We don’t need a Groundhog Day to focus on what we have learned from the repeated pattern of both successes and failures in our life. As Chris Argyris and Don Schön have repeatedly noted (Argyris and Schön, 1978; Argyris, 1982), our primary pathway to success in life concerns not the absence of failures, but instead the capacity to learn from these failures so that they are not frequently repeated. I would add an appreciative perspective to this formula for success. It is also critical that we learn from our successes (rather than just being grateful that a success has occurred). We are likely to have significant internal control over our money and our wealth when we assume this ongoing posture of learning and appreciation.
Regret
Loss is a powerful experience, as noted in the observations made by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. In many ways, Regret is just as powerful. It tends to be a more elusive feeling than Loss; however, it often endures for a longer period. It wakes us in the middle of the night, many years after we made a regretful decision or non-decision.
Behavioral Economics
In considering the nature and power of Regret, I begin once again with a personal account. In this case, the account comes from Michael Lewis (the noted author of Moneyball). Lewis (2017, p. 261) is writing about the remarkable collaboration between Amos Tversky and Daniel (“Danny”) Kahneman. Lewis provides a memo written by Kahneman to Tversky that triggers one of their many transformative (‘undoing”) projects. This memo concerns Regret:
“[Kahneman suggests that] the understanding of any decision had to account not just for the financial consequences but for the emotional ones, too. “Obviously it is not regret itself that determines decisions—no more than the actual emotional response to consequences ever determines the prior choice of a course of action,” Danny wrote to Amos, in one of a series of memos on the subject. ‘It is the anticipation of regret that affects decisions, along with the anticipation of other consequences.’ Danny thought that people anticipated regret, and adjusted for it, in a way they did not anticipate or adjust for other emotions. “What might have been is an essential component of misery,”‘ he wrote to Amos. ‘There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.'”
Lewis (2017, pp. 261-262) goes on to offer a summary of Kahneman and Tversky’s reflections on Regret as well as offering an insight into the personal experience of both these men with Regret:
“Happy people did not dwell on some imagined unhappiness the way unhappy people imagined what they might have done differently so that they might be happy. People did not seek to avoid other emotions with the same energy they sought to avoid regret. When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. As the starting point for a new theory, it sounded promising. When people asked Amos how he made the big decisions in his life, he often told them that his strategy was to imagine what he would come to regret, after he had chosen some option, and to choose the option that would make him feel the least regret. Danny, for his part, personified regret. Danny would resist a change to his airline reservations, even when the change made his life a lot easier, because he imagined the regret he would feel if the change led to some disaster. It’s not a stretch to say that Danny anticipated anticipating regret. He was perfectly capable of anticipating the regret provoked by events that might never occur and decisions that he might never need to make.”
