One of the most important insights from the scholarly research on regret is that we regret what we didn’t do more deeply and more often than what we did do.
This distinction between action regrets and inaction regrets came out clearly in my own research, including our survey of 4,489 Americans.
We found that 20-year-olds have about equal numbers of the two types of regret. But as people get just a little older, what begins to haunt them are inactions, not actions.
The lesson?
Act now. Take the chance.
