doing the right thing. We regret not reaching out. And that tells us what we want. What do we want? We want some stability in our life.

We want a chance to do something, to lead an interesting life and grow and have a psychologically rich existence. Most of us, I'm convinced, want to do the right thing. And we feel crappy when we don't. And what do we want? We want connection and love with other people. That's it. And so my trying to understand this emotion of regret...

took me to this unexpected place where they said, wait a second, these people who are expressing their regrets are telling me what they want out of life. And I think it's very clear now. Do they all apply to everyone or is there some kind of formula to know who they're most important to by age or by anything else? Super interesting question. So I also did a quantitative piece of research on a U.S. population where we did a pretty good public opinion poll of 4,489 Americans and

to try to get at some demographic differences. So we can do crosstabs to say, okay, do men have different regrets than women do? Do African-Americans have different regrets from white people and so forth? And what we found is not that many demographic differences. The big demographic difference comes out on age. When people are young, let's say in their 20s, they have about the same number of regrets of action,

and inaction. Same number of regrets about what they did and what they didn't do. But as people age, inaction regrets take over. People have many more inaction regrets as they age. Can you give some examples of inaction regrets that people older might have?

If only I'd traveled more. If only I had reached out to my brother before he passed away. If only I had started a business. If only I had spoken up at work. Those kinds of things. So fewer regrets about, oh, I did this. And fewer regrets, I hurt somebody and I regret doing that. More about, I didn't do the thing that I always wanted to do. I wasn't true to myself. I didn't lead a life of meaning and significance.

Yeah, it's funny. We, I spoke with Ben Nimpton. I don't know if you know him, who, you know, was in this show called The Buried Life, and went on to write a bucket list journal. And the whole thing was kind of inspired by the first of the five regrets of the dying, which is, you know, I didn't leave a life true to myself. And so we talked a bit about that. But it was more in the spirit of kind of all the things you can put on your list to do. So

To kind of juxtapose that, I'm going to ask you, now that you know all this, what advice do you have for people to use these regrets to kind of live the good life, if you will? I'll tell you one that changed me, Chris, and is on the connection regrets. I don't want to get woo-woo on you here. You can.

You know, at some level, when you work on a project, any kind of project, you know, if you're starting a business or doing a pot, like you're a different person when you started this podcast and you then you are on this episode. Right. We change over time. And so I'm a different person than when I started this book a few years ago. Now that I spent all this time immersed in the research on regret and talking to hundreds of people about regret and reading thousands of regrets, I'm a different person.

And the person I am today has a belief and essentially an unshakable belief now on this one dimension, which is this. If you if one, if I, you, anybody is at a juncture in your life and you're wondering, should I reach out?

The fact that you made it to that juncture answers the question. Always reach out. If there is any single lesson for me in this research, it is always reach out. I got all these people around the world who say, oh, I wanted to reach out to my friend or to this person who I used to know, but I thought it was going to be awkward, so I didn't do it, and they wouldn't care anyway. And they're always wrong on that front. It's much less awkward than we think, and it's almost always well-received. So,

One, I don't even want to call it a hack as much as it is a habit of the heart, which is always reach out.

If you're thinking about it, reach out. Another thing, always go to funerals. I mean it. I have that regret myself. A friend of mine, not a close friend, passed away several years ago. I worked with him and he was a little older than I was. And he had a funeral. And it's embarrassing to me. The funeral was literally the service was literally walking distance from my house.

And on that particular day, I intended to go, but I got swept up in some deadline or something like that. And I didn't go. This was maybe 15 years ago and I still regret it. So always go to the funeral. Always reach out. I think you have to think very hard if you're at a juncture where you can do the right thing or do the wrong thing. I think you got to think very hard about whether you want to do the wrong thing, because I got people for whom doing the wrong thing is lingering in their souls for decades, for decades.

Okay. So that's kind of the moral and the connection. Yeah. What about knowing how much you might regret not being bold? Is there something you can do to kind of fix the or prepare yourself for, you know, avoiding the regret of boldness? So one thing that you can do, and we can talk more about how to take existing regrets and transform them because there's interesting practices to do. So I'll give you in some ways the best decision making hack that I know.

of any kind, but it applies very forcefully to regret. And it's this, what would you tell your best friend to do? Let's say you have a regret about boldness and you're at another juncture. You didn't leave a job to start a business. Now you're in a new job. You don't like that job. You want to start a business. Your friend comes to you with that regret. What would you tell him or her to do? And when you apply that

I'll see your hack and call it a heuristic, you know, a mental shortcut. Right. When you apply that heuristic, what would you tell your best friend to do? People always know what to do. So that's one thing that you can do to act on a boldness regret. Now, there's a more systematic way to deal with and process your regrets that I think is useful to people.

Yeah. So that's where I kind of wanted to go is some of these, I can plan for these future regrets and what I might do if I'm thinking, oh, should I reach out? The answer is always yes. But what about all the regrets we already have?

I think there are three steps here in doing this. So the first step is to reframe how you think about the regret and how you think about yourself. Now, once again, a lot of the way we deal with emotions is a form of triangulation. All right. So in the same way that we don't want to ignore our regrets or wallow in them, we want to confront them. When we look at our regrets in ourselves, some of us are tempted to say, oh, I'm awesome anyway, boost our self-esteem. Other people are tempted to lacerate themselves with self-criticism.

The better option is something called self-compassion, which is the brainchild of Kristin Neff, a psychologist at the University of Texas.

