I’ve liked Pink for a long time, ever since I saw his first TED talk. In this book, he attempts to show that while many of us try to either live with “no regrets” or to push our regretful feelings aside, in fact regret is one of the things that makes us human and can also make us better people and help us make better choices. After conducting a huge research survey into peoples’ biggest regrets, he found that most fall into four main categories: foundation (“if only I’d done the work”), boldness (“if only I’d taken the risk”), moral (“if only I’d done the right thing”), and connection (“if only I’d reached out”). For each, the regret can fall into the category of action or inaction, closed (there’s no way to fix things now) or open (there might be a way to make things right). Pink’s ultimate conclusion is that for open regrets, we should try to fix things. For closed ones, we can tell ourselves “at least” stories to take away the sting. And when making a choice for the future, if it DOESN’T fall into one of the four big categories, we should make whatever choice is “good enough,” but if it DOES, then we might be better served taking some extra time to make sure we don’t do something we’ll regret later.