Making the Most of Regret

Do you regret a career that passed you by? Do you regret losing touch with old friends? Don't despair. By studying our regrets, we learn what is most important in life. And that clears the way to make the future even better.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Feb. 2, 2022.

David Gardner: Have you ever heard someone say, I live a life of no regret? Or maybe you've rocked something like that yourself, hashtag, no regrets. Well, my guest this week, superstar, author, and longtime friend of Fools, Dan Pink will beg to differ with this approach, to life. His book, The Power of Regret, hits bookstores online and off this week. Dan is all about how looking backward at regrets teaches us to live forward better. There's probably some success in investing to learn this week from regret. Do you regret buying stocks in 2021? There's probably some success in business to learn here this week. Looking backward, what would you have done differently in your career, and how might you still do those things differently? But one thing is for sure though, you will for sure learn some things this week to help you succeed in life. Dan Pink, you, me, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing, delighted to have you join with me this week. Reflecting back on last week's mailbag, I so enjoyed your notes about the January that was, as it turns out January 2022. I think it was the worst January for investors, at least of a Rule Breaker ilk, since January 2008. Now you might remember 2008 was a very painful year for investors. We felt that pain for one solid month. I'm happy to say, well, that final day of January is nice to see Netflix bounce back double digits. February started OK. I'm feeling better about the market. I hope you are too. This too shall pass but now, getting back to our subject this week, This Too Shall Pass. Sometimes we don't let things pass, and so what we're left with is a regret or regrets. A life lived with regrets, and Dan Pink, our guest this week, wants you to know, that's OK. In fact, it's actually very instructive. It's not just human, which it is, it's important. Looking forward to having Dan on. 

Very shortly, I want to mention you made a cameo on this podcast in 2018. He told his story, now in retrospect, it was one of regret, about meeting a young entrepreneur who had emailed him. He was a fan of Dan Pink's books, and this young entrepreneur gave Dan this idea that he had for a venture cap start-up, and Dan turned it down. He definitely did not invest it and he thought it was crazy. It ended up being Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb. I'm not saying Dan has too much regret. He probably has some regret about not being an early stage investor in Airbnb. But it's a great story. In fact it's worth listening back to if you like. It was Stock Stories Volume 2. That was June 6th, 2018. That was a great Dan Pink appearance, but this time we're going deep on The Power of Regret. I think this is going to be a greater Dan Pink appearance. I want you to know we're going to talk about his book. We're also going to talk about book crafting about how does Dan Pink make Dan Pink books happen? We're going to close this week with a round of buy, sell, or hold one of our favorite standby features we've done over the year, so really looking forward to this one. It's Groundhog Day, looked at from another advantage point. Remember that movie? I wonder if you should just keep listening to this week's podcast over and over again. Let's get started. Dan Pink, it's great to have you back to the world of the Motley Fool to Rule Breaker Investing.

Dan Pink: I'm so glad to be here, David. Thanks for having me.

David Gardner: So much of your past work has involved, well, in my mind anyway, deep analysis of others' academic studies, integrating the work of others. You basically turn unique and amazing insights out of other people's work. This time though, Dan, it looks like something new happened. You conducted your own original research and at a pretty big scale. Let's start. Could you tell the story of the American regret project?

Dan Pink: Well, I had looked at about 50 years of research on regret, and I found it interesting, but also somewhat unsatisfying. In the past, I would've been able to actually scratch that itch but today, and this is a big deal, David, in our world, it's like our shmoo like me can do some pretty sophisticated survey research. I worked with a company called Qualtrics who put together these very large online panels and came up with, I think a pretty rigorous survey to try to uncover American attitudes about regret. Our survey sample of 4,489 Americans, it's perfectly representative of the United States of America, and it ended up being the largest piece of survey research ever done on American attitudes about regret. What's amazing about that is that, when you look at the data, I was able to collect this data and analyze the data in a way that I think would have mystified mid-20th century statisticians. We were out there doing survey research with notebooks, and pencils, and papers, and not even mainframe computers.

David Gardner: Four thousand four hundred and eighty-nine Americans. What is representative of America? Did you learn anything about demographics that I'm missing? Who are those 4,489 people?

Dan Pink: We can figure the samples that we represented what America looks like based on education level, based on gender, based on race, based on income, and all those kinds of things. In political polling, you want to have a sample of likely voters.

David Gardner: Yeah.

Dan Pink: In mine, I wanted to sample of likely human beings in America and I didn't want it to be skewed one way or the other, and I find out some very interesting things about that. Although there were some limits to that research as well.

David Gardner: We'll get into that some Dan but I know this bled further into the world of regret survey, and world of regret survey is a dotcom. I think it's dotcom.

Dan Pink: Yes.

David Gardner: Yeah, not .org .edu. Dan, it got bigger than that and all of a sudden you had people reporting in from all around the world. We're here to talk about the book which I feel like is being published and is arriving this week but does all of this work continue for you or was this largely the setup, The Power of Regret by Daniel H. Pink?

Dan Pink: Well, the quantitative survey was a onetime exploration of American attitudes about regret. I also did, as you mentioned, this qualitative piece of research called, The World Regret Survey, which was I'd just add, John collection of regrets. We were up over 17,000 regrets from people in 105 countries, and that proved to be interesting. Again, not to try to empty your audience here by talking about research methodology [laughs] but in the quantitative part of the survey, I asked people questions about their regrets and I've tried to categorize them. When I got stymied, I realized, looking at the qualitative regrets that something much bigger, and much more interesting, and much more revealing was going on, and so this pairing of the two is quite fascinating. But I'm going to keep that World Regret Survey up there. People like it. We've got an interactive map so you can go on there and click a State, or a province, or a country and say, what do people in Idaho regret? What are people in Bangladesh regret?

David Gardner: That's brilliant. There are stories, those qualitative points are threaded throughout the book. It is so often the stories that they catch our attention now. One of my favorite insights in the book, Dan, you talked about on page 104, it's the difference between regrets about action versus in action. It turns out more people have regrets about things they did not do, and I quote: "A key reason you write for this discrepancy is that when we act, we know what happen next. We see the outcome and that can shrink regret's half-life." Love that phrase. "But when we don't act" You continue. "When we don't step off that metaphorical train, we can only speculate how events would have unfolded." Dan, I love that point about action versus actual errors of commission and omission. Really rich. Let's get dirty here a little bit. Dan, let's first talk about errors of action regrets.

