hi everybody tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday for the long version tune in on Wednesdays.

hi everyone I'm Nikolai Tangen the CEO of the Norwegian so wealth fund.

and today I'm thrilled to welcome Dan pink who has written seven New York Times bestsellers he's done groundbreaking work on the power of regret work creativity behaviors and so on.

and so today we'll talk mainly about regret drive and timing.

so welcome Dan.

thank you thank you great to be here.

so your latest book "The Power of Regret" explores that we should kind of learn from our regrets.

Now My Philosophy has always been to kind of try to learn from it and move on but you think a bit differently no.

I think that's I think we're we're actually we're actually fairly close.

what I'm really pushing back against is this idea especially here in America where people say I don't have any regrets everything happens for a reason that the path to a life well lived is to be positive all the time never be negative to always look forward never look back.

and that is Prof profoundly bad advice.

okay you mentioned that there are several types of regrets I think you divide them into four and one is the fation regret right.

the fact that you didn't work harder.

yeah so well you worked hard you you did a law degree at Yale so you must have very hard but but the yeah.

so so so just to give it just to give some context to this what I did is I I did a I gathered regrets from people all over the world.

I put an online survey a qualitative piece of research and we now have a database of regrets from about 26,000 people in 134 countries.

so it's it's pretty remarkable.

and around the world it seemed people had the same four core regrets.

one of them was this regret that I call Foundation regret.

which is actually it's interesting because I think there's a financial component to it.

it's small decisions people make early in life no single one of which is cataclysmic but that leads to terrible consequences later on.

and so the classic one is I spent too much and saved too little and now I'm broke.

Now you say you should tell people about your regrets right.

yeah.

uh why.

a couple of reasons.

number one it's an unburdening of sorts.

uh that there is there's some evidence that when we uh it's sort of a lifting of the weight of your shoulders.

but I think there's a more important one with more important reason than simply the unburdening and it's this it's a there's a sensemaking function.

we have a lot of evidence about this um when people uh write about their regrets or talk about their regrets there's a transformation that occurs.

regret like all negative emotions is Blobby it's amorphous it's vapor.

when we write about them or talk about them we convert that vapor into words which are concrete and those are less menacing and we can scrutinize them we can analyze them we can interrogate them.

so I think there's a there's a there's a very strong uh argument for doing that.

what's more you mentioned leadership before we we make a forecasting error sometimes when we say if we talk about our mistakes or our vulnerabilities people will think less of us.

and in many cases not all but in many cases they actually think more of us.

they admire cander they admire our courage.

well nobody likes perfect people that's true too.

I mean that's a more parsimonious explanation.

one um kind of last fun thing from the book I thought was that you uh photograph uh the Olympic uh kind of Champions right the gold medal winners really happy and the bronze people really happy the silver people not happy what's that about.

well it's interesting this is a really interesting piece of so I mean you know you have a background in social psychology.

this is one of those very provocative findings in Social psychology that has been replicated multiple times.

so uh uh it's it's goes back to counterfactual thinking.

there are two kinds of counterfactual thinking we can do we can do a downward counterfactual and an upward counterfactual.

all right an upward counterfactual is when we imagine how things could have been better.

upward counterfactuals that's a regret they make us feel worse but they can help us do better.

downward counterfactuals are when you imagine how things could have been worse.

so I see a lot in the database particularly when it comes to romantic regrets mostly women saying I regret marrying that idiot but at least I have these two great kids.

so I can imagine how things could have turned out worse.

in the in the Olympic medal example the the silver medalist was like ah if only I write about a bike race if only I pedal a little bit faster I could have been a gold medalist.

the the bronze medalist is like H at least I finished third rather than that Schmo who finished fourth who doesn't have any medals at all.

do cosos have stronger drives than others.

I don't know I mean it probably depends on the probably depends on the CEO.

if you pressed me to the wall and said you had and I had offer a yes no answer to that I would say no.

um I just think you know CEOs could be CEOs not because they have a stronger drive because they're they're Wier they're better at politics.

um they're they're you know they're they're they're tall uh they're male uh they're more conformist.

so that could be why they're CEOs too rather than rather they have some kind of innate drive that separates them from the great unwashed who aren't CEOs.

so when you look at the the cohort of CEOs what do you what do you think it depends.

I mean it's it's it's varied.

I think there's a big difference between a CEO who comes up through the ranks and a CEO who is a Founder first of all.

I think those are two they both have the same name CEO but I think that they're different species.

so what do you so how do you st they so you should do W inam morning okay.

so um for the 80% of us who are not night owls now night we have an outlier here the people who are the opposite of you who naturally wake up late and go to sleep late who we think are Laz and the nightclubs exactly.

we think that those people are diletant and not serious they just have a different chrony many of them just have a different chronotype.

um let's take the 80% of us who are either like you or like me here's what you should do early in the day that's when we should do our analytic work.

and analytic work is work that requires heads down Focus and attention.

writing is a good example of that analyzing data figuring out a strategy something that requires heads down Focus.

the reason for that is that is that during this peak period that we have mostly early in the day for most of us we're most we're more Vigilant we're able to batle away distractions.

so do your analytic work early in the day.

the middle of the day early afternoon mid-afternoon it's generally a terrible time of day.

and we see Inc there's incredible research on like health like errors in healthcare in the afternoon lack of handwashing in the the healthc care data.

you don't want to have an operation in the he.

you absolutely do not.

nobody in my family is permitted I mean if you get hit by a bus and there's no other choice yeah but a discretionary there is nobody in my family who is permitted to have a medical procedure in the afternoon.

I'm not I'm not joking around.

Dad what's the key to good breaks.

the the conceptual key to breaks and this is important um is um thinking of breaks as part of your work rather than a deviation from your work.

number one something is better than nothing so even a short break is better than no break at all.

second uh social is better than solo so that breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on your own.

even with uh even for introverts we know not a surprise.

moving is better than stationary so a break my having a break here sitting staring at the space not as good as just going out and for a walk.

very interesting for um I I think around the world is outside is better than inside.

and this to me is one of those insights in science that is underappreciated.

the advantage of being outside the advantage of being and I don't mean in National Park.

I mean you and I are talking here in Washington DC taking a walk outside in Washington DC and seeing the trees.

um and then finally uh the The Importance of breakes Being fully detached.

does it mean that taking a break into your desk and looking at at the screen is a good thing.

it's probably not a good thing because it violates the outside and the Mo motion uh and the social side of it.

so uh it's probably that's probably a bad that's that's a suboptimal kind of break.

yeah the optimal kind of break is in the afternoon go out for a walk 15 20 minutes with someone you like leaving your phone behind talking about something other than work.

that's a good break.

naps naps.

I've I this is this is one of those cases where the science changed my position my political position.

I was politically opposed to naps because I thought they were a sign of laziness.

uh and I always felt terrible if I ever to I didn't take naps very often.

if I took a nap I always felt terrible I would wake up really groggy sort of ashamed of myself.

um what what it shows is that problem I had was that every time I took a break my boss came in and thought I was so bad.

but now this and the reason why I want to talk about it now is so that everybody understands that I'm taking that I'm taking it up for a reason a good reason.

it's a sign it's a you're if you walk into nikolai's office and he's taking a break it's just another marker that he's an extremely high perform.

that's how you should interpret that.

thank you.