Daniel Pink's The Power of Regret and the Cautiousness Facet (C6)

Daniel Pink surveyed thousands of people across more than a hundred countries about what they regret, and The Power of Regret is his case that the emotion everyone tries to swear off is worth listening to. Most self-help tells you to have no regrets. Pink thinks that advice throws away useful information. In his Thought Economics interview he starts from how ordinary the feeling is: "Regret is one of the most common emotions that human beings experience." His argument is that a regret, handled well, points at what you actually value and tells you what to do differently next time. In the Big Five, whether you use it that way leans on one facet.

Turning regret forward is the Cautiousness facet

That facet is Cautiousness (C6), under Conscientiousness, the habit of thinking through consequences before you act rather than going with the first impulse. Pink's most practical idea is anticipated regret: before a decision, picture the version of you who chose wrong and has to live with it, and let that picture inform the call. That is C6 doing its job. A high scorer runs the simulation naturally and slows down at the fork. A low scorer tends to move first and meet the regret afterward, when it is a memory instead of a warning.

Neither end is simply better. High C6 catches mistakes before they happen, but past a point the same simulation turns into stalling, where every option gets weighed until the moment to choose has passed. Low C6 acts and learns the hard way, which is slower and more expensive but rarely gets stuck. Pink's method is a way of borrowing high-C6 behavior on purpose even when it is not your default: run the regret in advance, on the decisions that matter, and skip it on the ones that do not. The trap he warns about is letting a past regret stop being a signal and start being a loop you replay, which is where it slides toward the rumination end of things.

For a reader placing themselves, the useful part is that your C6 score predicts how you already handle this. If it runs high, Pink is describing a tool you reach for without thinking, and the risk to watch is overuse. If it runs low, the book is a case for adding one deliberate step to the decisions you will still be thinking about a year from now, without turning your whole life into a series of hesitations. We take the facet apart on its own in Cautiousness (C6).

Read the book: The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel Pink.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations