
No regrets
When people are on their deathbed, they tend to look at their life on retrospect and regret a lot of things that they didn’t get to do, instead of focusing on being happy on what they achieved. Regret compounds with time, so to live your life to the fullest, it helps a lot not feeling regret of things you did not do.
To fight regret, you need to conquer your fears. Fear is completely irrational. It is a psychological construct that prevents you from getting out of your comfort zone, and regret is with what you are left with when the opportunity is presumably lost. The real regret should be not attempting. There is no upside for not attempting something and, chances are, that even if you fail, you will learn something along the way!
For me, it’s still a work in progress, but these are the things that helped me become better at minimizing regrets.
Don’t catastrophize
We tend to make problems bigger than they actually are. It is a cognitive distortion which we are wired with. There is no single person alive today in 2017 that lived on 1850. Do you know something about the non-famous people that lived during that period? Probably not. The non-famous account for 99.99% of the population, so chances are that no one will remember your most embarrassing moment in 150 years.
Stop caring about what people think of you
When I was younger, fear of failing and fear of ridiculing myself were two of the main drivers for not doing stuff. What I realized, is that both fears were related to how people would react to what I did. My need to control what other people thought of me prevented a lot of my actions.
There will always be people that will judge your actions. Most jurors lack empathy, having almost no context and no idea of what you value. They measure you with their own set of values. Ignore them. As Steve Jobs said in his Stanford commencement speech:
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice”.
You are the only person you should be concerned of making proud. If you stay true to your values and do what you love, all else with follow.
How to start
The next time you are not sure about doing something, give Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework a try.
Project yourself being 80. Looking back to your life, you will want to have minimized the amount of regret on your life. So ask yourself this simple question: will I regret not having tried X? If the answer is yes, then go ahead and do it! It helped Jeff Bezos decide to start Amazon!

