The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

Minimizing techniques like At Least counterfactuals do have their place, as I’ll explain in Chapter 12. They can soothe us, and sometimes we need soothing. But they can also supply us with false comfort and strip us of the tools to address cold reality,

This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance. One of the pioneers in studying counterfactual thinking, Neal Roese, whose research appears throughout these pages and the Notes, used anagrams in one of his earliest and most influential papers. He, too, found that inducing regret—po

If thinking is for doing, feeling can help us think.[27]

Our cognitive apparatus is designed, at least in part, to sustain us in the long term rather than balm us in the near term.

This combination of time travel and fabulism is a human superpower. It’s hard to fathom any other species doing something so complex,

Then he dropped an intellectual grenade that reverberates still today: “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”[20]

more often the performance prevents people from doing the difficult work that produces genuine contentment.

In short, people without regrets aren’t paragons of psychological health. They are often people who are seriously ill.

Optimism is associated with better physical health. Emotions like joy, gratitude, and hope significantly boost our well-being.[8] We need plenty of positive emotions in our portfolio. They should outnumber the negative ones.[9] Yet overweighting our emotional investments with too much positivity brings its own dangers. The imbalance can inhibit lea