Dan Pink: Sure. What I saw in my research and also in the existing academic research is that people are much more likely to have regrets of inaction over regrets of action. Regrets about what they didn't do over regrets about what they did do. There all kinds of reasons for that, they mentioned a few of them. Some of it is that for certain action regrets, we can undo them. If you have cheated somebody or insulted somebody, you can make amends, you can apologize, but inaction regrets are harder to rectify, and so they live longer, but this distinction is actually incredibly important in the overall architecture of regret. One of the relatively few demographic differences we see in the American Regret Project has to do with age. Around age 20, when people are pretty young, they have the same number of action and inaction regrets but as people age, inaction regrets take over. We really end up regretting much more what we didn't do than what we did.

David Gardner: A lot of the point of the book, The Power of Regret, is to make us better human beings going forward. As a consequence of reading your book, Dan, a lot of us I hope, will end up making better decisions. It's not always about that we should've acted or we should have been inactive, it's actually about being thoughtful about those things. But I think the key insight again to underline it is, it's those inactions, those areas of omission that older people look back on and say they wish they'd done more. Regardless of our age, I think that's instructive going forward. Do you find yourself a changed man as a consequence of this research?

Dan Pink: Absolutely. I think that's true. Anytime you spend a few years working on a book, the person who starts to book and the person who finishes the book are different people. I think on this one, having heard all these stories of people around the world, having interviewed hundreds of them and having read literally thousands of these regrets, it's interesting. You would think it might be a little bit of a downer, but it's not at all. It's actually fortifying, it's heartening to see what humanity is grappling with. To me, the surprise of this research is that when you hear people's regrets around the world they keep coming back to the same four things and these four things actually tell us what people value the most. They tell us what constitutes a good life. When there's weird way I took on this project, trying to explore regret and unexpectedly, it revealed what makes life worth living.

David Gardner: [laughs] I hear you and you're speaking to the four, I think we should go there next. One of my favorite words underused in the English language is the word taxonomy, which is how we categorize things. You've done that understandably in your book, The Power of Regret, and you've looked at four core regrets, so let's break it down a little bit. We've talked indirectly to these but let's go to these. The four core regrets are foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. I don't know what the morning shows do here. They would say, "I'm setting you up for you're talking points with a list of 3-5 things." Here I am, I hope I'm not a lazy interviewer, but let's start, Dan Pink, with the first of the four core regrets, foundation regrets.

Dan Pink: You think you like taxonomy, David. Here on my desk, I have a stuffed doll of Charles Darwin.

David Gardner: No way. [laughs]

Dan Pink: I love taxonomy. I think what's interesting about these regrets is, if I can take one beat on this, is that when I did the quantitative survey, I asked people to put their regrets in different categories. Is this a career regret? Is this education regret? Is the health regret? I found that I wasn't getting satisfying answers, it was all over the place. Then I realized that deep down there were these core regrets that were about something deeper and more important than the domain of life itself.

David Gardner: Love it.

Dan Pink: Now to foundation regrets. Each of these regrets has a certain sound. Foundation regret sound like this. "If only I'd done the work." This is, I think extraordinarily important for investors. I have people, again around the world if only I hadn't smoked, if only I had worked harder in school. That's a health regret and education regret. "If only I'd saved money," that's a financial regret but to me, those are all the same regret. It's about making small choices at one in your life that accumulate to negative consequences later in your life. When people look back, they say, "If only I done the work." Again, as cliched as it might sound, Aesop had this right. We had The Ant and The Grasshopper. The grasshopper fiddled away the ant did the work and in the end, the ant didn't have regrets and the grasshopper had a lot of regrets. That's what people kept telling me over and over again. It's interesting though. Fools understand the power of compounding interest, but a lot of civilians don't. To me, it is one of the most important concepts. Again, whether it's about the interest one earns on money or the interest one earns on any behavior.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that and speaking to our audience in particular. I think that part of compounding, and we're reminded this during market down drops like we've experienced in recent weeks and months, part of allowing things to compound is allowing things to go down. That actually happens 1 year in every 3. Foundational regrets around compounding are going to be when people did jump off the train because the train was headed downhill even though it was going up a mountain over the long term. I hear you there, Dan Pink. You're making me think a little bit of James Clear. I'm sure you're familiar with James' work, Atomic Habits, tiny changes, remarkable results. Foundational regrets, that's where we are. We're talking about the small decisions we make from one day to the next.

Dan Pink: They end up being hard to rectify if you don't get them right. There is a great scene in one of Hemingway's books where one guy says to the other guy, "I went bankrupt," and he says, "How'd you go bankrupt?" Then he said, "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how we reckon with these foundation, regrets.

David Gardner: One decision at a time, you bet.

Dan Pink: Yeah, but what it shows us, I think is that again, I think of these four core regrets as a photographic negative of the good life of what we want out of life. One of the things we want out of life is some measure of stability. It's hard to have a life well lived if you're feeling unstable and precarious all the time.

David Gardner: Let's move from foundation regrets then to the second in our taxonomy, if you will and that's boldness regrets. Explain, Dan.

Dan Pink: Boldness regrets are very interesting, they are a pretty big category. Again, just to show you how they straddle domains, think about this. I'll give a business idea to your audience if they want to do it.

David Gardner: Let's do it.

Dan Pink: Here we go. I'm not even joking around, this is a great business idea. Setting up a travel agency that serves people who went to college who regret not studying abroad during college. I have hundreds of those. [laughs] That's like an education regret. Then I also have hundreds of regrets from around the world with pretty much the exact same formulation that goes like this. X years ago, there was a man/women whom I really liked, I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, I didn't because I was too chicken, and I've regretted it ever since. Romance regret. Then I have career regrets that sounds like this. "I can't believe I stayed in this crappy job if only I had started a business. I always wanted to start a business, but I never got around to it." On the surface, these look like very different regrets because it's about romance, education, careers, but it's the same regret deep down. It's a regret that says, "If only I taken the chance." This is a very big category of regret. Like a lot of these regrets, it emerges when we're at a juncture. We're at a juncture, we can play it safe or we can take the chance and over and over again, people regret playing it safe and not taking the chance. I got plenty of people who took a chance and it didn't work out for them and they're less upset than the people who never took the chance at all.

