Podcast Themes

Dan speaks about two types of Connection regrets – rifts (an event happens and people separate) and drifts (where people move away from each other slowly). He speaks about having a bias for action when it comes to these kinds of regrets as over the long term people regret omissions much more than commissions.

Dan speaks about the role of regret especially around transitions. He refers to the Japanese art form of Kintsugi which is about embracing the negatives and bringing beauty because of them and not in spite of them. He also refers to the work of Herminia Ibarra who speaks about acting your way into a new way of thinking.

Dan discusses three phases that we might want to go through when we deal with regret. The first step is going inward with self-compassion while processing the regret. The second step is about sharing it with a few people around us. The third step is about processing the lesson from that episode and moving forward with greater conviction.

Dan makes the point that a lot of us are not quite taught to cope effectively with negative emotion. He says that we need to be careful with how we handle regret. On one hand, we can’t ignore it. On the other hand, we can’t wallow in it. Getting that balance right can sometimes be hard.

Dan speaks about the work of Barry Schwartz around regret and teases out the distinction between regret and FOMO (Fear of missing out). He also speaks about how we call can undertake “time travel” to ensure that the “me of 10 years from now” would minimize regret.

Dan speaks about the Four core regrets that often lie below the surface of the regrets which we often experience – Foundation regrets (I wish I had done the work to lay the foundation when I was younger), Boldness regrets (If only I had taken the chance), Moral regrets (I wish I had done the right thing), Connection regrets (If only I had reached out). He also speaks about how the regrets we have reveals something about the needs we might have.

Ravi speaks about how we could think about measuring our life. He speaks about how he has gone about discovering what makes him distinctive and chosen the various initiatives that he has participated in.

Bill speaks about some of the elements of Jeff Bezos’s leadership that make him distinctive. While some of those elements are in-born and hard to replicate, he teases out some of the elements that we could learn and imbibe as we go through our journeys.

Meher talks about how she and her mother (Anu Aga) dealt with the sudden loss of her father and her brother within a span of a few months. She talks about how they got the strength to deal with the loss and the soul-searching she went through to come to terms with it. She talks about the criticality of gratitude and cherishing the relationships that matter when people are still alive and the importance of not having the guilt that you didn’t give it what you could.

Zia talks about how, in her generation, the notion of work-life balance, didn’t really exist for ambitious women who wanted to make a mark in the corporate world. She candidly talks about the real trade-offs involved in her case and how that’s changing.

All of us have had situations where we step way out of our comfort zone. Nandan talks about his experience from contesting the elections in Bangalore and why he moved on from Politics after that experience.