So what are your regrets?
If I could live again my life,
In the next one – I’d try to make more mistakes,
I wouldn’t try to be so perfect, I’d be more relaxed,
I’d be sillier than I’ve been,
In fact, I’d take things much less seriously.
I’d be less hygenic.
I’d run more risks,
take more trips,
watch more sunsets.
I’d climb more mountains, swim more rivers,
I’d go to many more places where I’ve never been,
I’d eat more ice cream and fewer peas,
I’d have more real problems and fewer imaginary ones.
I was one of those people who lived
prudently and fully every minute of his life;
of course I had moments of joy.
But if I could go back I’d try
to have only good moments.
Because if you don’t know, thats what life is made of,
only moments; don’t lose the now.
I was the type who never went anywhere
without a thermometer,
a hot-water bottle,
an umbrella and a parachute,
If I could live again, I’d travel lighter.
If I could live again, I’d go barefoot
from the beginning of spring
and stay barefoot until the end of autumn.
I’d ride in more carts,
I’d watch more sunrises,
and play with more children,
If I had another life ahead of me.
But now I am 85…
and I know that I am dying.It's lived a long and colorful life. But Borges didn't write it.
There's a detailed study of this poem's history at http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/iainst.php. It's in Spanish, but Google Translate can give you the gist of it in English.
I'm deeply sorry for what you went through though. Tough does not even begin to describe the utter destruction that Alzheimer puts a family through. My ex-girlfriend's father went through that. I can't easily put into words the absolute despair I felt watching him fade away from an outsider's perspective. I cannot, and hope I never can, imagine how she felt.
I turned down an offer of admission from MIT. Granted, I had my reasons, and had I accepted, there's an inappropriately high probability I would've had to discontinue halfway through. I guess what I really regret is letting circumstances reach that point.
What I really regret is things I didn't do. The girls I should have asked out. The musical instrument I didn't learn to play. I honestly wish I'd made more clear mistakes in high school, instead of constantly playing it safe and thereby skipping important life lessons.
I regret spending so much of my life in front of the computer. Indeed, the hacking skills I developed will help me when launching, but the social skills I didn't develop will kill me. One of my worst fears is that I will get pigeonholed into a being a backroom programmer, and this fear influences everything from my cofounder search to my current distribution of time.
On the flip side, what I regret from the past might not be so regrettable when I consider that I'm not making the same mistakes right now. It goes back to my hypothesis that what I should regret are the mistakes that I didn't make when I was younger, because I may have to make them when the stakes are higher.
After being unemployed for a little over 3 months earlier this year, I built a product on my own (instead of going for the safe job option, and taking the huge of risk of, you know, running out of food money) and managed to get it acquired by a media company here in Sao Paulo.
And that was quite possibly greatest lesson of my life.
Take risks. It pays off.
Not learning musical fundamentals when I was young.
To a lesser extent, pursuing a whack university degree :)
It's easy to tell people they are missing the best part of being in their twenties, when in reality it's not all that it's been made up to be, as the only thing it really contributes to one's life is a false sense of accomplishment.
Here's another golden nugget for the grandparent: Everyone talks about the single lifestyle, but that's a lifestyle suited for a really small fraction of the people that supposedly tell you it's the next big thing. You need a boatload of social skills that a great percentage of people don't really have, you need to be sort of successful at the moment, you need to have a way with women (which is something that comes from a boatload of experience), and you really need to have at least a couple of friends that are living it large as well.
I've seen friends make this exact same statement, that they are missing out and that they think they should leave the relationship they have and try the single lifestyle. It always blows up in their faces. In contrast, the two friends I had that really lived this lifestyle at the same time I did both realized they where going down fast and now one is married and the other one is engaged.
If there is one advice I can give you GP. If you have a couple of friends that tell you it's the greatest thing ever, the threesomes, the challenges, the satisfaction of bedding that model, etc... realize one thing, for every one of those men, there are hundreds (if not thousands) that won't achieve the same experiences, and the one's that do generally burn out pretty quickly. If you were single, I'd tell you to try it out and see what happens, but you're not and it would be a mistake to try to live it up just because. If you're happy with your significant other, don't sweat it, it's a lifestyle not worth your while.
Hell most people that do live it up like this don't do it because of a life choice, they do it because it's the only thing they have ever known, and it's a thing that just happened. You can't artificially become a money spending ladies man just like that.
Edit: Downvote? Really? Look there are some people who you don't learn fuzzy little life lessons from despite the bad times. There are some people who are just bad for your soul, who drain the life from you with constant drama, who you really could just do without.
My regret is not learning this in time to avoid being caught up with one of them, and when finding myself so, letting it go on as long as I did.
I second that! Same situation here.
Yesterday, I decided that 61 unread messages was too much, so I went through them.