David Gardner: "He who hesitates is lost," as often has been said. We can all look back on our own lives and see moments where we did not show the audacity or even just the lowercase small courage to do something. I hear you there, Dan. I can look back on my own life. How many times have I said to people, "Yeah, I should've taken a gap year. I really would have appreciated college more," and yet I felt like I was on a hamster wheel. I felt like what, wait all of my friends will now graduate a year ahead of me, I can't do that. I have to admit, looking at my own part here, I think I'm head-faking myself when I say that I think that I should've taken a gap here or I regret not doing so. That's my way of saying, how much of the time when somebody says boldness regret would they actually, if given a second chance, do what they are saying that they would do? I suspect a fair amount of us may just be saying things and not really being willing to act on them looking back. I don't know. What do you think?

Dan Pink: That's an interesting question and I don't know the answer to it, but I do think that a lot of us, if given that second chance, would act differently, especially if we reflect on those regrets and think about them carefully and analytically, not just dispense with them, but actually process them and try to draw a lesson from them.

David Gardner: That is indeed a lot of the point of this conversation of your book, that we can't go backwards, we can't relive it, but we can go forward and make better choices. That is a little bit about boldness regret, regret No. 2. Taxonomy continues, No. 3, moral regrets.

Dan Pink: You're at a juncture, you can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing, people do the wrong thing, and lots of us regret it for years. Once again, the universality of this is just breathtaking. Hundreds of people around the world regret bullying kids in school, I was blown away by that. Lots of regrets about infidelity, blown away by that, and then other kinds of moral breaches. This is a relatively small category but to me, it's an intriguing category, and it's also a heartening category in a weird way. Because I find that if all these people are bugged by breaches of doing the right thing earlier in their life, that it sticks with them, to me, it suggests that most of us actually want to be good. It bugs us if we're not good and that we prefer a life where we actually are doing the right thing. Even though this is a small category it is to me, a very heartening category about the human condition.

David Gardner: You and I are doing a video so we're seeing each other even though this is an audio podcast, and I almost felt as if you were my rabbi or priest [laughs] as you talked about the moral regrets that I maybe should have or should be thinking about. It does remind me a little bit of one of my favorite preachers actually no longer living but Morris Boyd who was in New York City. He once had a sermon in praise of hypocrites, and you'd think, "Wait, I'm going to church and that's the sermon?" But his whole point was here's the thing about hypocrites, at least they know the right thing to do even if they're faking doing it. There's something to be said about a moral compass or a North Star where even if people aren't getting there at least they're aware of it so that is praiseworthy. It was a very fun and contrary sermon it always stuck with me.

Dan Pink: I've read some of the research on moral hypocrisy and in general, people despise hypocrites. Hanna Aaron wrote about this, he wrote that people despise hypocrites more than people who are just purely evil. [laughs] People who fake being good and then are not are more worthy of our disdain than people who are just overtly and abashedly evil.

David Gardner: I totally hear you.

Dan Pink: But that said, these moral regrets are pretty interesting, and at times during this well, regret survey I felt like I was running an online confessional. If the writing thing doesn't work out maybe I have a second career as an [laughs] online priest or something.

David Gardner: Well, at one point I think it was about a third of the way through, but I remember you talking about that sometimes the Western, I don't know, a lot of our audience is traditional Western.

Dan Pink: Yeah.

David Gardner: However, you were raised you're of the West, and we assume your morality is my morality. We assume that we all have a general sense of right and wrong but it's a lot more open and squishy than that, isn't it, in reality?

Dan Pink: It's a very good point.

David Gardner: It's your point, Dan.

Dan Pink: It's not even my point, it's basically the point of what we know from moral psychology and particularly encapsulated most brilliantly.

David Gardner: Jonathan Haidt.

Dan Pink: Of Jonathan Haidt, which is that we have some agreement on what's morality we shouldn't cheat people, we shouldn't harm people. But on other kinds of things, there's not as much of a consensus. I'll give you an example of this, David. I have people who in the database, Americans, who really regret not serving in the military, and other people will look at those regrets and say, "What? That's not a regret." It's like, well, no, it is because for this person that he or she, and I heard some plenty of she's both men and women, they felt a moral duty to serve, and that sense of duty, that sense of respecting authority, that form of moral reasoning is very powerful, it's just not shared by everybody.

David Gardner: Thank you for that. Yes, you are right. Here I'm pages 116-117 now I remember, where you do talk about how not every book you read Dan Pink makes a big impression on you, but the Righteous Mind, Haidt's work I think 2012-ish really did change your mind about a few things affected you. That was one of the things you learned. Have you continued to follow his work? What are your thoughts about it?

Dan Pink: There are a couple of big things there. No. 1 is that morality is not one thing it's many things, and morality especially as conceived by Western, secular, well-educated people, is actually somewhat narrower than it is in the rest of the world. Where it includes moral precepts like duty and authority and things being sanctified, so that's one big point. The other point which I think is even more profound it's less directly related to regret is that, well, what Haidt and others have found is that, our instincts about how we make moral decisions is off. We think that we take a controversial moral issue, gay marriage, abortion, whatever, and what we do is we just reason through the pros and cons, the rights and responsibilities, and then arrive at a well-reasoned decision. What Haidt's and others research has shown is that's not how it goes. [laughs] What we do is we have an instinctive emotional response to right or wrong, and then we use reason to justify those instinctive responses. That to me is a revelation when I read that, and as someone who was years ago trained in the law, it exposes I think something that I had an instinct about when I was doing this when I was studying the law, but never had the words or the taxonomy or the construct to understand. But when it comes to moral arguments reason is a press secretary. Its job is to serve the boss and the boss are our innate instinctive, emotional responses to moral questions.

David Gardner: Well said, a lot of criticism aimed at economics especially some of the backward-looking now work was that economists were assuming that humans are rational creatures and so made various assumptions about what you and I would do, efficient market theory if you were lots of other examples. We're all clearly rational creatures so this is what a rational creature would do therefore economics suggests this or that approach. I think we're being reminded, you're helping remind us this week that we're crazy creatures.

Dan Pink: We are complicated, we are much more complicated and nuanced than one would think, and so a single model of human behavior is going to be inherently insufficient. What we want is we want multiple models and we also and this is something that I've been learning David, is we want to wrap our heads around the fact that there are contradictions. That is at some level we are thinking we've always thought of behavior as something that is purely mechanical.

