
Ask HN: What are your regrets? - thomsopw
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.<p>So what are your regrets?
======
willhf

      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.

~~~
dporan
The author of that appears to be Jose Luis Borges:

[http://books.google.com/books?ei=zvzWTNPpKsT_nAf7j7DpCQ&...](http://books.google.com/books?ei=zvzWTNPpKsT_nAf7j7DpCQ&ct=result&id=uPFIAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22I+was+one+of+those+who+never+went+anywhere+without+a+thermometer%22+borges&q=%22I+was+one+of+those+who+never+went+anywhere+without+a+thermometer%22#search_anchor)

~~~
anatoly
It's often misattributed to Borges. It was written (in prose) by columnist Don
Herold in 1953 for the _Reader's Digest_. Since then it underwent several
changes, has been attributed to several authors, was broken into a verse form,
was translated to Spanish, acquired a Spanish title, "Instantes", was then re-
translated back into English often retaining the Spanish title...

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.

------
ndl
Hmm, where shall I begin?

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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
So how much of that are you going to change, starting today?

------
jgalvez
Believing for so long that I needed someone's money to build something.

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.

~~~
sfphotoarts
I'm not sure this is very good advice. The people that are likely to comment
here (as with product reviews) are those with unordinary experiences. Yours
was positive and I am glad for you, however, for every good experience like
this I suspect there are many that regret such actions.

~~~
jgalvez
I think you have to measure things with care. I always thought that if worse
came to worst, I could always still get a shitty PHP coding job. Things are
never as bad as they appear to be. I think the message is to get over the
irrational fear of unemployment, and the nonsensical notion that web apps are
expensive to keep running. They're not. You need a domain name and a cheap
server box. If you already have a laptop, there's even free wifi everywhere.
If you think about that for a second, you realize it's a wonder there aren't
/more/ startups booming everywhere than there are today.

------
clofresh
I regret focusing on getting good grades in school instead of building strong
connections with people.

~~~
noname123
In the same vein, dealing with women. Sex is human being's strongest
motivator, choose to ignore it at your own peril.

------
jacobroufa
No reason to regret anything, as I see it. I am the culmination of my 24 short
years of experience. Without my experiences, good, bad or indifferent, I
wouldn't be the person I am today. And I like that person.

------
uast23
Nothing major. But currently I am seriously regretting my decision to buy an
iPhone instead of android.

~~~
billpaetzke
How come?

~~~
uast23
I took the decision a little too early. I should have checked it earlier that
there is no legal way to develop iPhone apps on Linux except (probably)buying
OS X and running it on a virtual machine and almost ditto goes for Windows.

------
Stevenup7002
I used to regret a lot of things, now I don't. You learn from every mistake
you make. (As I like to say in my own geeky way "Every failure == +1XP")

------
frou_dh
Not learning self-discipline when I was young.

Not learning musical fundamentals when I was young.

To a lesser extent, pursuing a whack university degree :)

------
maxklein
I regret all the times I was afraid of doing something.

------
flog
I've loved 2 wonderful women over the last 9 years since high school, but
missed out on ever being single and all that entails (one night stands, etc).
I just hope that doesn't haunt me when I'm middle aged.

~~~
sp4rki
Trust me you're not missing anything at all. If I actually had any regrets is
doing the single thing too much and going overboard too many times.

~~~
nanijoe
He needs to find out for himself that he's not missing anything...btw he IS
missing a LOT. Being Single and being in a relationship affect your lifestyle
in different ways, and everyone should take time to enjoy both.

~~~
sp4rki
The man says that he's in a committed relationship, but that he's scared of
the fact that he might miss the "single" experience. If you tell him that he
is missing "a LOT" you're giving him encouragement for him to leave that
relationship to live the single lifestyle that is completely overblown by the
media.

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.

------
tomjen3
Well there was this girl, whom I didn't go after...

~~~
noonespecial
There was this girl, who I did...

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.

~~~
Carcamonster
"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."

I second that! Same situation here.

~~~
wglb
When I was young, I thought that all of life was carbon-based. Later, I
learned that there are also anxiety-based lifeforms. Who we all really could
just do without.

------
user24
I reget not checking my email in July 2009.

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.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
What exactly prevents your from emailing them back now?

~~~
user24
Nothing at all. But it's still a shame I didn't pick the email up there and
then - could have gone straight from uni to Facebook, would have been a good
time to do it.

