It’s very likely that today you have some regrets, or some situation that, had you known 5 or 10 years ago, you would have handled differently so that your life (or the situation itself) would be different now. Very often, the most common regrets share the same root: putting things off, or procrastination. In other words, knowing you should do something but not doing it, or putting it off for so long that it was completely forgotten and still hasn’t been done.
That’s why we think this question is very powerful, as long as we act on the answers we find.
What do you think you’ll regret in 5 or 10 years if you don’t change something?
If you focus, go to a corner in the quiet of your home and work through this question, thinking about the answers, the truth is that for the first time you’ll very probably be able to see the future (your own future, at least), because if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll already have found the answers to this question.
You probably already had the answers but had never asked yourself the question, even though those inner voices have been nagging at you for some time, telling you that you ought to do this or that, that you should stop wasting time, or that you should make some changes to turn your life around.
See also: How to change your life radically
The changes you should have made might be things like not having made time to learn a new skill, not having taken a chance when you felt you could afford the risk to get a project off the ground, having stayed in a toxic relationship, or not having had a saving habit. It could even be about looking after your body and health: I should have exercised more or eaten better.
In 10 years’ time you’ll wish you had started today
How many times have you read this line in our articles? Plenty, I imagine.
The good news is that any age and any moment is an excellent time to make changes and turn your life around completely. To do it, you’ll have to do all those hard things you haven’t done so far, learn from the defeatist, lazy attitude of your past and build a new mindset of strength and progress: a mindset of change.
And why do you know what you’ll regret in 5 or 10 years?
You know what you’ll regret because you already regret it
You know that what you’re doing today isn’t getting you closer to where you want to be, but you make excuses so you don’t have to admit plainly that you’re being lazy. You know your actions won’t lead you to your dreams or goals. A few years from now you’ll realise you could have done much more, and that will leave you with a mix of helplessness, sadness and anger.
In the end you’ll fall back on the most common behaviour, which is to look for imaginary culprits and point the finger at everything you can in order to ignore the real culprit: you.
And you know you’re going to have regrets because your future regret will very probably be the same as your current one.
In other words, today you probably feel that 5 or 10 years ago you could have done certain things to improve your life, and you regret not having done them. The things you didn’t do 5 years ago are the very same things you should be doing today. But if you keep doing what you’ve been doing for years, in 5 or 10 years you’ll still be stuck in the same place with the same regrets. And yes, with the same complaints that let the real culprit off the hook: the one you look at in the mirror every morning.
See also: 5 things you may regret on your deathbed, and can fix today
So why don’t you do what you know you should?
Aristotle and Socrates called it akrasia, also known as procrastination or putting things off: two great enemies of discipline and success.
Basically, we don’t do what we should even though we know it’s good for us, because we tend to see the things that benefit us as a sacrifice (reading, studying, working hard), while distractions come in the form of pleasure (parties, alcohol, video games). So it seems we have to rely on something we don’t usually have, or don’t know how to build: willpower.
And for those who feel they lack willpower, in this article we explain… How to break habits without willpower, according to neuroscience
Recommended: How to make lasting, consistent changes in your life
Featured image: After Lysippos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