David Gardner: Consistent, yes.

Dan Pink: In many cases, the way that we behave is more like quantum physics where two opposite things exist side-by-side, where, is the cat alive or dead? Yes. [laughs]

David Gardner: Yes, with Schrodinger. Again, I love what you're doing here, Dan, because you and I started talking about taxonomy. The initial assumption you made is that people would have their regrets about their romantic life and about education but you double-clicked and you found that underneath those are four core regrets. To summarize, and then we're going to go to the fourth one, we talked about foundation regrets; if only. We talked about boldness, regrets; I should have, what could have should have. Now we just talked about moral regrets. The fourth one, probably the one that jumps out to me is just most interesting and most affecting, and those are connection regrets.

Dan Pink: Hugely important, the biggest category. Again, if there's one thing that, in his book that change me, I think it's all the stories in connection regret. A connection regret is this, you've got a relationship. It either wasn't intact or should've been intact. To some extent it doesn't matter precisely what the relationship is. It's sometimes with your romantic partner, but often not, parents and kids, kids and parents, siblings, other relatives, huge numbers of regrets about friends. What happens is this, you have this relationship or should've had this relationship and it comes apart. Now, what's interesting is how profoundly undramatic the way these relationships come apart. They very rarely explode, and very rarely involves people throwing dishes that each other, and cursing each other out, they tend to drift. What happens is that one person says, "Oh, I should reach out," but it feels really awkward and the other side is not going to care. They drift even further apart, and that sticks with people. To me, the lesson of these connection regrets, and there's a lot of good evidence in the literature about this is that your fears about it being awkward, it's way less awkward than you're going to think. Is it going to be well received? It is almost always is well received. We're actually hobbled by essentially a fake barrier.

David Gardner: Something we're telling ourselves in our own heads?

Dan Pink: Exactly. In doing some of these interviews, there was this one woman who drifted apart from a very, very close college friend. It really bugged her. This drift went over more than 20 years. She said, "You know what? I would reach out, but I haven't talked to her for a while, and she is going to think it's creepy, and she is not going to care." Finally, in my role as priest Rabbi, I said to her, [laughs] "OK, hold on a second." Just let me put it the other way. The second woman's name was Gen, "What if Gen reached out to you, would you think that was creepy?" She said, "Oh, no. That would be the best day of my life, I would be so touched." Again, this wacky species that you and I are both members of sometimes are imprisoned by what's called pluralistic ignorance. That is, we think we believe something and we're so special that no one else believes it. There's an old journalistic adage, always extrapolate from your own experience, you're not that special.

David Gardner: Wow, Dan, so this interview is speaking back to a number of past Rule Breaker Investing interviews authors I've had on. Just off the top of my head right away, let me mention Steven Pinker, who in his book and in a lot of his work, he points out that when you ask Americans, are you happy? Dan Pink, are you happy? Something like 81% of us say, "Yes, I'm happy." Then you ask Dan Pink, "Are others, in your opinion, happy? You'll say no. Twenty seven percent of us think that the other fellow Americans are happy. That jumps out to me, Pinker's work. Nick Epley, you include one of these studies in your book, Nick Epley, I had on the podcast in May of 2017. I want you to retell the story very briefly. I realize it's just one of 1,000 different studies you probably looked at, including your own. I don't know how well you remember this but Nick's job as a social psychologist in Chicago, he decided, with a research partner, to pay people to hang out on the L or Chicago subway and initiate conversations with strangers. Initially, this sounds a lot like what you just said, but it's really underlining it, Dan. Initially, people thought, "Wait, that's going to be painful. You're paying me to start a conversation with strangers. I don't want to do that," and?

Dan Pink: Epley and his team had these research participants go on this commuter train into downtown Chicago. They said, "Your job, you've got to strike up conversations with strangers." They had something to predict, how are you going to feel about that? How's the stranger going to feel about it? The prediction was, "Oh, my god, it's going to be the most awkward thing in my life. I mean, I hate every second of it." How is the other side going to feel? "They are going to hate it." Spoiler alert? It wasn't awkward, it was actually enjoyable, and the other side was into it. We're not great forecasters of our own behavior. We don't realize, at some level, how similar we're to other people, and we don't want to admit that. 

The other thing about it is that we don't realize actually that we change over time. Dan Gilbert has done some very good research on this. The classic example of this is, if you say to me, "Hey, Dan, are you different at all when you were 25?", "Oh, my god, I'm so different. I'm just a completely different person. I have different interests, and different values, and things like that." "What do you think you're going to be like when you're 75?" "Oh, pretty much like I am now." [laughs] We are not very good forecasters about ourselves. We have these various blind spots. That's one of the things. I'm glad you mentioned this, David, because I think it's one of the things that I like about this emotion of regret. It is a negative emotion and we tend to shy away from it. The last few years immersed in this, it is an incredibly clarifying emotion. It clarifies, it instructs, it teaches us. If we're open to receiving its messages and its lessons, it is actually transformative.

David Gardner: Again, we're talking about connection regrets here and whether you think that other people are unhappy while you're happy, or you think that that stranger would never want to talk to you on the plane or the train, you're probably not right, and you're going to feel some connection regret later on. I'm thinking now, back to the world of money, sticking with connection regrets. Dan, I had Amy Castoro who wrote a book called Preparing Heirs, I think in its new edition, it's Bridging Generations but Amy and her ilk have pointed out, this is about generational wealth being passed down. Seven times out of 10, studies have shown, done by Roy Williams and others, over decades, globally, 7 times out of 10, passing down wealth to the next generation fails.

It does not accomplish the goals of gramps, and grandma, or the legacy that they thought that they were setting up. Why? I would say in Dan Pink's words, "Connection regret it." Turns out you're not getting fleeced by the estate lawyer or by an inept or fraudulent wealth manager. The reason this fails most of the time is you didn't communicate. You didn't include your kids or your grand kids in terms of, are they aware of what's happening? Are they onboard with what you're thinking of? You didn't ultimately connect with those for whom you were setting up this legacy. In the money world, and this isn't a surprise, this is just an eye-opener when I talked to Amy, and I realized for the first time that this is very common but now, connecting that into Dan Pink's work, I see that it's connection regret, it's just a failure of connection.

