Thinks 997

Veronique de Rugy: “The best job-creation policy is a strong economy. The government should be content to create a level playing field with transparent rules and strong protection of property and contract rights. Of course, it should also supply public goods like infrastructure and ensure a stable legal system. Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”

The Verge: “A search engine is both an enormously complex thing and a fairly simple idea. All a search engine is doing, really, is compiling a database of webpages — known as the “search index” — then looking through that database every time you issue a query and serving the best and most relevant set of those pages. That’s the whole job. At every tiny step of that journey, though, there are huge complications that require critical and complex tradeoffs. Most of them boil down to two things: time and money. Even if you could hypothetically build a constantly updating database of all of the untold billions of pages on the internet, the storage and bandwidth costs alone would bankrupt practically any company on the planet. And that’s not even counting the cost of searching that database millions or billions of times a day. Add in the fact that every millisecond matters — Google still advertises how long every query took at the top of your results — and you don’t have time to look over the whole database, anyway.”

FT: “Since it launched the wildly successful Indian Premier League tournament in 2008, India has brought unparalleled riches to the sport. Its teams now attract the world’s best players and have bought up new international franchises. The country’s governing body, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, dominates global decision making and takes a larger share of global revenues than England and Australia combined. India is even influencing how the game is played, with test teams such as England increasingly adopting crowd-pleasing, aggressive playing styles that fans trace back to the IPL’s shorter, fast-paced Twenty20 format. “India’s influence in global cricket cannot be overstated,” said Arun Dhumal, the IPL’s chair and a former BCCI executive. “The IPL has been a game-changer not only for Indian cricket but also for world cricket, in terms of the traction it has generated with fans across the globe, in terms of the financial bandwidth . . . It has been phenomenal.””

Omar Shams on the AI organisation: “Right now we’re hand-designing information flows and team structure. Instead, let’s use LLMs to share information between teams and help route important work to the right people. LLMs can summarize what work everyone does in an organization by parsing over their code, messages, and documents. LLMs in conjunction with other AI techniques can also identify common problems in an organization and rank them by severity. These models can then group the work of each team member by reviewing their code, messages, and documents, providing a comprehensive summary of their roles. We can then route important information to the right people in the organization who have the relevant expertise. This way of organizing information effectively forms dynamic ‘flash’ teams that cut across traditional organizational boundaries. By training LLMs on company code/docs and/or embedding company code/docs in a vector space we can capture institutional knowledge (‘tribal knowledge’) and spread it around the organization and safeguard it against loss due to personnel changes.”

My Life System #90: Personal Hedgehog

A business idea I very much like is Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept. In the context of a business, it is about answering three questions:

  • What are you deeply passionate about?
  • What can you be best in the world at?
  • What drives your economic engine?

Here is what Jim Collins writes: “Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”…A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial. Every company would like to be the best at something, but few actually understand—with piercing insight and egoless clarity—what they actually have the potential to be the best at and, just as important, what they cannot be the best at. And it is this distinction that stands as one of the primary contrasts between the good-to-great companies and the comparison companies.”

The same Hedgehog Concept can be applied to us as individuals. It can help us identify our passions, strengths, and potential for success. By answering these three questions, we can work towards finding our “personal hedgehog” and ultimately build a fulfilling, successful, and meaningful life.

Here are three questions that can help us discover our own “hedgehog”:

  1. What activities or pursuits genuinely ignite your passion and make you feel fulfilled? Reflect on the things that truly excite you, bring joy, and make you feel engaged in life. These passions can help you find a personal sense of purpose.
  2. What are your unique talents, skills, or abilities that set me apart from others? Assess your strengths and areas where you excel or have the potential to excel. Consider not only your natural talents but also the skills you’ve developed through hard work, education, or experience.
  3. How can you combine my passion and strengths to create value or generate income? Think about ways to leverage your passions and skills in a manner that provides value to others and can potentially lead to financial rewards or a sustainable livelihood.

I asked myself these questions to discover my “personal Hedgehog.” For me, it has been about generating new ideas and converting them into startups – the 0 to 1 phase. Not all have ended up being successful, but the two big hits (IndiaWorld and Netcore) have delivered very good outcomes. Of late, there is a mini-Hedgehog that I have been building on – writing. The blog has become a great ideas generator. As Kevin Kelly wrote in his advice book, “I write in order to think; that’s how I think. I think by writing. I don’t have the ideas and then sit down and try to write them. I use writing to get the ideas.” I could not agree more.

The concept of a personal hedgehog is a powerful tool for self-discovery and personal growth. It is an exercise we must all do. We should repeat it every few years or so because we change with time. By regularly evaluating our passions, strengths, and opportunities for value creation, we can adapt to life’s changes and remain aligned with our true selves. Embracing the personal hedgehog concept is not only an investment in ourselves but also a journey towards reaching our full potential.

