“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain
Reading about regret is a habit for me. Like many other topics, regret inevitably comes up when talking with other people. I assume it has a similar effect on others as well, but it motivates me to do something because I know I have time as long as I’m alive.
In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware concludes that what people regret the most at the end of their lives is “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Similarly, Ken Kelly wrote in his book Excellent Advice for Living, “Very few regrets in life are about what you did. Almost all are about what you didn’t do.”
In Anything You Want (you can read a summary of the book here), Derek Sivers said “Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.” I think about this whenever I use my phone too much or waste my time on the computer.
Since we’re on the topic of regret, I was listening to the song Bastards of Young by The Replacements. In the song, this is how singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg describes to what lengths we often go to please people we don’t like:
The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them