The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

Daniel H. Pink opens The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by describing French entertainer and world-renowned singer Edith Piaf’s meeting with composer Charles Dumont and lyricist Michel Vaucaire, which took place on March 24, 1960. He describes Piaf as frail, claiming that addiction and hard living had taken a toll on her, and that three months earlier, she was in a coma for liver damage. Although Piaf had considered Dumont and Vaucaire to be “second-rate musical talents,” she agreed to meet with them to hear one song. Dumont performed a song he had composed with Vaucaire’s lyrics, called “No Regrets.” After hearing the song many times, Piaf called the director of L’Olympia, a Parisian concert venue, and weeks later, she sang the song on French television. She then performed the song at L’Olympia. The song was a success, and more than one million records sold.

Pink describes a woman named Amber Chase getting a tattoo in February 2016, which was the same tattoo that another woman, Mirella Battista, got five years earlier. Battista’s brother Germanno Teles had gotten a nearly identical tattoo the previous year, and Teles’s tattoo was nearly identical to what a man named Bruno Santos would get in 2013.