24 Things I Wish I Had Done Sooner (or my biggest regrets)

Of all the things in life we don’t control, the past is the clearest. It already happened. It’s done. It’s set in stone.

Perhaps we could have controlled and changed it, but the fact is, we didn’t. And now it is what it is, forever a was.

For this reason, the Stoics were not big on regret. Neither am I. There’s no reason to whip yourself or be paralyzed by the “What Ifs” of life. Still, we can learn and grow, and in fact, we must.

I once interviewed the peerless Dr. Edith Eger, Holocaust survivor and the author of one of my favorite books, The Choice. At the beginning of the podcast (you can listen here), I ask her about something I regretted, a relationship I had messed up. She looked at me and said she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. “I’ll give you a sentence,” she said, “One sentence — if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.” That’s the end of that, she said. “Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.”

So below are some things that, while I try not to regret, I do wish I had done differently or sooner or better. I think you might benefit from doing them sooner too…

-I look back at stuff I was so worked up about, things I fretted about, fought about, took…