And what she has found, it's very simple and straightforward. So when you have a regret, let's say that I have a regret about somebody bullied a kid in school and is really bothered by that even 20 years later. What you can do is you can you sort of show yourself some. So if a friend came to you with this regret, would you show them kindness or contempt? You probably would show them some kindness. So show yourself that kind of kindness. Do you think that this regret is part of the human condition or do you think you're the only one who's ever suffered from it?

believe me, you're not the only one. All right. So let yourself off the hook a little bit and treating ourselves with self-compassion rather than self-criticism or self-esteem actually is the best way to avoid complacency. Self-compassion. Number two, disclose it, man. I mean, the research on disclosure is amazing.

That when we disclose our regrets, we should be talking about these things. We shouldn't be bottling them up. When we disclose our regrets, we unburden them. We lift the burden. The other thing that we do, which is when we take these blobby emotion that we talked about at the top of the show, right? The regret is an emotion. It feels bad, but it's kind of amorphous. It's kind of it's a kind of abstract. When we take that abstraction and convert it into words by talking about it, even writing about it.

You take away some of the steam. It makes it less fearsome. So the act of converting it to language makes the regret less fearsome. The other thing about self-disclosure is that we think that if we disclose our vulnerabilities, people will like us less. Nope. There's 30 years of research that says they like us more.

Finally, extract a lesson from it. So the way that you extract a lesson from it is you do some self-distancing. You say, if I'm looking back on this in 10 years, what do I want to have done? If someone else were in my position, what would they do? You can even do self-distancing through language. So you, Chris, could say, instead of saying to yourself, what should I do? Say, what should Chris do? Even changing to the third person. And so...

You reframe it by treating yourself with self-compassion. You disclose it and make it less fearsome by converting it into words and you extract a lesson from it. And so if I regret bullying somebody, I say, you know what? I'm going to treat myself with some compassion that doesn't fully define me. Two, I'm going to tell people about it because that's going to unburden it and I'm going to make sense of it by talking about it. And three, I'm going to extract a lesson from it. And the lesson is that

I'm not a kid anymore, but in my office, I'm certainly going to treat people with kindness. If I see someone in my office bullying somebody in a way that adults bully, I'm going to stand up and say something. And I'm going to transmit this knowledge to my kids about this experience and what they can learn from it.

Wow.

is what you were saying earlier, where you say, I don't have any regrets. No regrets. No regrets. I bully kids, but I don't have any regrets. That's crazy. Once you've done this, so this is kind of dealing with all of your past regrets. Do you recommend just like sit down one day and kind of think about them and go through them? I would start with one. I would start with one that's bugging you and everybody has one that's bugging them. I know that because

17,000 people have disclosed the one that's bugging them to me. Okay. So pick one that's bugging from you and work that through inward, treat yourself with kindness, outward, disclose and make sense of it forward, extract a lesson from it. That's how you do it. You know, another thing that you can do in this, in this process of reckoning with it is that there's certain kinds of events, certain kinds of regrets that we have that we can undo. Like I got people in my, in my book who, you

have no regrets tattoos. They have tattoos that say no regrets. And then I have a guy who said, who got a no regrets tattoo and regretted it and had it removed. Okay. So that's how you, that's how you undo a regret. I'll give you another idea here. So let's, let's talk about career regrets. Here is a hack. One of my favorite hacks. It comes from Tina Seelig at Stanford university. It's called a failure resume. This is one of the smartest things you can do as a professional.

So we all have these resumes, these glistening things that talk about how awesome we are and all of our accomplishments and credentials. Tina Seelig at Stanford suggests that we also do a failure resume, which is the opposite of that, which is a list of all of our screw ups and failures and setbacks. You list those. You don't have to tell anybody about it. I've done this. I didn't tell anybody about it. It's terrible. I mean, I told people that I did it. I'm not showing anybody this thing because it's embarrassing as hell.

a list of your failures, setbacks, and mistakes. But you don't just leave it there. Then you say, okay, what did I learn from this?

And then what am I going to do? The failure resume is one of the best things that professionals can do. And then just store it somewhere. And do you come back and reflect on it on some particular cadence or how do you use it? Oh, it depends. It depends because you can also like the way I did it, which is not exactly what Tina recommends, but the way that I did it is list basically three columns, list the failure, setback, screw up, whatever, list the lesson, and then say, next time I will

Blah, blah, blah. For me, what happened, though, it was interesting. And I think that the exercise itself is revealing, because for me, what I found is that, you know, some things that I did that didn't work out, that sort of flopped. But it was like the stock that you mentioned. It's like, yeah, I might do it again. It's like I was I was out of my control. It's actually not so much a failure as it is like life happens. And sometimes things work out and sometimes they don't. And that's OK. But on some of the things I found myself making when I looked at the list of lessons, I

I had two lessons that kept coming up over and over again. I was making the same two mistakes over and over and over again. And they were in some ways the...

infection at the heart of some of these problems. And I've done a good job subsequently of not making those mistakes again. But the only reason I was able to really surface those two mistakes was by doing a failure resume. And is that something that helps you in the future? Or I know you have a kind of a framework for regret optimization. And when you think about how to plan for a lot of people get worried about anticipating regret. Yeah. Is this a prereq

to that framework? I don't think it's a prerequisite. I don't think it's a post-requisite. I think it is, it can live alongside. Again, I don't think that there is a single universal one-size-fits-all prescription. What I want to try to do is get people to rethink regret, normalize it, recognize that everybody has it,

and try to learn from the regrets, learn what people regret, because I think it points a path to a good life, and have some tools and hacks and things that they can do to deal with a particular regret or two in their own life as a starting point. So for some people, they care very deeply about their careers. And so I totally recommend it for that. Now, we can talk about anticipated regret, which is a really, really interesting issue. You know, we can talk about why Jeff Bezos was right and wrong to some extent.

