Why You Shouldnt Be Afraid Of Making Mistakes

Make them earth- why you shouldn’t shattering, life-shredding be afraid of catastrophes – you’ll be a making mistakes better man for it.

- Tony Parsons

Regrets? You’ll have a few. “I wish I’d had more sex,” Sir John Betjeman, poet laureate, famously sighed at the end of his life, suggesting that even the most successful man must confront the gap – the yawning abyss – between the life that he has lived and the life that he actually wanted to live.

In her book, The Top Five Regrets Of The Dying, Australian nurse Bronnie Ware, who spent years nursing the terminally ill, writes that the greatest regret among dying men is the deep remorse they feel for devoting so much of their life to work and career and so little to the people they loved. But the regrets do not end there. The book is a litany of missed opportunities, wasted moments, profound emotions that were left unsaid. We feel bad about the old friends who we let slip from our lives. We regret that we never quite summoned the courage to live the life we wanted rather than the life that was expected of us.

But could there be anything worse than mourning all the wonderful things that you never got around to doing? Only this: regretting all the stupid things that you did do.

New research suggests that the average man makes six terrible decisions in the course of his lifetime, half a dozen horribly wrong turns that he then spends the rest of his days trying to mend.