A Perspective Around Regrets

This is a difficult topic to tackle, but let’s try. It’s not necessarily about having regrets, or why they exist, but more a perspective around regrets that might be new to you.

To quickly define it, you feel regret when something happened that didn’t produce the result you wanted, but more particularly, you realize that you could have done something differently that would have influenced the result.  This goes for steps that you did or didn’t take, and the action or inaction that in hindsight was the wrong decision.

What happens with regret is it consumes us. We let it hold more mental bandwidth than it’s worth and preoccupy us. But in every moment we are making more decisions that generate results, and if we aren’t as present as we should be in those moments we’re more likely to do things incorrectly and do things we’ll later regret.

For example - And I don’t know the first thing about this but let’s say you almost bought Bitcoin 10 years ago. You regret having not taken action, and that regret distracts you from seeing the opportunity to invest today, because it very well still could be the right decision.

Or, let’s say you didn’t study a topic as hard as you wish you did in college because it would be valuable for you now. You could feel sorry for yourself and regretful for not making the most of that opportunity, or you could take the time to bridge that knowledge gap right now.

Regrets have a compounding nature to them, one thing leads to the next and leads to the next, but being mindful that you’re still making decisions about that thing today allows you to start correcting it.