We can also talk about. OK, so I'm into the hack thing now, Chris. All right. Here's a hack. Yeah. For all you kids out there stuck taking multiple choice tests, taking a multiple choice test. It's question 11. You think the answer is a you move along in the test. I think, wait a second. Maybe the answer to question 11 is C. So here's the question. Should you change your answer? Should you change your answer?

Now, if this it would be great if like we had this is like a call in podcast where people would call in and tell me. But if you I've done a poll on this, asking this question overwhelmingly, people say, oh, no, no, you got to go with your first instinct. And that's certainly what I was taught in the public schools of Columbus, Ohio, 100 years ago. Always go with your first instinct. Don't change your answer. Your first instinct is going to be more accurate than changing the answer. We have research on this and the research says that's wrong. Change your frickin answer.

People are more likely to switch from a wrong answer to a right answer than a right answer to the wrong answer. What hobbles them is anticipated regret gone awry because what happens is that they anticipate greater regret from the fear of switching from a right answer to a wrong answer than the fear of sticking with the wrong answer. And so they don't make the optimal decision. So a lot of times when we anticipate our regret,

We actually end up making very risk averse choices. And so anticipated regret is not all good. It's mostly good. But there is a way to there's a way to recommend. The other thing about anticipated regret is that, as you were suggesting earlier, Chris, we need to pick what we're going to focus on. And so if you say, OK,

Oh, am I going to regret buying a blue car or a gray car? Am I going to regret wearing my black sweater or my blue sweater? Am I going to regret having macaroni and cheese for dinner or turkey tetrazzini? I mean, you can go crazy on this, on our decision making. And I'm sure your listeners are familiar with this. I mean, you'll see it in any social psychology textbook or class.

the difference between maximizers and satisficers. People who are maximizers try to make the best decision on every single thing they do. Satisficers say there's some things where good enough is good enough. And what the research tells us very clearly is maximizers are miserable. They're just miserable. And satisficers are happier. And the key really is to satisface on most things, but maximize on the things that matter the most.

And that is, again, regret points is that way. So you're anticipating your regrets. You say, am I going to regret not doing the work? Yeah, you're going to regret not doing the work. Am I going to regret not taking the risk? Yep. You're going to regret that. Am I going to regret not doing the right thing? Yep. Am I going to regret not reaching out? Yep. Am I going to regret buying a blue car? Probably not in a few years. Am I going to regret taking a vacation to place A or place B? No.

Probably not in a few years. So what you have to do is you have to maximize on what's important in your anticipated regrets and satisfy on everything else.

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Don't miss the chance to maximize your happiness and save money. Join over 37,000 people getting my newsletter by going to allthehacks.com slash email and signing up for free. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash email. What hacks might you have for someone who's in the middle of something they probably won't anticipate regret on but stuck? Like, ah, you know, I got these two hotels. I can't pick between them. They both look great.

Is it just, you know, it's easy to tell someone just do this one. And maybe, maybe that's the question. Ask what your friend would tell them. You know, what would you tell your friend? Just pick one. Okay. So multiple hacks on that one, Chris. Okay. So what would you tell your best friend to do? Okay. Here's my favorite one. I don't know where I got this. Let's say you're trying to decide where to go. So I'm going to go to, you know, should I go to Croatia or should I go to Greece? All right. Let's say it's equally priced or whatever. All right. So it's sort of in the same more or less kind of sort of region. Yeah.

but you just can't decide you're paralyzed by that. Okay. First of all, you're going to be fine because you get to go to either Croatia or Greece. So you're going to be fine. All right. So you flip a coin heads is Croatia and tails is Greece. All right. You flip a coin when the coin gets to its apex, you think, how do I want this to turn out in that instant? And that's your answer right there.

I thought you were going to go for what it landed on, but I like it more now. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because the thing is, it's like you sort of know. You actually, you know, you're 50% in a peppercorn in one direction or another. And that moment when it hits its apex is when you say it sort of is revealed to you. But this is my point. It's like...

You're going to be fine. You're going to go to Croatia and say Croatia is awesome. You're going to go to Greece and say Greece is awesome. The big thing there is like, gee, you know, should I take the risk of going to, you know, it's like, should I go to Croatia? You know, I don't speak. I don't speak Serbo-Croatian and I'm not sure about some of the places to stay. And I've never been to that part of the world before. So maybe I should just play it safe and relax.

go to Hilton Head or something like that. And there you will have a regret because that's about boldness. And we have a lot of, I mean, it's interesting for your show, Chris, we have a lot of regrets about people not traveling, not taking the chance to travel to cool places. Yeah, I've talked in the past about

how easy it can be, right? One credit card can take a family on a vacation. My goal is to help people get rid of, you know, if there's a thing holding you back, it certainly can't be the cost. You know, at least if you have good credit, I guess, free travel is available.

Absolutely. And but the barrier for people isn't when they admit it, when they confess in this online confessional called the World Regret Survey. They very rarely they don't say, oh, I couldn't afford to go to Croatia. And so I decided it's not that it was it was like, you know, it was a little bit risky because I hadn't traveled abroad and I wasn't sure where to stay. And I really regret not taking that taking that risk.

I've heard a lot of people worried about going places because they say, oh, you know, this place isn't safe. I don't know. And I think I've mentioned this in the past, but someone was like, I read this thing in this book and they said, you got to bring the money belt and you got to hide all of your stuff. It just seems so dangerous. I was like, go read the guide for New York City. It says the same thing.

And like, you know, I don't put my phone and my wallet in a money belt walking around New York City. And so, you know, everything's going to try to make you feel like it could be scary. But at the end of the day, I think you're going to be fine in most places. I mean, it's not this is not a good thing, but I live in Washington, D.C., and our neighborhood listserv three days ago talked about a carjacking. That's my neighborhood here in Washington, D.C. So I'm telling you what people regret is not taking those kinds of trips. Yeah.

