No More Regrets: A Study on Eliminating Regret and Maximizing Potential
Know your why.
Regret is one of the worst feelings. In my early twenties, I had the goal of never having any regret in life. Unfortunately, it seems part of the human experience involves having some regrets. However, regret can be minimized to a large degree. Regret is born of two things: failing to accomplish a goal or doing something you wish you didn’t. When I look back at the regrets I do have, they all have the same thing in common: I didn’t like my reasons.
Know Your Why
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” — Frederich Nietzsche
We make decisions all day long. The big decisions, however, like what to major in college or who to marry require more thought than what to buy at the grocery store. For the big decisions in life, you should know your reasons why you are making them. Evaluating these reasons and determining if they are good reasons are an essential part of a good decision making process. Making decisions for good reasons is what minimizes regret.
A good why can sustain you through hard times. For example, if you are starting a business, sometimes it will be hard. Sometimes it will be stressful. Sometimes you won’t know what to do. If your reason, your why, is strong enough, it will carry you through the rough patches. As Dr. Ben Hardy says, “If you Why is strong enough, you will figure out the How.” This is why getting clear on your reasons for doing something can be such a powerful force in your life.
For the goals we have in life, it is important to know why we want them. If you want to lose weight, you should know your reasons why. And be brutally honest with yourself. Lying to yourself serves no purpose and will lower your self-esteem. The reasons driving your desires are largely going to determine whether or not you actually achieve your goals so uncovering them is vital. So ask yourself why. Why do you want that thing?
Sometimes when you ask yourself why your brain immediately supplies the answer ‘I don’t know. I just do.’ That is always a lie. You always know why you want something. Ask again. Don’t take ‘I don’t know’ for an answer. If you push yourself, you will find your driving motivators.
An exercise I learned ,through an engineering course of all things, is really helpful when applied to this personal exercise. It is called the 5 whys. It is used in six sigma to find the root cause in the DMAIC process, but I find it also is very helpful here as well. In the 5 whys you start with the problem, or in this case, you would start with the goal you would like to accomplish. Let’s say that your goal is to lose weight. You would then ask yourself why you want to lose weight. Whatever that answer is you would ask yourself why to that answer and repeat the process five times. So here is what it would look like in the weight loss example:
I want to lose 15 pounds
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Why?
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So I can look good in a bikini this summer
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Why?
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I want to feel good about myself
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Why?
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I’m tired of not feeling good about myself
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Why?
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It makes me depressed
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Why?
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Because I never feel good enough
The theory here is that once you get to the bottom of the 5 whys you will have found your true motivator. This motivator is the one you really need to examine. This is the one that is ultimately your driving force and will determine your success or lack of. If you have made goals before that you haven’t been able to achieve, take a look at your motivators. You might find the answer to your lack of success there.
Like Your Reasons
“Whoever loves the sun always has a reason to wake up.” — Marty Rubin
The reason it is important to uncover your reasons for wanting something is that the true way to minimize regret and really get what you want in life is to love your reasons for doing something. When you look at your list of reasons for doing something, does it make you feel good? Motivation isn’t born of negative feelings, so if you don’t feel good when you think of your reasons, you likely won’t be able to sustain any long-term motivation. You cannot promote positive change through negative feelings.
Doing something for reasons you don’t like is what leads to regret.
There is a rock on Waimea Bay on Oahu that people like to jump off of. I climbed to the top of the rock, and looked over the edge, and then took the walk of shame back down the rock. I never jumped. My reason for not jumping was I was scared of heights. This is a terrible reason for me since I have a life value tied to never letting fear get in the way of what I want in life. It is a small thing, but it is something that I now regret.
A larger example from my own life is my marriage. I grew up very religious and marriage was taught as something not only essential, but ,like, the entire purpose of life. So in college, when my boyfriend at the time asked me to marry him, I said yes, even though deep down I did not want to. My reasons for saying yes were: this is what I was supposed to do and I might not get another opportunity. Both are terrible reasons that produced terrible results. The marriage was a disaster and I am grateful to be out of it now. Looking back now I can see how, if I had examined my reasons and made sure I liked them, that I would not have gone through with the marriage and I would have spared myself all of that suffering. Now, when I make decisions, I examine my reasons and make sure I like them.
You might find that you have competing reasons for doing something. Some of them you might like and some others might not feel so great. This is fine because you get to choose which reasons you want to keep. So, let’s say you want to lose weight because you never feel good enough, but you also want to lose weight because you want to be more healthy. One of those reasons is going to feel terrible and will be a de-motivator, and the other could feel good and be a motivator. You can choose the better reason and focus solely on that. Every time you think of weight loss, you also think about how you can be more healthy. This will drive different behavior than the negative reason and will produce better results.
In life you cannot always guarantee an outcome. We constantly deal with uncertainty. What determines if something is a good or bad decision is the decision making process itself. Is your decision making process sound?
Sometimes a bad decision will work out and a good decision won’t. Luck can come into play. But I never regret a decision where I had a sound decision making process and I liked my reasons. Even if it didn’t work out the way I wanted. I can feel confident that I made the best decision that I could at the time and I take peace from that.
Just Do It
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” -Vincent Van Gogh
I am a terrible fence sitter. I get faced with a decision and I sit on the fence of indecision for as long as I possibly can. Indecision is a lie though. It is just fear in disguise.
Fence sitting is exhausting. It is better to just make a decision and commit to that decision. Examine the reasons for making any decision and then pick the decision that you like the reasons for most and go for it. No more spinning in indecision. It was Steve Jobs who so perfectly said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Steve Jobs also talked about how he minimized regret in his own life by thinking of himself at 80 looking back on his life and considering what he would think then. What would he regret at 80? There is a saying that you regret the things you don’t do more than the things that you do. I think this exercise illustrates that. It can be a great tool for figuring out what you really want in life.
The idea of getting to the end of my life without having gone for my dreams puts ice in my stomach. I would rather crash and burn and fail at everything than never have tried. Even if I crash and burn, I will still have had a hell of an adventure and a more meaningful life than I ever would have had just sitting on my couch thinking about it.
Going after what you want in life and achieving your goals feels amazing. Life is what you make of it. By examining your reasons for wanting and doing things, you can get more motivation and reduce regret. You can live the life you want and feel great doing it.
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