Ask HN: What are your regrets?
I was asked the other day by a friend whether i regretted a few of the major decisions that I've made in life..
That got me wondering what kind of regrets people in a similar situation to me have.
So what are your regrets?
71 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadNot learning musical fundamentals when I was young.
To a lesser extent, pursuing a whack university degree :)
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.
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
Everything to date I am happy about, no reason to complain.
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.
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.
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.
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.