Did we hit on everything when it comes to anticipating regret? So Jeff Bezos had this idea called the regret minimization principle. And so his view is like every decision you make, you should try to minimize your future regrets. And that comes from a famous story where I don't even know if it's true, but he's told it where he's working as a banker and he's thinking about starting Amazon. And the guy, his boss says, oh, you're crazy. You don't want to do that. And you need to think about it. So he's taking a walk in Central Park and he's thinking about it. He says, well, what am I going to regret when I'm 80?

Am I going to regret taking the chance or am I going to regret not taking the chance? And he said, I'll probably regret not taking the chance. So therefore, I'm going to do that. Now, that's sensible. We can't minimize every single regret. We'll become paralyzed here. But when we look forward and again, ask these core questions, will I regret not doing the work? Will I regret not taking the chance? Will I regret?

Not doing the right thing. Will I regret not reaching out? I think the answer, at least in the chorus of 17,000 people who've told me, is that, yeah, those are the things you're going to regret. So focus on making really good decisions there and just doing good enough for everything else.

Is it fair to say those are the maximizer focus areas and the rest you can kind of satisfy some? It's more than fair. It's essential to say that, that that's what you want to maximize on those things because those are the things that give our life meaning. And I mean that, we talked a little bit about being a different person. I am a different person having heard the voices of all these people for two years.

They are all of them telling me what matters in their lives. And they're all telling me the same things. And I look at what they're telling me and I'm like, yeah, what do I care about? I want stability for myself and for my family. Yeah, I feel like I haven't taken enough risks in my life and I need to be bolder. Yeah, I feel terrible in my life when I've done the wrong thing. And it's stuck with me and I hate that feeling.

And connection, it's like, ultimately, what is life about except that do you have people in your life who care about you, whom you care about? It's like, yeah, there is an area, a realm of our lives where we absolutely want to maximize and that's it. But other stuff, dissatisfice, you'll be fine. So I'll share a minor regret. It's not one that's nagging me too much, but I've read a lot of your books and

And I feel like I would have loved to had the chance to start this podcast, I don't know, 15 years ago to be able to go through and, and have you on every couple years and talk about them. But I can't go back. I can't, I can't go back in time. So I do want to see if I could pick your brain a little bit late on me. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot more with regret. And to that, I'll say the books out, go pick it up and kind of dig into more of the research you've done.

But there's two of them, Drive and When, that have some takeaways that I would love to chat about. And I'll start with Drive, which was the first book of yours I read. And for those who aren't familiar, the subtitle is The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. And so I think...

Despite that I've read it, though, it was years ago. I think the first place to start is kind of maybe you could just share what is that surprising truth for those who aren't familiar. Yeah. I mean, it's that again, this is a book based on science, based on the work of people like Edward Deasy and Richard Ryan and the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and many other people who have researched motivation over the years. And what it says is that human beings are complex.

We have one motivation. We have a biological drive. We eat when we're hungry. We drink when we're thirsty. We have sex to satisfy those desires. We also respond very well to rewards and punishments in our environment in certain circumstances. But we also have another drive. We do things because we like them, because they're interesting, because they're meaningful, because it's the right thing to do. I don't think that, especially in organizations, we had a three-dimensional view of people. So that's one big idea. The other thing is that if you look at

60 years of research in motivational science, what it tells you is I'll give you the one quick conceptual takeaway here of that book, which is this. There's a certain kind of motivator we use in organizations. Psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator. I like to call it an if then reward as an if you do this, then you get that. If you do this, then you get that. I think it's a simpler way to understand it.

Here's what science tells us about if not about all rewards, but about if then rewards. If then rewards are great for simple tasks with short time horizons. They work really well. We love rewards. They get us to focus. You say you want someone to stuff a lot of envelopes, pay them per envelope, give them a bonus for every hundred envelopes they stuff for simple tasks where you know exactly what you need to do. And you can see the finish line. If then rewards are effective because human beings love rewards.

The same body of research tells us that if-then rewards are far less effective for more complex tasks with longer time horizons. Why? It's the same reason. We love rewards so much they get us to focus very narrowly. That's a good frame of mind if the task is algorithmic. But if the task requires judgment, creativity, discernment,

You don't want to have that narrow focus. You want to have an expansive focus. And the problem in organizations is that we're using if-then rewards for everything rather than for the small and increasingly smaller rewards.

kind of work that people do. And there is a better motivational regime. You want to give people some autonomy. You want to help them make progress and get better at something that matters. You want to plug them into a purpose. Yeah. So you touched on that briefly. Then I remember that the kind of three elements are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Right. Are those things you can create for your own or are they things that organization has to give you? Well, I mean, that's a very profound question, actually. I mean, seriously, I mean that because I think part of

The whole field of behavioral science is basically the entire field of social psychology at the very least. But I think the entire field of behavioral science is when we look at people acting in whatever realm of life, how much of what they're doing is because of the person and how much is it because of the situation?

You know, it's both, obviously. So certain people in certain situations will behave differently from other people in certain situations. So I think that for these kinds of principles, you want to work, you want to go to a place, an environment where

that has the nutrients in the soil for these things. It's not so much sort of giving you it, it's basically creating an atmosphere where those kinds of things can flourish. Let's take autonomy, for instance. We want to give people some sovereignty over what they do and how they do it and who they do it with. There are some places that just where that soil is not rich enough, where no matter how autonomous you might be as an individual,

It's you're not going to be able to drop roots in a soil where the whole enterprise is about thwarting autonomy and controlling people. So I guess this is a long winded way, Chris, of my answering that question. It depends. So.

