15 tweets · August 2022 · 45 likes · 3 retweets · read on Twitter
I've thought about regret a lot over the years & I think there's a real difference betw when you learn a lot vs getting an old lesson again at great cost eg if you sleep in & miss a workshop, that may teach you a lesson about alarm clocks... that is less useful than the workshop
it's worth cultivating diligence to avoid making small mistakes that keep you from making more interesting mistakes but also, if you somehow fail to do this, there may be a deeper learning to be found there
for example, maybe you have the opportunity to pitch someone your idea, and if it lands it could change your life if you don't prepare, you'll learn the lesson "better prepare", but you won't find out if a well-prepared pitch could have worked
and maybe the deeper lesson here is you were actually scared of finding that out! either because you're scared of the life-change or scared of what it would mean if your idea got rejected despite a good pitch, vs being able to say "well he just didn't like my pitch"
in Larson's autobiographical musical Tick... Tick... BOOM! he finally does an amazing workshop of the musical he's been working on for 6yr. lots of people love it but it doesn't get picked up for production, allowing Sondheim to finally convince him to move on & do something new
this first struck me many years ago, when I was part of hosting an event, and an oversight on our part meant that some participants showed up without any buy-in to what we were doing, and dramatically disrupted something others had flown across the continent for
we learned interesting stuff from the disruption, and a co-host was emphasizing those, but when she said she wasn't that surprised by it happening I was like "wait, but why didn't we do something to prevent that then?! then we could have found out how well it was possible to do!"
I've still got a lot to learn re actually cultivating that much diligence & excellence. Whether it's fear of success or fear of rejection or something else, I often make underpreparedness-shaped mistakes eg this could probably have been way better
there's a powerful spiritual insight to be found in seeing how in some sense you couldn't have avoided making all the mistakes you made and there's lots of low-hanging fruit to be found in taking them seriously so you can make new ones next time
for an old beautiful post of mine exploring the spiritual insight about transcending regret & mistakes (without the later third-more-complex-thing insight that this thread is about) check out this piece: malcolmocean.com/2017/11/transc…
ah, here's another way to point at the post-regret insight, kinda with less confusion: beating yourself up about something that happened generally doesn't help there's already whatever happened and how you feel—adding any extra pain/problem is fake twitter.com/darcyjae/statu…
also if you are beating yourself up about things, you don't have to beat yourself up about that but it's okay if you do, etc etc ×♾
ah and the other missing piece here is coherence empathy, which is grokking that in fact doing exactly what you did was *actually* what made sense to you at the time that's true while also it had costs. don't negate, bring those in dialogue to get a bigger perspective for future
revisiting the original tweet (rephrased) maybe my point is that truly recognizing *in first person* that you cannot change anything about the past opens up a whole different kind of learning (so below has causal arrow backwards)
ahh, and I think he's also critiquing people who avoid FEELING the pain of whatever was lost as a result of the mistake although "lost" still sort of treats the counterfactual world as the default, which is the confusion I'm trying to point at here slippery stuff, fuck