In July 2009, Facebook emailed me suggesting I give them a quick call to discuss my "career goals/ambitions and opportunities at facebook". For real.
I was right in the middle of my degree, super busy with my final project, and... somehow it must have just slipped past me.
Although, as one of my friends commented:
Look at it this way: It's not like you're a worse developer since then.
Put another way, it's not so much the missed opportunities I regret, but the opportunities I recognised were worth taking that I didn't then make the most of. Usually the delayed starting or early quitting was for some reason that seemed very important and logical at the time, but with hindsight just looks like ignorance, cowardice or laziness.
If there were only one thing I could teach my children, I think it would be how to act with integrity and be a decent person. But if I could teach two, I think the second would be that you can't follow every opportunity in life, but those things you do choose to pursue are worth doing properly.
It's a cliché, but mistakes are an opportunity to learn, that means I've had a hell of a lot of learning experiences!
If anything, the only things worth regretting are mistakes that you've repeated - because they could be avoidable?
I dropped out of dental school in order to pursue a computer-science degree instead. Everyone around me told me I should have done the comp-sci degree in the first place, with hind-sight that's obvious and technically I 'lost' a year. But that one year of studying for dentistry and having to make the major decision to drop-out was fantastic experience.
Everything to date I am happy about, no reason to complain.
I could regret having voluntarily foregone a normal childhood in favor of solitary intellectual and artistic pursuits, but then I wouldn't have had the foundation that later allowed my to do some really neat things for a living.
I could regret having dropped out of high school upon learning that I'd won enough in scholarships to attend Waterloo at a tidy profit just before graduation, but I'd probably be complaining about the idiots I have to lecture when I'm rudely dragged away from my hunt for a generalized solution to the n-sphere packing problem (which will, of course, be crucial to the moving industry when humanity evolves beyond the constraints of three-dimensional meatspace).
I could regret the ethical quagmire that was my military service, particularly around the time of the Oka crisis in Quebec, but I would have to do without the discovery that I am a rather good teacher of matters mathematical and technical, and that I can speak publicly with confidence about things that matter to me.
I could regret drinking myself half to death trying to solve the question of how to appear to be social while remaining comfortable in my solitude, but without a truly desperate need to save my life, I never would have been able to overcome the voluntary, learned autism I developed in childhood.
As jacobroufa said in an earlier comment, if I were to change any of that, I wouldn't be who I am today. And I have had a life that is nearly beyond imagining. I'm a high school dropout (I never did finish, or even get a GED) who has taught electricty/electronics and mathematics at college. I'm a "failed" musician (I sold six records -- not six different albums; six paid-for copies of my one and only album) who, as a utility sideman, played gigs with some of my heroes in the jazz and blues world. When educational funding dried up in Ontario during the '90s recession, I found that the only postion available for an ex-military high school dropout was shining shoes, and that drove me to but an obsolete computer and teach myself to program. It took a while (years) to meet my own admittedly high standards and to break into the industry at all as a n00b pushing forty, but I became a highly Googleable entity (once you figure out how to filter out the dead folk singer with whom I share a name) and had a reputation for innovative thinking within my little niche (Notes and Domino -- please hold the comments; the platform is much better than most of the applications written for it). No shoeshine boy, no Google hits. I've loved and been loved in return; I've had my heart broken and experienced loss -- and become more human in the process. I have a tremor disorder with an associated dementia now (and hang around places like this and Stack Overflow to stave off the decline as long as I can -- it beats doing the crossword), and suffer intermittent aphasia that sort of alternates between Broca- and Wernicke-associated damage patterns and am hugely unreliable due to physical incapacitation, yet I'm still asked to give motivational talks on a regular basis. (Yes, by people who have heard me before.)
We can spend a lifetime regretting the path not taken, and another worrying about the consequences of the next choice. But always keep in mind the sage advice of Yogi Berra: when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Read as a mere Yogism, it may seem inane, but if you really give it some consideration (as Yogi did before he said it) you'll find that it is an admonition to avoid the paralysis of indecision. There may come a time when you wonder what might have been down the other path, but standing at the point of choice, tossing coins for the rest of your life means going nowhere and doing and learning nothing.
and plus a few more points for having the same as this guy:
...I think I just accidentally made a pun.
There's been times when I've been burned, but most of the time it was from me reaching too high for a position which I wasn't yet ready for. When I failed, it hurt really badly at the time, and I had a lot of regrets then, but now I can say it's been the best failure I've ever had.
Have a screwed up? Heck yes. Do I regret it? No way.
Basically any time I let paranoid thoughts of "I have to do work" prevent me from growing my relationships with others.
About the things that I did not regret is the bold decision to come to the States for PhD: I did not regret that for a second
--Oscar Wilde
trying to live in a way to keep it that way.