Let me rephrase it differently. If you're finding yourself not very motivated to do something, is it safe to say that the first place to start to figure out how to maybe figure out whether you can be motivated, because maybe you just are in a place where it's not possible, is to kind of dig in and explore those three elements and try to figure out if any of them are missing and how to create them?

Yeah, I think that's a very, very good idea. So the question is, so ask yourself, do I have control? How much control do I have over what I do, how I do it, when I do it, who I do it with? If you come to that conclusion and say, you know what, I don't have much control over any of those things, that often is a very early warning sign of why you're demotivated. Now, let me give you another one because I can deliver a hack here. One of my favorite ones, a practice of my own.

When we think about mastery, the second element, mastery is our desire to get better at stuff. And at some level, it's also about our desire to make progress. Theresa Mobule at Harvard Business School has some brilliant research showing that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work. But here's the thing.

We need information and feedback to know whether we're making progress. That's true for anything, right? So if you're driving somewhere, you need to know how fast you're going. You need to have the directions and the road signs and the GPS and whatnot. And for many people, especially in the workplace, they're

in a world devoid of information about how they're doing. So now to the hack. One of my favorite things, and I have this on my laptop on which I'm talking to you, is what I call a progress ritual. A progress ritual. At the end of every day, I stop and list what I got done that day. It takes me 60 seconds.

But I don't leave my office without doing that because it helps me see the progress that I'm making. And we know from the research that making progress is the single largest day-to-day motivator. So I have a giant list.

that just says basically a got done list, a progress list. I call it a got done list, but it's really a progress list. And so what I'll do is on the day that I'm talking to you, I will go to that list and I will type in everything that I got done today. And all of us know at some level how intuitively appealing this is because many of us have done the thing where we have a to-do list, write it all out or type it all out. Then we do something that's not on the to-do list,

And we write it on the to-do list and cross it out because we know how satisfying that is. And so this progress ritual, 60-second punctuation mark at the end of every day, to me, is one of the most important things that you can do to maintain your daily motivation. And just to get super tactical, where do you put that list? I keep it literally on a Word file. I never go back to it. That's the thing that's interesting about it. It's not...

It's not for capture to review things. It's for the moment. It's for that punctuation mark, the ritual in that moment. And what I've found is that on some of the most frustrating days that I have, if I take that punctuation mark for 60 seconds, I realize I've actually made some progress that day. That buoys my motivation and it allows me to come back the next day. But I almost never look back on it. It's the ritual itself that is powerful.

I love that. I've even applied something similar to my life, which is I need to make sure I do something exciting and memorable every month to just kind of keep up the progress of non-professional things. I think it's so easy to spend your days with making all the progress in life on work.

and forgetting that there's all of these other elements in life that you probably want to make progress on. But for some reason, for many of us, work is the one we focus on all the time. But it's a great point, Chris, because on my list, I put non-work things.

I'll put, you know, ran four miles. I'll put, had a phone call with my daughter. You know, I will put those kinds of things on there because that's a very important part of making progress. It's not only the work stuff. And how long is the list usually? Is it a couple things or do you try to get pretty granular? It could be 10, 15, 20 things. It depends on the day, you know? Like there's not, sometimes a long list is less, there's less progress because I'm doing a bunch of different small things. Other days, if I say I wrote,

a thousand good words, that's our fricking awesome day. Even if that's the only line item on there, you know? So it, it, it really, it really varies. But again, the key thing here, and I really want to emphasize is that it is the act itself that is valuable, right?

Simply doing it is important. You can always have it be an ephemeral list and get if it was written in invisible ink or like it's self-destructed after seven days. Or if somebody, you know, if somehow Dropbox had some kind of calamity and it disappeared, I would be fine. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I wouldn't be fine about if all the Dropbox files disappear. No, that's what I'm saying, because I have if Dropbox goes down, my life is over for me.

I mean, I might as I basically if Dropbox goes down, I just go into a monastery for the rest of my life. Any other motivation hacks to get on? We can go to general stuff at the end. But just before we move on, I mean, one of the things that I like to do for motivating yourself and also for motivating other people is each week I try to have two fewer conversations about how and two more about why, particularly.

particularly when I'm working with other people and have even a minor directive role. You know, it's like, here's how I want you to do that piece of the website. Here's how I want us to do that presentation. And just twice a week, you realize when you're working with people and you're in any kind of instructive mode, you have more how conversations than you realize. And what I have found is that just converting two of them a week to a why conversation is important. So catch yourself, say, okay, here's how, stop.

Stop. Here's why we're making that presentation. And I find it useful pointed inward as well, especially as a writer. So there are times when I will if I'm struggling to write a chapter or struggling to write anything, I naturally want to say, OK, how can I finish this chapter? How can I get this section done?

And then it's helpful for me to stop back and say, okay, why am I writing this section? Why am I writing this chapter? This is not just a couple of times, just both internally and externally. We're a little over-indexed on how conversations, and we're a little under-indexed on why conversations. And there's a pile of evidence showing that why that sense of purpose is, I think it's the most cost-effective performance enhancer we have. Wow. That's a great hack.

