删减自 Ted，由 Sonia提供。致谢！
Let's talk about regret. It is, to my mind, our most misunderstood emotion, and so I decided to spend a couple of years studying it.
And one of the things that l did is l went back and looked at about 50 years of social science on regret. And here's what it tells you. I'll save you the trouble of reading a half century of social science. The research tells us that everybody has regrets, regrets make us human. Regrets can make us better. They can improve our decision-making skills, improve our negotiation skills, make us better strategists, make us better problem solvers, enhance our sense of meaning if we treat them right. And the good news is that there's a systematic way to do that.
So the four core regrets that I'm going to cover. Number one, what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets. These are people who regret things like this: not saving enough money, which would be like, you know, financial regret, not taking care of their health and not eating right, health regret. But they're the same. Those kinds of regrets are about making choices that didn't allow you to have some stability, a stable platform for their life. I have a lot of people who regret not working hard enough in school. A lot of people who regret - I got a lot of regrets about not saving money. "If only" - And that's the catch phrase of regret, "if only" -- "If only l' d. done the work."
Second category. I love this category, it's fascinating. Boldness regrets. I have hundreds of regrets around the world that go like this: X years ago, there was a man/woman whom l really liked. I wanted to ask him/her out on a date, but l was too scared to do it and I've regretted it ever since. “I also have hundreds of regrets by people who said: "Oh, I always wanted to start a business, but I never had the guts to do that." People who said: Oh, I wish l' d spoken up more. I wish l' d said something and
asserted myself." These are, as l said before, what I call boldness regrets. And we get to a juncture in our life and we have a choice. We can play it safe or we can take the chance. And what I found is overwhelmingly people regret not taking the chance. Even people who took the chance and it didn't work out don't really have many regrets about that. lt' s the people who didn’t take the chance. So this is
boldness regrets. Boldness regrets sound like this: "lf only l'd taken the chance."
Third category. Moral regrets. Very interesting, very interesting category. These are people who, again, a lot of these regrets begin at a
juncture. You're at a juncture, you can do the right thing or you can do the wrong thing. People do the wrong thing, and they regret it. I mean, one of the ones that really stuck with me, I'm going to try to pull it up here, is this one here, this woman. She's a 71-year-old woman in New Jersey. "When I was a kid, my mother would send me to a small local store for a few items. I frequently would steal a candy bar when the grocer wasn't looking. That's bothered me for about 60 years." So, 71-year-old woman in New Jersey, for 60 years, she's been bugged by this moral breach. So moral regrets. We have people regretting
bullying, we have people regretting marital infidelity. All kinds of things. Moral regrets sound like this, If only l' d done the right thing.
And finally our fourth category, or what I call connection regrets. Connection regrets are like this: You have a relationship or ought to have a relationship. And it doesn't matter what the relationship is. Kids, parents, siblings, cousins, friends, colleagues, but you have a relationship or ought to have had a relationship, and the relationship comes apart. And what's interesting is that what these 16,000 people were telling me is that the way these relationships come apart is often not very dramatic, not very dramatic at all. They often come apart by drifting apart rather than through some kind of explosive rift. And what happens is that people don't want to reach out because they say it's going to be awkward to reach out, and the other side is not going to care. One of the lessons that I learned from this book for myself is always reach out. So that's what connection regrets are. "If only l'd reached out."
And when we look at these regrets, so that's interesting in itself, but what I realized is that these four core regrets operate as a kind of photographic negative of the good life. Because if we understand what people regret the most, we actually can understand what they value the most. And each of these regrets, to my mind, reveals something fundamental about humanity and about what we need. And so in a weird way, this negative emotion of regret points the way to a good life. And so l hope that you will begin to reckon with your own regrets because l think they are going to give you direction to a life well lived.
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