Thinks 996

WSJ: “Traditionally, goods come to the warehouse in trucks, then are manually unloaded with pallet jacks and forklifts. Here, Walmart is testing an autonomous forklift. A single worker can unload multiple trucks at once while monitoring cases for accuracy and damage. Walmart plans to automate or partially automate many of its hundred-plus U.S. warehouses in the coming years. The shift means Walmart can use fewer people to process more goods and make stocking shelves at stores more efficient. To keep their jobs, many of the company’s tens of thousands of warehouse workers need to retrain for new roles. Some will leave. Warehouses will also need to hire people with new skills, such as technicians. Large companies such as Walmart and Amazon that rely on massive warehousing networks have worked for years to automate more of their supply chains to increase the volume of packages they can process and reduce labor costs. Because of Walmart’s scale, its plan to make automation standard in more of its supply chain is likely to affect how smaller competitors invest in their own facilities and what a U.S. warehouse job becomes.”

RV Raman: “This is sketch of the nascent crime fiction scene in India. Stories and writers are not in short supply. Nor are publishers. But readers are. We are lamentably short of readers. For the Indian crime fiction scene to flourish, we need more people to read for pleasure. However, we do have a silver lining: there is fresh interest from overseas publishers for Indian mysteries. How much that will help remains to be seen. With luck, the new readers who currently consume romance and mythological fiction will expand their patronage to crime fiction and provide the genre the necessary boost. Just as British mysteries and Scandinavian noir have carved niches of their own, we might see Indian noir carving one for itself in the coming years.”

NYTimes: “If you have had a romantic partner, you’ve most likely had the maddening experience of realizing that while you were blabbering on about something or another, they were focused on their phone. As relationship transgressions go, “phubbing” — a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing” — is, on the surface, fairly benign. Yet research increasingly shows it can be insidious. A recent study linked higher levels of phubbing to marital dissatisfaction, and a 2022 study found it can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. One study found that those who phub a lot are more likely to be phubbed themselves, creating a kind of ripple effect.”

Renée Mauborgne: “Beyond Disruption is about how companies can innovate and achieve growth without displacing industries, companies, or jobs. It is a positive-sum approach to innovation and growth that allows business and society to thrive together. The book is the result of research that my colleague W. Chan Kim and I completed during a 30-year research journey. We set out to codify processes and tools that allow organizations to be systematic in identifying and unlocking nondisruptive opportunities in a high-value, low-cost way…Disruption occurs when you create a new market within an existing market, leading to a high level of disruptive growth. Blue ocean strategy involves developing a new market across existing industries, creating a measure of disruptive and nondisruptive growth. Nondisruption is at the opposite end of the innovation spectrum. It occurs when you develop a new market outside the bounds of existing industries, which generates largely nondisruptive growth where there is no displacement.”

My Life System #89: Rejection

We will never go through life getting everything we want. Rejection is a part and parcel of our journey. Whether it is the competitive race to get into a good school or college, or then in the search for a job, or as an entrepreneur seeking to raise capital – rejection is part of the terrain. And with rejection also comes disappointment. “How could they reject me? They rejected ME? What do I do now?” And so on.

In this essay, I want to discuss the 50+ rejections I have faced as an entrepreneur raising capital over 30+ years. I have not succeeded at all. (Which has perhaps been a good thing across IndiaWorld and Netcore – lack of external capital forced us down the path of profitability and our proficorn journey.) But there is always a hurt to hear a “No” – almost making me feel that something was lacking in me, especially when every competitor gets capital coming their way.

I was recently meeting a potential investor and decided to take a different approach. I started by saying that I have failed 50 times in my life to raise capital and I don’t expect this to end differently. I said that I will first explain why I will get rejected so as to make their thinking job easier! I will then explain why they should look at investing in Netcore. And after that, I will also mention the valuation at which a deal could be possible. After having gone through plenty of such meetings, I know the drill and thus wanted to make sure none of us wasted time in the early decision process.

The investor smiled and asked me to go ahead. He probably had not seen such candour in all his previous meetings! When I was done, he asked me, “Why do you think you have got rejected 50 times?” My reply, “I do not compromise on my valuation expectation. I did not do that when I was a very small company during my IndiaWorld days, and I will not do it now when we are much larger. I am profitable so there is no desperation for capital. I know what we are worth, I think it is a fair ask, and I know we can create value greater than your IRR expectations.”

Of course, I tallied up one more reject. I wear these rejections now as a badge of honour. And yet, I will never decline a meeting with a potential investor. I have thus changed my attitude towards getting rejected. Instead of self-blame and depression, I use the meetings to learn from some of the smartest people in the world of investing – the questions they ask, the flaws they point, the things they like, the words they use – all help me in making my next pitch better.

My advice: flip the attitude towards being rejected, and never stop trying. Think of it as going for a meeting with the objective of getting at least one new idea, and you will never be disappointed. As Alexander Graham Bell said, “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” This applies to meetings with prospective employers, potential investors, or even future customers. Not every answer will be a Yes, and not every No is an indictment. In my life, it is rejections which have pushed me onward to become better.

Thinks 995

Arnold Kling: “The presumption that markets are flawed and government intervention is the solution pervades the thinking of much of the economics profession in general and Akerlof and Yellen in particular. As you know, I have a different point of view. Are markets imperfect? Certainly. But solutions that come from the market itself can sometimes work. And solutions that come from government intervention can often fail. In short: markets fail; use markets.”

