Pain is Inevitable, Regret is Optional.
choose wisely
Pain is inevitable. That’s the price of living.
How we choose to pay that price, though, is entirely up to us. Make that choice now or let it fester into regret.
Regret is deferred pain. The price we pay for not taking on discomfort now.
It is a debt. Regret is pain that compounds with interest. Every tough decision we avoid stacks up. The longer we avoid those difficult choices, the heavier the bill.
That bill comes due.
It’s no wonder we avoid it. Hard choices hurt. Be it taking a career risk, confronting failing relationships, or facing our own flaws. It’s like walking barefoot on broken glass.
Just the mere thought of deciding strikes right at our core. We fear that we’ll fall short. We might find out that we are woefully inadequate. It’s like an indictment on ourselves.
What do we do when we learn that we are not enough?
We take the easy way out. We put off the difficult thing. We even deceive ourselves into thinking that the pain will fade away.
Spoiler alert!
It doesn't.
Imagine, the last thought we’ll ever have are our regrets.
The things we never did.
The words we never said.
Dreams we didn’t muster the courage to pursue.
Replaying the what-ifs and what-could-have-been on our deathbed.
The only comfort? Pray that our last moment doesn’t last too long.
Even the most successful people face these decisions.
Before Amazon, Jeff Bezos faced a life-changing decision: stay at his cushy Wall Street job, or risk it all to set up an online bookstore.
He searched for a way to frame his decision and found the Regret Minimization framework. He imagined himself at 80, and looking back on his life. Which is worse? trying but failing, or never trying at all?
Realizing that failure was not the worst of it, his choice became clear. Bezos had to build Amazon.
In game theory this is called minimaxing: Minimizing the maximum possible loss.
We all play this game, and there’s no escaping the price.
The only real choice is this: pain now, or a lifetime of regret?
That's exactly how I've been deciding and didn't even need to go that far in the future. Just the idea of being in the same place in five years, still preparing to take the risk, was excruciating. That + my alignment with the choice was probably why I never regretted leaping.