Smart About Money: Value of Regret

In his new bestselling book titled The Power of Regret, author Daniel Pink explores what he calls our “most misunderstood emotion” and how it can be the pathway to our best life.

Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of regret. Pink writes about one woman who deeply regretted not spending more time as a child with her now-deceased grandparents, which falls into the “Something You Just Couldn’t Have Known at the Time” category.

Nick Maffeo

Obviously there’s no way to go back and correct those regrets. The best someone can do might be to let the regret go and look for ways to have a similar experience now. Possibly in that woman’s case, she could connect today with older relatives.

Another category of regret is about “Something You Should Have Known.” An experienced driver ignored a red-light oil warning, even after friends said that was something to get checked. Then their car’s engine seized. The driver felt bad later because they knew they should have paid attention to the light but they just didn’t.

Everyone regrets things like that, feeling like they “should have” known. Because the fact is that they did know; they regret not acting on that knowledge.

That is precisely what Pink means when he says regret is valuable. “Granted, regret feels awful,” he writes. “But it clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down. It can lift us up.”

The category of regret that is possibly the easiest to make peace with is “Something You Wish You Had Known.” Wishing one had loaded up on Apple, Amazon or Microsoft stock, ocean-front real estate — you name it — is a common “if only” kind of regret. Everyone has plenty of these regrets that you can’t get a re-do on without a time machine.

Pink points out that one of the gifts of regret is the fear it instills — reminding people of the things they should do now or they’ll be sorry later.

After retiring from the National Hockey League, superstar Derek Sanderson went around to local schools speaking honestly about how he had “squandered it all.” He urged young people to not go the way he had gone. Sanderson spoke movingly of a friend who literally saved his life and helped him make his way back from a very dark place filled with sorrow and regrets.

Sanderson said his goal in speaking to schools was to “pay forward” his friend’s kindness and hopefully keep kids from doing things they would regret.

Life has left some people in a positon where saving for retirement is very difficult or genuinely impossible. But those tragic situations tend to be rare. And it turns out that not saving for retirement is actually one of people’s biggest money regrets.

A gentleman told Pink, “I regret not saving money diligently ever since I started working. It’s nearly crushing every day to think about how hard I’ve worked, but financially I have nothing to show for it.”

If you know you haven’t been saving enough for retirement, here’s your chance to learn from the regret felt by that man and by Derek Sanderson. Let yourself off the “should have started earlier” hook and take steps to start saving today. Even small steps. You won’t regret it.

(P.S. The friend who Derek Sanderson said saved his life? Hockey legend and, more important, a man described by so many as an all-around truly good guy, Bobby Orr.)

Nick Maffeo is the President & CEO of Canton Co-operative Bank in Canton. Have a question? Email to submissions@thecantoncitizen.com.

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Posted by Nick Maffeo on Aug 11 2023. Filed under Featured Content, Opinion, Smart About Money. Both comments and pings are currently closed.