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I just want to thank you, Quick, for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Okay, I said I wanted to hit two books, so I'm going to move on to when, get some timing, try to make sure we have room for it. Which for anyone who hasn't read or seen, it's The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

And I know we've all heard timing is everything, right? I bet that's a common phrase. And a lot of us think timing's up to serendipity. But my takeaway was it's definitely not something that you should leave to serendipity or let coincidence run. Is that a fair takeaway? That is, once again, Chris, your concern about fairness is admirable, but it's an essential takeaway. The essentialness comes from the fact that timing is not an art, it's a science. And for that book written a few years ago, I went back and looked at, I mean, we looked at like, I don't know,

700, 800 studies across a whole array of different fields about timing. And what it shows is that our brain power changes over the course of a day. So we perform differently on different kinds of tasks based on the time of day. It shows that we have, I think, very seriously undervalued taking breaks. And even the way we think about breaks is distorted. But it also shows even on episodic timing that

How do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? How do groups synchronize in time? So a lot of really, really interesting stuff that makes us more aware of the temporal aspects of our lives. And once we're more aware, we can be more intentional. We tend to be very intentional about what we do.

who we do it with, but we're less intentional about when we do things. And there's a pile of evidence showing that when we do things has a material effect on our performance and our happiness. I don't want to go through the whole book because that take a lot of time and there's a book for people to read. But if we went one layer, one layer deeper there, like when should people do things or does it matter depending on the type of person? Let's talk about that. Well, it does matter depending on type of person. So let's just talk about daily timing.

Okay. And the day is a pretty fundamental unit of time because we can't do anything about it. You know, we're on a planet, the planet's turning. Like, you know, we could say like a week is not a real thing. We could just declare a week is nine days. A week is a human invention. We could have said a week is 13. I hereby declare as president of the world, a week is 13 days. Fine. You just can't declare, oh, a day is only going to be 14 hours. Nope, not going to work. So daily timing is really important. Here's what we know. The

The most important thing is that our cognitive abilities change over the course of the day. They are not static. And this is the big mistake that we often make. We think that all times of the day are created equal. They're not. Our brain power changes over the course of the day. It changes in material ways. And the best time to do something depends on what you're doing. So this can't quite get to the level of like,

particular hack, but it can get to the level of design principles. And I think that a lot of the actual particular hacks in this realm are wrong. They're not scientific. So here's what we know. You have to begin with what's called a chronotype. And that is essentially your propensity. Do you wake up early and go to sleep early? Do you wake up late and go to sleep late? Are you somewhere in between?

And what the distribution tells us is that about 15% of us are very strong morning people. 20% of us are very strong evening people, night owls. And about two thirds of us are in the middle, but we tilt a little bit more toward the morning. An overly simplified way of thinking about this is you have night owls and everybody else. 20% of us are night owls. We naturally wake up late and go to sleep late. 80% of us are a little bit more the other way.

And what it shows us is that we, the research tells us we move through the day in three stages. There's a peak, there's a trough, there's a recovery. The peak for most of us, 80% of us is early in the day. That's when we're most vigilant. We're able to bat away distractions. So that's when we should be doing our heads down analytic work.

The trough early to mid-afternoon. That is a terrible time of day. We joke about it, but the data are overwhelming. Like, don't go to the hospital in the afternoon. There are more per capita car accidents between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. than at any time except for between 4 a.m. and 6 p.m. I mean, there's a downdraft in performance in that early to mid-afternoon that is staggering.

So we all have that trough. We should be doing our administrative work in that period, the work that doesn't require a massive cognitive load. Now, the final stage, peak, early, trough in the middle, recovery later in the day. In the recovery phase of the day, it's very interesting. Our vigilance, our mental vigilance is down, but our mood is typically up.

And that can be a very potent combination for doing things like brainstorming or solving non-obvious problems or iterating ideas. And so for 80% of us, we should be doing our heads down analytic work

during the peak, which is most usually early in the day, we should be doing the least important stuff for those couple of hours in the middle of the day. And then we should be doing our insight, iterative, brainstorming kind of stuff later in the day. Now, the one caveat here is that if you're part of the 20% who are night owls,

you're much better off doing your analytic work late in the day because that's when you are most vigilant. And so one of the things that we see is that the traditional corporate structures are completely inhospitable to people who are night owls. They want people to be at like 7 a.m. staff or 8 a.m. staff meetings.

When these people are barely conscious at that time, but they're on fire at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. Yeah. Do you think the trend towards kind of remote work and multiple time zones kind of makes makes it better for these night owls?

Yeah, I do. I think it's I think that remote work is a godsend tonight, Alice, not only remote, but also, again, autonomous work going back to drive for a second. Autonomous work is great because you want to give people some amount of control over what they do, how they do it, but also when they do it. And so at some level, we should be managers should be should be focused on results, not on whether Chris is at his Zoom on the Zoom meeting at 830 in the morning.

When Chris is doing high quality work and he's more comfortable doing it between 9 p.m. and 2 in the morning, I don't care if he's not on that 8.30 Zoom call because he's delivering results. And what I want to do as a manager is default to autonomy to let people find the way of work that is best for them and that contributes to the larger whole. Now, I know you said 80% of people should be doing that analytical work in the morning.

And if I remember right, one of the takeaways was that you hate breakfast. Is that? No, no, I don't hate breakfast. I don't hate breakfast. No, I don't hate breakfast at all. It's like, like, you know, I sort of see things a little bit like an economist as like pricing. And so I think that breakfast is over. The evidence that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is almost non-existent. I mean, breakfast isn't bad. I eat breakfast. It's not bad. The idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is really a legacy of

breakfast cereal advertising from the early part of the 20th century, truly. But I actually think that in some ways breakfast is overvalued and lunch is undervalued. Lunch as a punctuation mark in the middle of the day, lunch as a break in the middle of the day, I think is undervalued. And I think that breaks in general are undervalued. We have this, even the many of us who have zero connection to the

family connection to the Puritans have absorbed this very puritanical view that the way to get work done, more work done, better work done, is to power through all the time. And also this idea that powering through is morally virtuous. That's not what the evidence tells us about high performers. The evidence on high performers in music, in sports, in so many realms shows that they are systematic break takers. They transform.

treat their breaks very seriously. And so should the rest of us. Is there a kind of general principle or a hack for here's how many breaks you should be taking or how often or, you know, what types? So here's the thing, like, like, like, we're going to follow the science, we have design principles, we can't this, this is why I go crazy, where the advice is like, wake up at 430 in the morning and win the day. You know what, a lot of us don't do that. A lot of us, we're not our brains and physiology are not built for that. I'm sorry. I'm

I don't think that there is a certain number of breaks to take in the day. However, there are design principles very clearly rooted in the science about the kinds of breaks that you should take. So one principle is that something is better than nothing. So even a short break is better than no break at all.

