Regret reveals what you actually value and teaches you how to act next time. A decade of guilt over unkindness showed the speaker that kindness matters most. Now that awareness changes who they invite to parties.
Regret does 2 things for us. It clarifies and it instructs. So the fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years, that's telling me something. It's telling me what I value. It's telling me I actually value kindness, something that's important to me. And as I think about that, I think, well, who are the people who I admire? A lot of the people I admire are kind people, people who treat others well. And it's also instructing me what to do next. Now, this is mundane. If I'm ever at a social gathering or any kind of gathering and I see, you know, sometimes there are people like clumped together talking and every once in a while, in a while, you see people sort of left out on their— an island of their own. I always reach out, pull that person in, and that is a consequence of being embarrassed and regretful about letting people be left out earlier in my life. So regrets clarify what matters to us, and they instruct us on how to do better.
