Live life with no regrets

Read a Facebook post from an Australian woman who died at 27 from a rare disease. This was the last thing she wrote before she passed away. Link here.

It was a reminder that we’re all finite. We’re all going to go some day. It’s hard coming to terms with this fact as a young person because we expect our life to be so long with so many years ahead. You don’t know how many years you will have. You don’t know what the future holds. It could all end tomorrow.

Depending on how you look at it, that’s either scary or liberating. Scary because you can constantly be stressed about your death and what happens after you die. But more liberating because if you could go at any time, why aren’t you living the life you wanted? Why are you letting other people’s opinions of you hold you back from living the life you want to live? When we’re young, we’re too caught up in the opinions of others. Social media has magnified that. Everything is a comparison to someone else.

As you grow older, and you hear this from so many people as they age, they stop caring. They stop doing things for other people. They stop trying to live up to other people’s expectations of who they should be. They make decisions for themselves. What takes people so long? People can’t grasp things they can’t see unless they experience it themselves. What I’ve learned through reading so many books across many subjects is you can learn life through other people’s mistakes.

If you listen to old people on their deathbed talk about their lives, the ones who were miserable are filled with regret for the things they didn’t do. The stuff they never tried because they were trapped in the life they lived. They were too comfortable in their situation that they never ventured outside of their routine to do something different. It wasn’t what other people around them were doing so why would they do it?

Social proofing is such a powerful concept. Just finished Poor Richard’s Almanack about Charlie Munger’s life. What a genius that guy is. His ability to read across multiple disciplines and never stop learning was the reason he succeeded. Anyone can be like him if they have that innate curiousity of learning and never stop doing it. After decades, you eventually learn things through experience but reading can expedite that process. The most successful people in the world according to Munger are those who are obsessive readers across disciplines. It’s a habit I’m starting to develop and although I’ve started strong by reading over 100 books over the last 2.5 years, I’m still at the beginning. There’s so much more to learn. 

I’m starting to see the world from different angles because of the diverse subject areas I’ve learned about. As Charlie was discussing psychology in his book, I couldn’t help but think of applications in how businesses are run, why women like certain men, and how animals interact with each other. Reading across disciplines gives you multiple mental models to make sense of the world. You’re never going to be perfect but if you can be right more than wrong, because of the infinite leverage that exists in today’s world, you can be exponentially more successful than the next person.

I keep thinking about this Naval quote, ‘life is a single player game.’ There’s so much insight in that quote. As he describes it, you’re born, you have a bunch of sensory experiences that inform who you are as a person and then you pass away. The only person playing that game is you, no one else. Reality is completely neutral. You interpret it based on your mind, which is informed by your feelings, experiences, culture, language, etc. but you determine how you see the world. If you think the world is a terrible place, it will be because that’s all you see. If you think it’s a great place full of opportunity, that’s how you’ll see it. I’m in the latter camp.

Create your own reality. Think about what you want to accomplish in your life and repeat it to yourself every day. After a few years, you’ll notice your subconscious mind leading you to opportunities to reach that goal. The mind is a powerful tool that people severely underestimate. Your mind is everything and you can use it to change how you see the world. But it takes consistent work.

You have to trust the process. You have to put in the work and trust the work you’ve done prior. When I was losing weight, everything I read told me if you train and eat healthy for long enough, your body will reward you. It did. It came from doing things for long periods of time. It also came from doing things that were challenging. I didn’t know if I was ever going to get a six-pack in my life and I’m here.

You have to live life without regret because we’re all going to pass away some day. We don’t know when that day will come or what it will look like or who will be around us. It could be a complete stranger, it could be by ourselves in a car accident or it could be with generations of family around us as we pass away in our sleep. No one knows how it’s going to happen but that moment right before you go, do you really want to be thinking about all the regrets you had?

I sure don’t.