Dan Pink: I agree with that completely. There is one piece of very tactical advice in this book that's been meaningful to me which is that, if you are at a juncture in your life and you think, "Should I reach out or should I not reach out?" It could be with your children and grandchildren, it could be with your friends, whatever, if you say, "Should I reach out?" You answered the question. The answer to the question is yes, you should reach out. I think that to me, on a personal level, that is one of the most profound takeaways of this. People deeply regret not reaching out and it could be simply making that phone call, taking that visit. I have David, hundreds, of people who deeply regret missing funerals. I have a regret about that myself, about missing a friend's funeral. When in doubt, always reach out. If there's a single lesson from all these 16,000 people, to me, that's what it is. As you're saying, it not only has a restorative effect on our well-being, but it actually has a knock-on effect of allowing us to plan better for the future.

David Gardner: Is this a challenge to the introverts? We often hear that the extroverts get energy by being connected with other people, the introverts like to be by themselves more or to reprocess by themselves. This is obviously cartoonish in its simplicity as I summarize this.

Dan Pink: Yes.

David Gardner: But is this a call out to introverts to make sure that they are connecting?

Dan Pink: Maybe. I think that the introvert-extrovert research is much more nuanced than Myers-Briggs would have it, and most of us are a little bit of both. It's possible to reach out to people in a quiet way. Reaching out doesn't mean going to a party and putting a lamp shade on your head and dancing on the table, [laughs] it could simply mean sending an email or a text to your college roommate, so that's part of it. But what's interesting is that there is a dimension of this in the boldness regrets. It's very interesting that they pick up on. Again, the commonality, the universality is just breathtaking. I have hundreds of people who regret their words, not mine, "I wish I'd spoken up, I wish I'd said something, I wish I'd asserted myself". You have very few people who regret asserting themselves. Being too bold, some of them being too extroverted. I do have some people who say, I regret being too introverted. As someone who like me, I'm a writer, I'm in the middle of things, I'm more introverted than extrovert, I'm not a super strong introvert, there is some pretty good evidence that if you are somewhat introverted on that spectrum, that trying to nudge yourself a little more toward the center is probably good for your well-being.

David Gardner: All right, Dan. Well, there's no doubt more we can say and probably will this week about regret, we're going to continue that, but I want to click out for a sec. Let's go matter a little bit. I want to talk about book crafting and how Dan Pink books are made, where they come from, how many more they are going to, whatever you'd like to say. I want to start though with the conversation you and I had some months ago just hanging out with each other and at a certain point you said, "I got stuck a little bit". I think it was on this book, I'll let you speak to it Dan, but I got stuck and then tapped into your friend Fred. Fred who lives, I think, in Argentina and Fred who I know because it's Fred Kofman who's a conscious capitalist and has written a book called Conscious Business. But Fred said, Dan, it's because, what's the purpose of this book? What I loved about that is purpose and purpose-driven, and I'm wondering Dan, what did the purpose of this book end up being? Do you regret not having purposes for your other books? Or let's just talk about purpose a little bit.

Dan Pink: I'm so glad that you mentioned that. In the early days of working on this, I was not getting any traction. I was, forgive the cliche, I was spinning my wheels. I was going to the office all day and not getting anything done. I wasn't making any progress and it was so frustrating to me because I'm usually a reasonably productive person. I'm a tortoise not a hare, but I'm a tortoise who moves forward every single day, [laughs] and I was tortoise on my back and I was so frustrated, David, and I didn't know what to do. I reached out to people and I said, I think I might need a coach. A friend of ours pointed me to Fred who said, "OK, I'm not really coaching anymore, but I'm happy to talk to you for a little bit". He was in Mexico at the time via Zoom, and I talked to him and told him what's going on. Maybe like 15 minutes in, it didn't even take him any time to diagnose what the problem was. He is, "Oh, I know what's going on here. You don't have a purpose for this book". I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You don't know why you're writing this, you don't have a purpose. I don't even want to talk to you anymore, Dan. [laughs] What I want you to do is I want you to write me an email telling me what the purpose of this book is. Then once you do that, we'll talk again". I'm like, "Man, you're supposed to help me write not give me more writing assignments". [laughs] I hand and I hard and I realized that he was right. I was a little resentful. I realized that he was right, and I thought about it. It took me like two weeks and I finally started thinking about it and I wrote it out and I sent him an email. The email said what the purpose of the book is, and he says, "OK, now we're talking, now you can get unstuck". Now again, you and I are talking by video conference.

David Gardner: Yes. You're looking to your right. It's like you have something posted on your wall to your right of your computer, something like that.

Dan Pink: Exactly. What I've got here is that thing that I drafted it for Fred.

David Gardner: Love it.

Dan Pink: I used it as like a signpost, a North Star, where I say, I'll read it to you, "The purpose of this book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion and to help people enlisted to make wiser choices. By changing the conversation about human flourishing, this book will spark millions of people to reclaim their own regrets and thereby lead richer, fuller lives."

David Gardner: Wow, I should have led off the whole interview this week with that. Why leave that buried until minute 34 or something? But that's powerful man.

Dan Pink: But I think the interesting thing about that is how much knowing why we're doing something and having a purpose for what we're doing is clarifying. I keep coming back to that word David, and I think it's partly a pandemic word because the pandemic feels so hazy and muddy and confused and sluggish, is that we're looking for clarity. I think purpose gives us clarity and as I mentioned before, I think regrets give us clarity also. A big part of I think what's going on in these last two years is people throbbing around trying to make sense of their own lives and we're not that well equipped to do that. Here I am who writes books about human behavior, I'm stalled and stagnating and languishing myself and I have to [laughs] make a cry for help to Fred the prophet to tell me what to do. Anything that we can use to find clarity, I think is really powerful. Purpose gives us clarity. I think that regrets give us clarity, I think to some extent, reckoning with our mortality gives us clarity as well.

David Gardner: Well said. Dan I'm thinking, is The Power of Regret the first Dan Pink book that had a purpose statement?

Dan Pink: It's the first one that had a purpose statement. If I ever wrote a book again and believe me, that's an open question, I would do that purpose exercise again. The previous books, I think there was a purpose that was latent in there, that was embedded in there, but it wasn't as explicit. It wasn't the kind of thing where literally, David, in a struggle to write a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, I would look over and say, "Oh yeah, that's why I'm doing this."

