If you are picking your way through the late phases of the pandemic, re-examining your motivation and purpose, reshaping your working days and weeks for a hybrid world, or considering career paths not taken, then Daniel Pink has a book to sell you.
Twenty-one years ago, the US author’s first book, Free Agent Nation, picked up the early threads of remote and flexible working in what is now the “gig economy”. Drive located people’s core motivation in the catchy triad of autonomy, mastery and purpose. When was about how to time your schedule and career moves to greatest effect. His latest, The Power of Regret, turns what Pink calls “our most misunderstood emotion” into a source of inspiration for future action.
Organisations used to start from the premise that “not everybody deserved autonomy, that not everybody could be trusted”, says Pink, and that only over time would they permit some independence to selected staff. “We just had a two-year experiment with that and — you know what? — [remote working] showed that you could trust people . . . Now, some people will disprove that, no question, but I think we found that most people won’t . . . You can’t unscramble that egg.”
Pink is clever enough not to take credit for having predicted this particular future of work. Apart from anything else, he fits into that category of writers, along with Simon Sinek or Malcolm Gladwell, who translate the in-depth behavioural and sociological research of academics (duly acknowledged) into readable, usable ideas.
He admits that the unscrambling of old corporate ways has been faster and messier than he thought it would be when he turned freelance, having served as a speechwriter for Al Gore, then US vice-president.
His first books emerged before the smartphone and social media accelerated the trends for flexible and freelance work that he had identified. Risk transferred more quickly from organisations to individuals than he had expected. Now, the rapid post-pandemic cyclical shift to tighter labour markets is combining with what Pink predicts will be a permanent change. Thanks to technology, talented individuals can “carry around their means of production” with them instead of relying on employers to supply it. As a result, they “need organisations a lot less than organisations need talented individuals”.
Rather than businesses and free-agent workers being “two distinct warring nations”, Pink is surprised that they turn out to have “a shared, pretty porous border”. The 57-year-old has built some lucrative property on that frontier, combining books with motivational talks for companies and a wider public. His 2009 Ted talk, “The puzzle of motivation”, has been viewed 28mn times. He says he is increasingly open-minded about the form in which he presents his ideas, in books, podcasts, video or live presentations.
What is driving him on at this point in his career? He still relishes the challenge of taking research and “trying to make sense of it . . . to understand it, decode it, strip the mystery from it . . . and then explain it to people in as clear and concise and simple a way as possible so that they can then use some small element of it in their own lives”.
Pink’s target audience is individuals rather than businesses or their managers. If a corporate board asked his advice on strategy, he says he would “immediately short the company”. But he points out that organisations are merely “collections of individuals, and there’s something to be said for individuals figuring out what their strengths are, what they’re good at, what they care about, how they can be their best selves”.
Pink is as fluent and engaging as his books. But the past few years of global turmoil have occasionally tested his confidence. “Every once in a while, I would go to my office, which is in a garage behind my house in Washington DC, and I would wonder, what am I doing writing about whatever it is I’m writing about when there is, in my country and around the world, a pretty clear autocratic threat, and do I want to explain to my grandchildren that, in this moment, I didn’t do anything?”
Even so, he knows how to link broader lessons from his microanalyses of human motivation to geopolitical and environmental cataclysms. What is happening in Ukraine, he says, “is a perfect example of why autonomy matters . . . Human beings have only two reactions to control. They comply, or they defy. That’s it.” Separately, he says governments trying to persuade citizens — or other governments — to combat climate change could learn from his book To Sell Is Human, in which he described and explored sales and persuasion techniques.
While Pink concedes he may be trying to justify all that time spent in his garage poring over academic studies, he is also applying some of the lessons from his latest work.
In The Power of Regret, Pink contends that an Edith Piaf-like “je ne regrette rien” approach is as damaging as wallowing in regret. But by steering between these two pitfalls, people can look at regrets as “a photographic negative” of a better life that they could still choose to lead. Regret “clarifies what we value and it instructs us on how to do better,” he says, “but it comes with a least slight pain and obvious discomfort”.
In two large surveys, he asked participants to identify their biggest regrets and found remarkable consistency across countries, gender, social background, and age. These acute sadnesses pepper the book, each one a novel in miniature, and Pink categorised them into four main areas [see below]. Ten years hence, trivial choices will not be sources of regret, Pink says. “The ‘Me of 2032’ is not going to care what I have for dinner. [But] did I act boldly when I had a chance? The Me of 2032 cares about that. Did I do the right thing? He is going to care about that. Did I reach out and maintain connections and love with other people?”
The four “core regrets”
Foundation regrets. Failures to be responsible, conscientious or prudent.
Boldness regrets. The chances we didn’t take.
Moral regrets. Deceiving, cheating, swindling, bullying.
Connection regrets. Fractured, unrealised or neglected relationships.
As for worrying that he may not have played his part in tackling the great geopolitical and environmental crises of today, Pink is wary of “anticipating regret”. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called this a “regret minimisation framework”. Pink says it can be helpful, but also dangerous. “When we anticipate our regrets, we sometimes make risk-averse decisions”, because failures are often easier to imagine than as yet uncharted successes. Pink suggests harnessing regrets instead in an “optimisation framework” and focusing attention on those core decisions that most frequently lead to lasting regrets.
“We’ve been sold this bill of goods that you have to be positive all the time. You have to look forward all the time,” says Pink. “That’s nonsense. That’s not how our brains work. Our brains are programmed for regret. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend all your time spinning in regret and ruminating over it.”
One exception to the consistency of Pink’s findings on regret was age-related. The older the respondents, the more likely they were to regret not having tried something. Career regrets were a subset of this core regret. “My mother convinced me I would starve to death if I pursued a career in art, so now I am stuck behind a desk tangled in management red tape and the life is draining out of me,” one 45-year-old woman from Minnesota confided to the survey.
For every person in his database who said they regretted setting out on their own in business, Pink says there were 40 or 50 who kicked themselves for not having acted. “The lesson from career regrets,” he says, “is that we should have a slight bias for action . . . We should just try stuff and be less worried about the risk.”
