Regrets, I’ve had a few
This is part of my experiment to write regularly and publish every day with the help of 365 Days of Writing Prompts. Today’s prompt: “What’s your biggest regret? How would your life have been different if you’d made another decision?”
Some people say that they have no regret. If they could start all over again, they would have lived each day and done everything just like they have. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. I have quite a few regrets. Many of them are about missed opportunities.
I should have made myself rich and famous during the dot-com era. I started getting access to the Internet while the dot-com bubble was ramping up. I did not just surf the web. I self-taught how to make websites. I made some. No, they were not like the simpler ones where one uploads HTML files to GeoCities. I wrote my own database-driven websites. I scraped news website to make a list of that day’s headlines. Perhaps there was some way to monetize my skills. After all, websites were popping up here and there. During the craze, some people thought that every single company that could make websites was the next big thing. A lot of people got rich by convincing others to given them investment money. Not, me, though. It never occurred to me back then that I should make seize the craze and make some money. I also lacked skills and confidence to market myself and my products.
I should have worked on embracing myself less. “Be yourself” is such an overrated statement. The truth, though, is that our society likes certain characteristics more than others. I should have trained myself to be more talkative and presentable. I should have faked it until I made it. Doing these things early instills wanted habits at a young age before the opposite become unwanted habits. But I was never really motivated to learn how to speak well. I guess it was hard enough to speak at all, as a result of some childhood matters that I wish I had not endured. I had no officially diagnosed speak impediment but I was a super quiet kid who did not speak unless really made to. I joined Toastmasters several years after graduating from college, even though I probably heard about it and received some invitations as early as my undergraduate years. After I finally joined, I have kept thinking that given that I have joined, I should have done it much sooner. When I see college students join and even become officers, I keep thinking: what a huge head start they have over me. Some of them might become, say, district directors before they are at my current age if they put their head starts into good use.
I should have picked up a few languages when I was younger. I envy those who started speaking two or more languages every day when they were young. When I grew up in Hong Kong, the state of learning English for kids was pretty sad. Technically, we learned English (a second language for most of us) while in kindergarten. In practice, most students had close to no practice. I rarely spoke it even in English class at school and almost never spoke it outside classes. In Hong Kong, even some English teachers did not speak good enough English, and many did not know how to teach English. Practicing English was somewhat regarded as “showing off” and it was not good, possibly because the older generation had limited or no English language skills. That must be a huge missed opportunity. Learning to speak a foreign language gives one less or no “foreign accent” compared to if the person learns the language in adulthood. In fact, why stopping at just two languages? Nowadays, many kids speak three or more languages. That gives them more flexibility in terms of where they can live and work later. Last year, I started learning French, my third language, as an adult. So far, my process has been so painfully slow that I am not sure if I would ever become reasonably fluent at it. I really could have used the amazing ability that children have in learning new languages relatively quickly and effortlessly.
There are lost opportunity that can be made up, and there are lost opportunities that are gone for good. I can still achieve success and even make some small fortune in the technology field, but I do not think there will be another dot-com bubble. Perhaps one day I will be fluent in French, but I will speak with an accent that is unavoidable for adult learners. Sometimes there is no silver lining, and losing opportunities does not necessarily mean that we gain something else useful in return. The best we can do is to avoid losing more opportunities.