Two, outside is better than inside. I think, again, one of the things we haven't fully reckoned with is the importance of being exposed to nature and being in nature, even in urban environments. There's a whole pile of research on this as well. So outside is better than inside. Moving is better than stationary. A break where you're in motion is better than a break where you're sedentary. Social is better than solo.

So breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own, even for introverts. And finally, last and certainly not least, you got to be fully detached. So a break where you're walking around with your face in your phone is not a break. You got to be fully, fully detached. So I've always thought that, you know, you want to sort of a meta break.

change the country and increase labor productivity by 0.6% in a year hack, which would be an incredible accomplishment, is that if everybody in the American workforce took a 15-minute walk

every afternoon took a 15 minute walk outside with someone they liked talking about something other than work and leaving their phones behind. I think that would be how we are at a market increase in productivity and also mental and emotional wellbeing. Well, I can't change the entire country that, I mean, talk about something, an easy hack, right? It costs nothing. Totally. And adds a lot of value. And the hack would be, since you're not, since most of the people who listen to a podcast about hacks are not going to do it sort of

impulsively, just put it in your schedule. Set it for a week. You know, 2.15 every afternoon, I'm going to take a 15-minute walk break with someone I like

outside, talking about something other than work and not bringing my phone with me. And I actually think, Chris, that if in organizations, if managers, if the leaders of these organizations start doing this, then that actually could be a game changer. I mean, could everyone just do it at the same time? Would it be like the bell rings, the production line stops? Well, you're making a very interesting point there, right? Because if you think about these design elements, outside, in motion,

with people you like. That's basically recess. So, you know, I have long advocated that we should have, you know, maybe we do it en masse. We have a 2.30 every day. We have the Great American Walk Break. Or recess. Can we just call it recess and bring back the childhood spirits? We can call it the Great American, we can call it the American Adult Recess Initiative. Ari. No, that doesn't quite work there. The Adult Recess Initiative. Ari. Ari. No. Yeah. We can work on it. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is all for the day, right? You talked a little bit about how to schedule this for the week. Did you learn anything about timing? You know, I know you said weeks, months, years, they're all kind of concepts that we made up, but is there something important to good timing over longer periods of time? Well, yes and no. I mean, I think to me, the most important piece of research there is by Katie Milkman, Jason Reese, and Hengchen Dai, who did something where they discovered what they call the fresh start effect, which is that certain data

days in the calendar operate as temporal landmarks. That is, they stick out in the calendar, they stick out in time the way that physical landmarks stick out in space, and they give us a way to orient ourselves. And there's certain kinds of temporal landmarks that are these, that they call these fresh start dates, that where we essentially relegate our past

our bad selves to the past and open up kind of a fresh ledger on our new selves. So they found, for instance, that in college, okay, so they had, they looked at a large university, a large university where students are swiping in and out of the gym. When are students going to the gym? So it's a brilliant study because you can get data on students taking their ID, swiping into the gym and not. Students more likely to go to the gym on the first day of the semester, on Mondays, on the day after a holiday.

And so there's certain days of the year where we are more likely to begin behavior change and therefore more likely to –

continue with that behavior change. And those are the fresh start dates. First of the month, beginning of a semester, first day of a quarter, the day after a federal holiday, that kind of stuff. What about making big decisions? I'm going to switch my career, quit my job or, you know, something like that. Any science to time he knows? You know, those big decisions accumulate. And so it's not the kind of thing where people decide,

you know, right away in terms of a given day, there is some evidence showing that we are more likely to resort to a kind of default no later in the day than earlier in the day. If you're going back to a boldness regret and you want to ask out,

you're, you know, someone who you're interested in, if you wait till later in the day, there's some evidence that you're going to just give up. Whereas if you do it early in the day, you might have be able to summon a little bit more moxie. Well, you know, there's plenty more in the book, and we didn't even hit on, you know, four or five other books. So lots to check out lots of links in the show notes.

Before we go, you know, you mentioned you had some hacks that span outside of these books. There's some boxes in the corner you referenced. I'd love to hear your, you know, some of the general things that you do or recommend to kind of optimize life and everything else. Well, I mean, I do a lot of different things. So you're seeing in my in my office here, my garage behind my house in Washington, D.C., I have these box. These are bankers boxes.

You sometimes will see in like a law firm in the 1980s. I love them. And what I do is that I have when I have projects that I'm not working on right now, the projects that I'm imagining for the future, some of which may go somewhere, some of which may not. What I will do is I will establish a physical box for each of those things.

And then when I see something, a newspaper article, or I hear about a book, I heard about a book today. Somebody mentioned a book that was related to something here. So when I get the book, I'm not going to read that book right now, but I'm going to take that book.

plop it in that box because that way is a way for me to collect all the material that I think might be relevant to that particular project, but that I'm not ready to deal with right now. So these boxes for me are an incredible organizing tool, even though it's very analog. I still use Evernote sometimes. I still use Dropbox. But for me, the physical boxes are so useful. I see a magazine story or I see something online. I print it out.

pop it in the box. I get a book, pop it in the box. And what happens then is to my surprise, it's like a holiday morning. It's like, oh, well, I was thinking about working on that, make a documentary about X, Y, or Z. And I look at the box like, holy moly, who put all this stuff in here? This is great. I got like all kinds of research material right here. If I didn't have a system for that, I would be lost.

