Why do people fall out of love?

The simple answer is: we fall out of love because that is the only way for us to start learning how to really love. Being in love - or romantic love - has its place, but it's very different from true love.

How do you deal with regret about wasted years?

Regret is inevitable and painful, and that pain can either trap you or teach you. Treat it as an expensive teacher: you have already paid the tuition in lost time and lost potential, so the only question left is whether you collect the lesson. Extract the lesson, integrate it into how you see life, and invest it into your next chapter so the fee compounds instead of being lost.

Is making peace with regret enough?

Often it is the easier and less useful option. Making peace can mean you accept the regret, the wasted time and the wasted potential without learning anything. You pay the fee without gaining the lesson, and you cannot invest a lesson you never extracted.

What does "make a strong choice and execute" mean?

When you have many options, choosing one feels dangerous because it means letting go of the others, so you pursue them all a little and none properly. You can do almost anything, but you cannot do everything, because your time, energy and attention (TEA) have to be invested somewhere. Choose one path, commit fully, and pay with effort and possible failure instead of with regret.

#103 How To Deal With Life's Biggest Regrets

Francois Esterhuizen

Sep 23

3 min read

There is a lot about my thirties that I regret, and regret deeply. I could tell you that I have made peace with that. Really I haven't.

At the end of 2007 I had been married for about five months, I had quit full-time ministry and we had moved to Cape Town. Three major life changes all at once. Not something I would recommend.

I made a full video on this. Watch it here, or keep reading for the short version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WDGperNKU

Making peace is not the same as learning

Sometimes making peace with something in the past means you do not get what you were supposed to get from it. You are not learning anything, you just accept it. Accept the regret, accept that you wasted time, accept that you wasted potential. I did all of that in the first four years of my thirties.

Regret is an expensive teacher

Regret is inevitable. Regrets are painful. And that pain can either trap us or teach us.

It is a very expensive teacher, because you pay in time and you pay in potential. There is no bursary for this. You pay the full tuition fee. And we all pay in some way. If regret is a trap, you pay with lost time and lost potential. If regret is a teacher, you have a choice in the future to not go back and ask to be taught the same lesson again.

What happened in Cape Town

I had sponsors, so there was no money pressure. I had a lot of different options, and that was part of the problem for me. Choosing one of them felt dangerous, because if I choose one path, I am letting go of all the others. So I would think about pursuing one thing and say no, wait, wait, wait. And then I pursued them all at once, all a little bit.

My big lesson looking back is one sentence. Make a strong choice and execute.

How you pay instead

Because regret is so expensive and everyone pays, you can choose how you want to pay, where you are now. Instead of paying with regret, we pay with effort, we pay with failure, we pay with embarrassment. Trying things, going after things, fully committing. We also pay with our confidence a little, because a real attempt that fails can give it a knock. That is part of why we fear trying anything that is not guaranteed to work. But if you only go after what is guaranteed, you stay in a very safe zone, and there is no way to break into more of your potential like that.

Passing the class: extract, integrate, invest

Extract the lesson. Understand what happened and what you needed to learn. Mine was to make a strong choice and execute on it fully.

Integrate it. Allow it to change your world view. I thought I could do anything. What I was really saying was that I wanted to do everything, and that is a very different thing. You can do almost anything. You can't do everything, because you have to invest your time, energy and attention somewhere. I call that TEA, and TEA equals life.

Invest it into your next chapter. Then the school fees you paid in lost time and lost potential get invested and can compound. If you just make peace with something, that does not happen. You pay the fee without gaining the lessons, and you cannot invest lessons you never extracted.

If there is a time in your life that you regret, whatever it is, extract the lessons, integrate them, and invest them. That is where it starts to compound.

And if you want to see where and how you are stuck right now, take the RUT Diagnostic. It takes three minutes.