 Do you ever feel a sense of regret that you've wasted too much time in life, that you wish you were younger and had some years back? Maybe that you would make different choices, take different path in life, do things differently? It seems like it's a rare few that don't have this, at least to some degree. A rare few who can be fully content that every decision they made was okay. Now it is possible to say, okay, being who I was then, knowing what I knew then, I made the best choices that I was able to make with what I had and what I was. And that's fair enough and that's reasonable. And that's a useful thing that we can remind ourselves of, that we're not beating ourselves up about the past and how we have an imperfect past. And yet it also seems to me like this feeling of regret can be very useful to us. This is a very powerful feeling. I think it's never going to feel good. It's always going to be a very uncomfortable feeling, that sense of loss, the sense of lost time, time that we will never get back. It is gone. The past is gone. And that sense of something that is out of our grasp, that there was a time when it was in our grasp, we didn't make full use of it, or even if we did, it is gone now. There's the sense of the actual regret that we have for a lost past. And there's the fear that in the future, we will regret how we spent the present. And that I think especially can be a very powerful fuel for changing our lives. And this is something that really helped me start to change. I was happy with what I was doing. I was happy wasting time and just filling in time entertaining myself with escapism. It's great entertainment. It was only that feeling that time is passing. I'm not getting the fullness of life that I want, as fun as it is to be entertained. It doesn't feel like that is enough for, that is not what life can be and should be. So I did this simple thought experiment that helped to change that perspective. Just imagine yourself in old age, looking back on your life. How do you want to feel? You don't have to even go to full old age. You can go to middle age. You can go to even 10 years in the future, maybe even less. Just imagine yourself at some point in the future. Looking back on everything that your life has been. How do you want to feel? What kind of life do you want to be looking back on? It seems to me like the recipe for happiness and satisfaction in this state is to be able to look back on life and say that I lived a full life. Whereas the recipe for sadness and miserable old age would be to look back on my life and say what I could have been. I could have had a full life, but instead I wasted my time. I turned down my chances to do bigger, better things. I filled my time with things that were not particularly valuable and now here I am. I'm old. I cannot get that time back. It's too late. Now that is a truly miserable feeling. Now I believe no matter how late in life, we still have a chance. It's never too late to do anything. There's never a time I believe when we should completely give up. Even if we are 80 years old, there's still a chance to have even if it's only a few more years, but a few more years of a wonderful life which is possible is a huge thing. So it's never fully too late, but it is too late for those years that are gone. Every year that is gone is gone and that's regret. That's regretting lost time, lost youth, lost chances. Once it's gone, it's gone. It really is an ugly feeling. Anytime there is an intense feeling, that can be an intense motivator and the fear of that feeling or the desire for that feeling can also be a powerful motivator. So for me the fear of regret started to help me to make some changes in my life, but then over time combined with actual regret over years that were gone and I had wasted too much time, that became a powerful feeling. Of course it led to the desire to escape from that feeling, deny it, ignore it, and simply avoid dealing with it, but it would only get worse over time and my fear of that feeling getting worse, the feeling of that regret feeling becoming worse, that feeling got stronger and really started to push me towards doing something about it. Regret is a feeling of discomfort and discomfort can be very useful to get us out of a routine that's not working. Sometimes expressed as lighting a fire in your belly, lighting a fire under your ass, that is a strong way to picture this idea that you are sitting comfortably and you're perfectly content to just sit, but then there's a fire burning under your ass, now you have to move. It is not comfortable, there's no way that feeling is going to be pleasant, but it does make you move. I like the metaphor of a comfortable arm chair that represents living in a comfortable routine and then the arm chair catches fire. It's no longer a place where you can comfortably rest because now it's tainted with this feeling of regret or the fear of future regret, wasting time. I want my life to be more, so now it's not as comfortable anymore. I can't just hang out in my nice arm chair, I have to move. So I would be curious to hear your experience with a tool like this, using negative emotions, using discomfort as a motivator that feel that gut wrenching, burning, uncomfortable feeling of something's wrong and apply that to getting up out of comfort and moving into doing new things. Of course it's important not to let the feeling be so overwhelming that we simply kind of wallow in it and drown in this feeling of misery and regret because no matter how bad the feeling is, there's always that feeling that it could be getting worse in the future unless we do something about it. So as much regret as you feel, let the fear of future regret be even stronger so that even if you are 80 years old, you can still start to make changes and start to do new things, live your life in a new way so that even if you cannot get back any of that time before, there's still time ahead in which you can live a life that you don't regret. That I find to be a wonderful motivation. Don't avoid the burn, don't paper over the burn, don't just say everything's okay, you don't need to feel that way. Let yourself feel the burn. Let it get you out of that comfortable armchair and start moving. Let your mistakes, your regrets, your sadness, all negative mental states, all negative emotions become fuel that you can burn in order to take you in a new direction towards a better life.