David Gardner: Dan, you and I have talked over the years at Fool events and on this podcast about a number of your other books. This question is about is there any narrative arc going on here in your mind reflecting back on the books that you've written? Just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of a whole new mind. I'm thinking of something totally different that I thought was so much fun. The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, I'm thinking of When. Do you see any thread looking back that make sense? Do you see purpose? What underlies all of your truly amazing New York Times best-selling literary work?

Dan Pink: I don't know if there is a thread. There might be a thread retrospectively that we can concoct, but prospectively there was no thread at all, it's much more mundane than that. It is, what am I curious about and what am I so curious about and so interested in that I'm willing to spend years working on it, but not only that, but also subsequent years still talking about it? You mentioned a whole new mind. That book came out almost 15 years ago and I'm still totally psyched to talk about that. [laughs] There might be a life lesson here, but when I think about writing a book, it's really hard to write a book. It's a giant pain. It's so difficult. Every single one has been really hard to do. You have to pick something that you adore, that you love, that you obsess over, that you can't live without and most topics aren't that way. You really have to be selective about what you choose. For me, what was more important is not so much fashioning some strategic literary plan [laughs] and executing that than it was at this moment in my life, do I want to spend two and a half, three years learning about regret? Previously, do I want to spend two and a half, three years learning about the science of timing? That's all that it is. It's a very singular metric which is, do I want to live with this deeply for a few years and at least lightly possibly for decades?

David Gardner: Earlier you said that Jonathan Hey, teaches us that while we might try to lawyerly construct some logical proof of why we are where we are, in fact, it's our gut and then we justify it backwards. I appreciate Dan, you not trying to say there is a narrative arc because there wasn't and that will be faking it.

Dan Pink: Prospectively there was none. There was no overarching strategy behind this. Retrospectively, maybe someone interpreting it might see a connection, but believe me, that connection was not intentional. Now, the other interesting thing about this goes to something we were talking about earlier is this, I don't want to get all woo-woo on you right now, I mean I do but [laughs] I'm recognizing how unpleasant that can be. [laughs] The person who wrote Free Agent Nation in 2001 is a different person from the person who wrote The Power of Regret in 2022. On this particular book, there is no way in God's green Earth I would've written a book about regret in my 30s. I didn't have the perspective, I didn't have enough mileage on me. In my 50s at some level it felt inevitable, because I'm reckoning with these things. I mean, we are similarly situated, we're at a juncture in our life where we look backward and there's a mileage there, but we also look forward and there's also some mileage there. You had that incredible podcasts where you basically announced that you were going to do something else and try to figure out what that is, and that's not a podcast and not movie you would've made 25 years ago. But now it seems inevitable, and I think that for me, writing this book about regrets felt in a weird way, inevitable at this stage in my life because I myself I'm looking for that guidance and that clarity of how to have a well-lived life for the next, I hope, several decades on this planet.

David Gardner: Beautifully said Dan. One word that you've used repeatedly, especially in the last ten minutes, clarity, clarify, clarity. I'm not sure, is Claritas the latin route. Anyway, so I'm thinking about clarity, and that clarity, the purpose gives you. I'm thinking going forward from here, now that you've written your first purpose-driven, if you will, book, do you see more clarity about what's next for you? I hear you cagily mention that you might or might not ever do a book again. I hear you saying, and I've done this too, they're really hard to do and as a lazy bum, I can absolutely appreciate that I don't like to have to work really hard if I can work smart instead. Dan, where are you right now going forward?

Dan Pink: I'm not sure. In the very short term, I'm excited to enact the purpose of this book, which is to try to help people reclaim regret, use it as that force for clarity that you were just mentioning. Beyond that, I don't know. I'm trying to be as open to it and also recognizing that if I look back on this juncture in my life in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, what I'm going to regret is pretty clear. I'm going to regret not being bold, and I'm going to regret not having connections to other people. Those are the two things that will haunt me, and so that's going to inform what I do next. I will tell you that just part of me is intrigued by this idea, having written books for 20 years is intrigued by the possibility of being a beginner at something. That is an idea that I can't get out of my head, is going and doing something where I am an absolute beginner. Think about oil painting. I've never picked up a brush or music or other kinds of artistic expression. [OVERLAPPING]

David Gardner: A whole new mind?

Dan Pink: Even something athletic, something where I'm a complete beginner, because there's something exhilarating about being a beginner. Because you learn so much so fast. For me, the marginal learning I'm going to get, going from book 7 to book 8, is going to be less than the marginal learning I'm going to go from painting 0 to painting 1.

David Gardner: Two quick questions about book grafting. Let's just geek out a little bit here, Dan. One thing I really appreciate in both The Power of Regret, I definitely had in your previous book when you didn't have it though in a whole new mind because I was looking back at it earlier. In your table of contents, there's like a little summary underneath each of the chapters, there's the takeaways, so you can almost read a Dan Pink table of contents. This is really great for the Good Morning America morning show book crowd, they can basically know the book through the table of contents. I thought that's a pretty genius aid to memory and just learning for people, when did you start that?

Dan Pink: Thank you for mentioning that. I really appreciate that because that's very intentional. I did that in drive. The reason that I did it in drive is that, I don't remember the book, but I saw it in other books, and I said, wow, I like this as a reader. Because it gives me a chance to preview it, but also because sometimes we read books in this fashion where I read a third of it once, and then I'll put it down for a week. Then I think it up again and [OVERLAPPING] I need to get back into it [laughs], and so it's something that I admired and books that I read, and once again, not succumbing to pluralistic ignorance. I said, well, if I dig this then other readers will dig it too. Thank you for mentioning that, I don't think any interviewers ever mentioned that before.

David Gardner: Well, you're welcome.

Dan Pink: It is so intentional as a way to help readers figure out, is this book for them, if they are looking at it online or in a bookstore, but also recognizing the reality of people's lives is that it's not like, oh my God, Dan Pink has a book out, I'm going to stop everything in my life and clear all the deck, so I can read it from [laughs] the first words to the last word, and only a few sittings with barely up brake just [laughs] to fortify myself. No. It's like I'm going to read two chapters here, and then I'm going to be waiting in the DMV, and I'm going to read another chapter, and then I'm going to be at my kid soccer game, and I'm going to read the third chapter, and I want to get people ways to get back into the flow of the argument in the storytelling.

