"Regrets are about the things you wanted to try and didn't"

From the New York Times "Boss" column. This is JuE Wong, CEO of skin-care products company StriVectin:

To me, regrets are not about failures; they’re about things you wanted to try and didn’t. Because I never felt guilty about my choices and my husband was behind me, I was able to do my best.

A poignant note to this quotation is that Wong's husband, died suddenly just after she had reached the CEO level in 2009, at a prior company. Her career success has clearly been a team effort.

Kathryn Schulz discusses the importance of regret

Kathryn Schulz (author of "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error") has a great TED Talk covering regret - why it's painful, and why it's necessary. Knowing that the absence of regret is a trait of psychopaths is one reason why we shouldn't feel too bad when we, you know, feel bad about something we've done. Schulz had a prior talk which we posted on earlier in the year.

Does thinking about mistakes cause us to wallow in regret?

I wanted to acknowledge the News and Tribune of Jeffersonville, Indiana, and its columnist Terry Stawar. Stawar wrote a column called, "My Favorite Regrets" which covers a number of topics we've pointed to here, such as the Newsweek series My Favorite Mistake, the various Steve Jobs-related stories about failures and decisionmaking, and a reference to yours truly.

Stawar's piece then seizes on regret as a theme, specifically the need not to beat oneself up over past mistakes. He writes:

Regrets are rooted in self-blame. According to the late psychologist Albert Ellis, such feelings result from irrational demands either on the world or ourselves. When we insist that the world be a different place than it really is, or that we be perfect and never make mistakes, we are setting ourselves up for undesirable feelings and behaviors. Since humans are fallible, most of us do the best we can (given what we know at the time) and only hindsight shows that there were better options. Instead of second-guessing ourselves and feeling terrible, Ellis taught that it would be best if people adopted a more rational perspective, which acknowledges disappointment, but eliminates the need to catastrophize.

I agree with this, but I struggled with this piece of advice: "Psychologist Kase says 'Focus on what you want, and what you can do in the current moment, rather than on past mistakes. When you experience regret, you are caught in the past.'"

The best mistake-learners I know are not seized with regret. Rather, when they experience an outcome that they didn't expect, they analyze what happened (especially the parts they can fix) and move forward putting that knowledge to use. Simply moving ahead without thinking about the past is a recipe for delusion and running in place. Worst of all, you risk making the same mistakes over and over again.

Now that's something to regret.