And so for me, having various kinds of systems to capture ideas is super useful. I also use something called a Spark file. I don't even know where this even came from, which again, is just a running document that I store in Dropbox. And let's say that I have a question. Let's say that I have an idea. I think of a phrase. Hey, that would be a good book title.

I just pop it on that spark file and periodically go back to that, you know, maybe every three or four months to see what's on there is a long list of things. So it could be it could be a question. You know, maybe I say, oh, wow, our left hander is more likely to be libertarians.

Like, I've noticed a lot of left handers are libertarians. Is that a thing? You know, and it's like, I don't feel like researching that right now. It's kind of an intriguing question. It's not that urgent and essential in my life at this moment, but it's kind of intriguing. Put it on the spark file out of my head into a system or even things like I'll think of a book title. And I don't even know what the book is, but.

Put it on there. And I go through it. And a lot of this stuff, when I look at it later on, it doesn't make any, it's like, okay, this is not that interesting. But some stuff sticks. And again, having systems, getting stuff out. This is, I'm a big believer in the getting things done methodology of David Allen from 30, 25 years ago. I still am a devotee of that. But basically, devotee, especially of the core principle, which is,

Get it out of your head into a system. Don't rely on keeping things in your head. Use your head for the things that your head, you really need your head for, which is problem solving and creation, not for storage. Yeah, two things I've used. There's a Chrome extension called OneTab.

And sometimes I'll just be researching something. I have all these tabs open. I'm like, I don't have time for this. Click one button. All the tabs disappear. You can always go back and find them grouped by whenever you click the button. And what I'll say is it's kind of like a graveyard of things that actually didn't matter. You know, that I go back there. I'm like, gosh, why did I go down a rabbit hole here? I don't even care. And there's this great like delete this. I never need it.

And then the other is whenever I find links that someone shared, posted on Twitter, and I'm like, oh, I want to read that. I just send it to... I think I sent it to reminders on my iPhone. And I'm like, one day I can go back and scroll through that. And oftentimes I don't, but it at least...

it kind of gives me the satisfaction of I acknowledge the link without having to read it now. I don't feel, you know, to go back full circle, I don't feel the regret of not clicking. I can eliminate the regret of not looking at it by saving it for later, but not actually looking at it. Out of your head into a system. I use something similar to that. I've been using it for a long time.

And, you know, I think what happens sometimes, it's called Instapaper, which is simply a, there are extensions or buttons on, I think, every browser now where you see an article online. Let's say it's a long form article. It's 3,000 words. I'm not going to sit there in the midst of a maw of a day and read a 3,000 word article on my computer. But if I...

hit the Instapaper button, it saves it. And then I go on my iPad and read the stories like that. I love Instapaper. That's great. Yeah, I used it. I use an app called Pocket, which I think is kind of the same thing. Same thing. It's Pocket is, you know, the only, it's like I use Instapaper because I started using Instapaper. If I started using Pocket, I'd be using Pocket, but it's the same basic principle.

Yeah. Any other final hacks? I got so many, man. So one of the smartest things I've done is I keep a notebook next to my bed and it's called a line a day notebook.

And every day I write down one line that I've heard, a sentence, a phrase, a question, a quotation that I've heard. And I usually capture them like on my phone. I take a photograph of it and then I just render it in the, but actually with, with a pen in this book. And so I've done this every, this book now I'm on,

Year four. So every day for three plus years. So there's way over a thousand little entries in there. Wow. And what do you do with them? I go back and look at them. Sometimes I write down jokes. And so it allows me to like remember jokes that I wouldn't ever before. Other times I'll write down a sentence that I read is really intriguing. That just helps me think through. It's like, oh, why does that sentence work so well?

But again, I have to say the habit of it on that one is also really important because what it does more than anything else, it makes me pay attention in the day

makes me attuned to hearing and seeing great things. Because you know you're going to need to write something down. Because I know I'm going to write something down, yeah. I like that a lot. I feel like it's very easy to get distracted throughout the day and not pay attention. But if you have a goal at the end of the day of, I'm going to write one thing down, you've got to find that thing. Right, and when you find that thing, you just take a picture of it, or I sometimes will send myself an email. Here's today's. So the story in the Washington Post that I read, it happened to be about the NFL. There's a very good sports writer for the Washington Post named Adam Kilgore.

And he had he was writing about the NFL and he had a line, a couple of lines about football in the NFL that just was just brilliant writing. And so I just literally took a photograph of it. And tonight I'll transcribe that into my little notebook.

The book, you know, we talked about Regret a lot at the beginning. The book's out today. Other than buying the book and reading it and enjoying it, where can people follow you online? Well, you can go to my website, which is danpink.com. And there's all kinds of groovy stuff there. And, you know, you can find the books, as they say, wherever books are sold. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of research reports. We'll link up to all of them in the show notes as well as the book.

Cool. Thanks for doing that. I appreciate it. I just hope that Manu Ginobili listens to this. Yeah, I will. You know, he was the one that sent me a list. He's like, hey, if you could have a couple of these people on and he had your name on there, I was like, OK, you know, I got to reach out. Because actually, I got some street credit with my son a few years ago when I showed him that Manu Ginobili and Pau Gasol followed me on Twitter. So that's pretty good, I have to say.

That's how the Manu thing started for me was I noticed he followed me and I sent him a note. So he's quite responsive. You should reach out. Yeah, I should. Well, cool. Thank you so much for being here. Chris, what a pleasure being with you. I really enjoyed it.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it, especially Spotify, since they just added podcast ratings. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.