David Gardner: You do it very successfully with that. It's a small thing, but I like to learn. The devil or God depending on your viewpoint, both of them are in the details, and so I really appreciate that you took the time to do that. Sometimes I think part of what I'm trying to do speaking purpose on this earth, is just find good stuff and share it and spread it to as many people as possible. I hope some authors are listening, and we'll take a look after they purchase your book this week, The Power of Regret. We'll take a look at what you've done with the table of contents for the last couple of books, because, I would love to see that catch on my other book crafting question. 

Dan, this one, maybe as a little bit more onerous for fellow authors, but I'm going to ask you to coach fellow non-fictional authors here. What you did with this book, The American Regret Project, the effort you made with Qualtrics, it looks amazing. You talked to thousands and thousands of people, but you've also made it sound as if it was a lot easier, thanks to new technology, it was a lot easier than it would've been 50 or 25 years ago. My question is, basically, would you be inspired to do more original, new research if you were to write another book? Would you suggest fellow authors do the same, it's easier than ever before? Or was this just a one-off?

David Gardner: That's an easy one, David. I would definitely do something like this, again. I really think that we have the tools that are available right now to gather material to do analysis are just extraordinary. I have to say, I am not a data scientist but when someone like me, like a reasonably curious, fairly mildly numerous person, can use these tools. That is a game-changer, and I do think that nonfiction books and other forms of analysis are going to be this marriage of the great narrative and emotion in storytelling and insights that we can glean from collecting massive amounts of data. If I were to write another book, absolutely, I would use a technique like this. Again, my hunch is that the tools would be even better, more powerful, and cheaper.

David Gardner: It is the story of technology really throughout the last couple of centuries and especially the acceleration that the Internet has brought for so many of us in so many different ways, in this case, authors included. Well, Dan, thank you for kicking out with me about book crafting a little bit. Well, let's get to our buy-seller hold but before we do, let me just mention what's happening on next week's Rule Breaker Investing. Well, next week it's going to be time to review some five stock samplers. Now, a disclaimer. If you want to blow next week's episode off, you can be my guest. Because reviewing my five stock samplers may not be as fun as it normally has been in the past. Wait, you're still interested? I hope you're not just listening for the schadenfreude, well then please join me and my guest star analysts next week as we review five stock strategy mystery, five stocks that spark joy, and five stocks rolled up at random. Now why do I do that? Well, let's close with one of my favorite things I've done with you. We've done this with many others in the past, but I don't think I've done enough in recent years. It's a buy, sell, hold segment, so you know what's coming, Dan Pink.

Dan Pink: I know generally what's coming out, I have no idea what's coming actually.

David Gardner: It's true because I never pre-submit interview questions or what we're going to do so you don't know what's coming. In deference to you speaking here to my listeners, Dan has no idea what we're going to do next other than I'm going to ask them about. We got six things queued up, just got a short answers, but if these were stocks, none of them is. If these were stocks which be buying, i.e. you like it, or you think the future is good selling the opposite or holding you're somewhere in between. Back to buy, sell or hold, a classic Motley Fool trope, you ready, Dan?

Dan Pink: Yes.

David Gardner: As you will ever be. Buy, sell or hold Number 1. New year's resolutions.

Dan Pink: I'm going to buy. I think there's some good research on temporal landmarks, and I think the new year's resolutions get a little bit of a bad rap, because people say by February, people have abandoned half of their resolutions, and I'm like, well, let me say kept half of them too. That's pretty good, so I'm going to buy new year's resolutions.

David Gardner: Buy, sell or hold Daniel Kahneman and explain who he is briefly for those few people listening who may not know. Buy, sell or hold Kahneman.

Dan Pink: Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist of Israeli descent who won the Nobel Prize in economics for work that he did over many years with Amos Tversky, who sadly passed away before the Nobel Prize was awarded. I'm a total buy on that. I think he's been a revolutionary figure in our understanding of ourselves, and actually, a pushback to the idea that human beings are purely rational calculators of our economic self-interest, that we're much more inscrutable and unpredictable, and are often will fall down various cognitive trap doors, so Kahneman, buy.

David Gardner: The work that he has done has been referenced by so many. I mean, it is truly revolutionary. It's one of those Nobel Prizes that was completely deserved because, wow, has he ever affected the way we think about ourselves, Jonathan, I'd et cetera. I will mention Kahneman and who's been to Fool HQ before we've done some interviews with them. Not really a big stock market guy, so I'm selling Kahneman saying that you should never buy individual stocks. I definitely disagree with that point, but we need to be able to disagree with the great exemplars of our time on something. Dan Pink, Number 3, buy, sell or hold the Winter Olympics.

Dan Pink: I'm going to hold.

David Gardner: Now, I know a lot is going through your mind here, Dan. I know you and I are both sports fans. There are also international implications this year, and then I didn't even say this year.

Dan Pink: That's exactly why I'm holding. You're not going to find someone on the planet who loves the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat more than I. [laughs] The winter games are a great venue for that. On the international front, I'm pretty disturbed by a lot of the things that China is doing and so I'm uncomfortable blessing that country with something as grand as the Winter Olympics, so I'm going to put myself as a hold on that one.

David Gardner: Well said. Dan Pink buy, sell, or hold, economists?

Dan Pink: I'm going to buy because I think that at this point they've taken such a beating that it's an undervalued stock. [laughs] If you think about what economists are doing, look at the guy like Raj Chetty at Harvard. He's an economist, but what he's doing is he's taking these incredible, gigantic datasets and using them to figure out things like, how much does it matter what kind of neighborhood you grow up in to your overall well-being? The idea that pure neoclassical economics is the best explainer for behavior or for the world that's flawed. But I think that the profession of economics, which is about understanding decisions made under scarcity and also using mathematical methods to find insights and data is something that is extraordinarily valuable.

David Gardner: I agree, and I'm a strong buy as well. Maybe in part because, I don't know it's always been the dismal science.

Dan Pink: Yeah.

David Gardner: The Fool in me wants to go against conventional wisdom with you and say, it is valuable and clearly it is an offshoot of this one, this is not number 5 yet. Buy, sell, or hold The Economist?

Dan Pink: The Economist magazine.

David Gardner: Yeah, I figured out I'll throw it in there.

Dan Pink: I think, I'm going to hold, maybe a lean toward to buy. I like its coverage of international affairs from a European perspective. Its editorial policy is very neoclassical economics. I can take that with a grain of salt. They also gave me a really bad review of one of my books years ago.