------
karterk
Regrets are a funny thing. We did what we did because we lacked the help of
"hindsight" which we have now. In that context, it's far too easy to end up
criticizing ourselves. As for me, I prefer to not regret, but just learn from
my past.

------
rbrcurtis
I should have put a lot more thought into who I wanted to be and how I wanted
to get there when I was in highschool. I'm fairly satisfied with who I am but
some more forethought would have helped quite a bit.

------
Silhouette
Almost everything that I would do differently with the wisdom of hindsight
comes down to one of two stories: it's something I could have started
immediately but didn't, so I wasted time before starting it later anyway or
never did it at all, or it's something I did start but then gave up on too
soon or for the wrong reasons.

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.

------
rlivsey
It's a difficult one because our decisions & mistakes made earlier in our
lives are what make us who we are today.

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.

------
AN447
Every cute girl I don't talk to on the street that catches my eye. Thats a
regret.

Everything to date I am happy about, no reason to complain.

------
stan_rogers
Regrets? I've had a few; but, then again, too few to mention.

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.

~~~
thetylerhayes
+1 for everything mentioned here. +10 for the way it was mentioned. +100 for
the Sinatra reference.

~~~
clutchski
(totally off-topic)

and plus a few more points for having the same as this guy:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-PQbdmQRwc>

------
petervandijck
No regrets, really. Just thankfulness for the times I lucked out.

------
wyclif
I regret not seeking out more personal mentoring when I was younger instead of
more schooling. It's easier to ask for and get when you're young-- the mentor
is more likely to be flattered and more likely to see that taking a young
person under his/her wing is worthwhile. It's harder (but not impossible) to
do when you're older: you have less time to spend with that experienced
person.

------
Mc_Big_G
I regret not forcing myself to leave my over-paid, reliable, incredibly easy
job years ago. Despite building many (what I consider cool) things solo, my
job search is suffering from a lack of experience developing in a
collaborative environment and the problem of being too much of a generalist.
This is what happens when you do everything yourself.

~~~
windsurfer
Never regret being a generalist.

...I think I just accidentally made a pun.

~~~
hasenj
where's the pun? I don't see it.

------
kirpekar
I run a small site that does this: record people's regrets.
<http://regrett.com>

------
Mz
I'm not big on regrets. I make the best decision I know how and try to learn
from my mistakes. Now, if you want to know my current frustrations and
annoyances -- the things I am trying desperately to _not_ have become regrets
-- that list is reasonably long. :-D

------
Nemisis7654
A few things I regret: -As a college student, I regret not learning how to
program earlier -Not spending more time learning how to program (I am trying
to remedy this) -Not taking as many risks (Mainly having to do with some girls
in my life)

------
randall
This is more of a public journal entry than anything, but I honestly don't
regret anything. I only dated one girl before the girl who I married, I'm
about to have a kid, I've worked with a ridiculous amount of great companies,
I had a semi-nerdy time in school, and none of it has given me any regrets.

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.

------
iuguy
There are many things I could've regretted, but ultimately all of those things
made me who I am now. I'm fairly certain I've had more than my fair share of
opportunities and made more than my fair share of mistakes, but all I can do
is identify them as such, learn as much as I can and try to make myself a
better person.

Have a screwed up? Heck yes. Do I regret it? No way.

------
alina24
I learnt Indian classical music till I was high school and then had to
completely give it up for different reasons.I haven't practiced it much since
then and I regret it badly. And I really regret not having been much involved
in extracurr. activities in college

------
danielson
Je ne regrette rien!

~~~
stan_rogers
+1 for the Piaf reference. I'm always two feet taller and wearing armour after
hearing that song.

------
venturebros
Being lazy... it's been a year and I am still inbetween novice and
intermediate when it comes to javascript and php. I have the books and some
tutorials but I have not really looked at them. I could be a lot farther along
with all my projects if I focused.

------
Omnipresent
I regret not implementing my ideas into real projects, fearing the fear,
predicting the worse, not making a decision on what to focus on among 5
things, writing about all this here rather than learning something.

------
snkherv
Nights I stayed in during school so I could "do work" when my friends wanted
me to go out.

Basically any time I let paranoid thoughts of "I have to do work" prevent me
from growing my relationships with others.

------
gsivil
That I did not become proficient in programming during my undergrad in EE and
CE

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

------
kadavy
Some people call them "regrets." I like to call them "lessons learned."

------
roadnottaken
" _The only thing one never regrets are one's mistakes._ "

\--Oscar Wilde

------
keefe
wasting time

------
joshfraser
no regrets.

trying to live in a way to keep it that way.