David Gardner: But you're rising above, you're bigger than that.

Dan Pink: Yeah, but I'm only making it a hold, not a buy if you think of that. [laughs] It shows you like, I'm picking stocks nominally to see which is going to rise in value, and yet I can't get past a grudge. [laughs]

David Gardner: Yet you're saying it, which says a lot of good things about you. Dan, slightly more seriously, how do you keep up with the news? There are infinite ways of Facebook to CNN, to Fox News to Internet, to being texted by friend, Google News. How do you stay informed in a way that you feel represents the truth as best as it could be objectively presented?

Dan Pink: That's a tough one. I'll tell you, I spend relatively little time on social media, very little in fact. I spend very little time watching cable news. I don't find those that revealing. We can think about this almost like buy, sell, or hold, or overvalued or undervalued.

David Gardner: Sure.

Dan Pink: I think that social media overvalued, cable TV news, overvalued. What I think are undervalued are things like email newsletters, and not only the recent bout of Substack things. Although there are some that are very good, but just The New York Times daily newsletter is one of the best things out there. 1440 is another great daily email newsletter. Dave Pell's newsletter NextDraft is outstanding. I find that those kinds of filters and distillations of news are very helpful to me, that's one thing. The second thing is that I also still believe in long-form journalism, because long-form journalism is often fact check. The things like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. One of the things I used there, is I use something called Instapaper, where I can essentially save it to read on my iPad later, so I use that a lot. I still believe in books, I think we can glean a lot from books. I wish books were better edited. I think that almost every nonfiction book would be twice as good as if it were half as long but I still believe in books. When I say books I not only mean nonfiction books, I also mean novels. I like to read novels and I think that we understand the world and can empathize with other people through reading novels. Novels, undervalued, email newsletters, undervalued, social media, overvalued, cable TV, overvalued.

David Gardner: Thank you. I think I agree on all points. Since you did throw out some newsletters that you value, and I think the world is to the trustworthy filterers. It's a very valuable contribution in a world that is just, there are so many things but Dan, I should ask you about a novel. How about recommend something a good read, anytime last five years, something that jumped out that you enjoyed, recent or old. What's a novel we all should read?

Dan Pink: There are so many great novel. I'll tell you one that I think that your audience would really dig, which is a novel called Black Buck and it is a novel, you're going to love this, in the form of a almost like a sales training guide. It's like a story of a guy who decides to go into sales and he's giving advice on sales along the way, but he's also navigating start-up culture. He's African American, so he's navigating various kinds of ratio divides. It's a really brilliant, hilarious novel. I really like that book Black Buck quite a bit. There's another one that I really like by novelist named Yaa Gyasi called Transcendent Kingdom. I actually love reading stories of immigrants to the United States. It's a novel essentially about Ghanaian immigrants. Not something that we would often read about in most traditional novels. She's a brilliant writer.

David Gardner: Wonderful. Thank you Dan. Those are two I could add to my list, and by the way, because I can Google quickly, I had not heard of Black Buck before. It looks like the author's name, I'm going to do my best here, Mateo Askaripour.

Dan Pink: Yeah.

David Gardner: Really interesting. Both of those sound very interesting. Thank you. I got two more buy, sell, hold for you. Let's stay on the topic of how we while away our hours, buy, sell, or hold Netflix?

Dan Pink: I think I'm going to hold. There's some very good stuff on there. There's also a paradox of choice issue going on where you flick open Netflix and then you just sit there paralyzed for 20 minutes because you don't know what to watch. My antidote for that is on Dropbox, I keep a running file of things that I want to watch so instead of looking at that, I look at my list.

David Gardner: Your list. A friend mentions it, you're out of coffee assuming you're socially distanced with that person and you're like, "I should add that to my list." I do the same thing. I use Evernote in my case, but I hear you. Netflix isn't just a streaming services, is also a stock that is, for a lot of us a big holding that's lost a lot of value in recent weeks. It's also more broadly a microcosm of something much bigger; streaming. I'm curious, HBO Max, Amazon Prime. Dan, are you subscribed to all of these? Do you pick and choose? What's your approach to streaming?

Dan Pink: I've got Amazon, I've got HBO Max, I've got Netflix, I've got Hulu, and that is more than enough. [laughs] Also, I have Apple TV. I think I'm over-index there.

David Gardner: Possibly even one or two more that will occur to you later. Wag [laughs] recently suggested in social media that you know what should happen is somebody should take a lot of these services, bundle them all together and call it cable.

Dan Pink: How about that? The history of media is basically a history of bundling or unbundling things.

David Gardner: [laughs] Let's close it out with buy, sell, or hold, self-criticism?

Dan Pink: I'm going to sell, and the reason is that I've read the research. I'm going to sell self-esteem also. What I'm going to buy is something called self-compassion. Self-esteem has some benefits, but it can lead to narcissism and lack of effort. Self-criticism fields morally virtuous, I love it but there's very little argument for its effectiveness. Instead, I'm going to sell both of those and I'm going to cash those in and put all the money into self-compassion, which is the work pioneered by Kristin Neff at University of Texas, who says that, "When we have mistakes and setbacks, we should treat ourselves with the same kindness that we would treat somebody else. That we should recognize that our mistakes are not definitional of who we are. They're just a moment in our lives, and that a lot of what we do, a lot of our setbacks, a lot of our mistakes are just part of the human condition. Once we at some level exonerate ourselves with self-compassion, it doesn't lead to complacency, it actually is fortifying and allows us to take the kinds of actions to lead a better life."

David Gardner: Sounds like some other voices we've had on this podcast before, Shirzad Chamine, among them. Dan Pink, thank you very much for playing buy, sell, hold with us here on Rule Breaker Investing. We prerecorded this last week, but this actually is coming out to listeners on Groundhog Day. I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you in closing damping, buy, sell, or hold, Groundhog Day?

Dan Pink: I'm going to sell, man. [laughs] Let's get rid of superstitious. [laughs] I would much rather check the weather forecast on February 2nd then I want to see what happens to some road in Pennsylvania.

David Gardner: I hear you're Punxsutawney Phil fans beware. Dan Pink thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the purposeful work. I love the purpose statement for this book and what you said. I trust that you were already in the process of achieving that at the level of millions of people and that is a great service to the world. Fool on my friend.

Dan Pink: Thank you, David.