WSJ: “To reduce your cancer risk, you don’t need to make it all the way to the gym: You could start by bringing in the groceries. People who recorded just under four minutes of vigorous movement every day had a roughly 17% reduced cancer risk compared with people who didn’t log any high-intensity movement, a study published [recently] in the journal JAMA Oncology concluded. The link was stronger for cancers in which exercise has previously been connected to lower risks, including breast, colon, endometrial and bladder cancer. The study followed more than 22,000 people who reported that they didn’t exercise but logged minute-long bursts of activity such as walking uphill or carrying shopping bags. It adds to evidence connecting physical activity to better health, even when the movement is modest.”

Economist: “Companies are increasingly caught up in governments’ competing aims. What to do?…In a fractious world, businesses cannot hide from politics and geopolitics. But the lesson of the wokelash is that outspokenness can backfire. When deciding whether to speak up, bosses of global firms should use long-term shareholder value as their lodestar. The more directly what they say affects their business, the more credibility they have and the less risk of appearing a fraud or a hypocrite. This approach may include reminding politicians of the benefits that efficiency and openness once brought to economies around the world. When governments seem to contain a dearth of champions for either, that would be no bad thing.”

Ninan: “If growth has been slowing down in recent years, it is because no sector comparable in scale has emerged to play the role of lead cyclist. Meanwhile the pharma sector lost momentum prematurely because of poor industry practices and regulatory failures. Now the infotech boom has eased into a slower, mature phase. And in the wake of successive shocks (demonetisation, Covid, etc), domestic consumer demand growth has levelled off. For instance, two-wheeler sales have stagnated. One reason could be that the consumer debt burden is now high for India’s income level. As for aviation, India has just one viable (and one potentially viable) airline company that can invest for growth. Meanwhile, merchandise exports have done poorly in the last decade, following the economy’s failure to develop a competitive manufacturing base vis-a-vis rivals like Vietnam and Bangladesh.”

My Life System #88: Public Speaking (contd)

After my speech-cum-presentation at Netcore’s India conference, a younger colleague walked up to me and asked, “How can I learn to speak like you?” In reply, I summarised what I had written previously. I said, “Prepare. Practice. Post-mortem” and gave her an idea to get started on her journey to become a better public speaker.

Preparation is about planning the speech. It took me a week. I wanted the speech to motivate and inspire, and also provide enough talking points to the customer-facing teams about Netcore’s strengths in a competitive marketplace. I then set about making the deck – pulling in some images as needed which could help amplify the points I needed to hit home.

Practice is about running through the talk a few times in private (or to a smaller audience). It helps one work through the transitions in the slides without breaking the flow and the story. Even on the day of the talk I made a few edits to incorporate a few ideas other speakers before me had made.

Then comes the actual “show” because it is exactly that. For the time I was on stage, I was a performer. I had to engage with the audience, add in that humour and topicality, connect with their thoughts, and make them forget about their mobiles! I had to surprise them – so they never took their eyes off me. I promised to send the deck to all of them so they didn’t have to worry about making detailed notes and could focus on the experience of listening. I too was in a “flow” as I spoke – the audience interaction propelling me forward. I had a powerful ending and that got me a standing ovation.

And then I did the post-mortem. There were a few places I had missed a few points. I realised I should have either added a word or two on the slide as a prompt or kept a sheet in front of me to make sure I covered those. (The laptop was not in front of me so I did not have access to the slide notes.) In a couple places, the jokes fell flat – a lesson to do better next time. A few times, I was repetitive – in my eagerness to emphasise a point, I went a bit overboard. So, some useful learnings for my next big talk.

In this case, I had the benefit of a friendly audience and unlimited time. In the talk that I had done at SaaS Open in March in New York, I was speaking to SaaS founders and had a 20-minute hard stop. Despite my preparation and planning, I overdid a couple stories which led to me being crunched for time towards the end, leading to a weaker closing than I would have liked. The lesson for me: stick to the script.

I then gave my colleague a suggestion: create a small group at work where she and 4-5 others can meet once every week to speak on a topic for 8-10 minutes. It is how I had learnt at the Indo-American Society course I had done in 1981. Half the battle is won when one can stand up and speak confidently in front of others.

Public speaking is not something we are taught in school or college, and yet it is an important skill to have. To be able to stand up and speak in front of others, persuade them, change their minds, and win their hearts – that is a key step in one’s own leadership journey.

Thinks 994

FT: “The rise of AI forces us to reinterpret our human intelligence…Teachers of all kinds must ensure their students continually question what they think they know — and they are able to use both natural and artificial sources of intelligence. Armed with the tools of curiosity and healthy scepticism, they must master nuance. And, as the emerging career category of “prompt engineers” demonstrates, they must become ever more skilled at asking questions. If the goal of education is to enable our full potential, then we must rethink how we are developing all human capacities, taking advantage of the technological tools that augment our natural abilities. This education needs to be life-long. Top performers in sports, music and, increasingly, business have coaches of many different kinds. These teams increasingly use technology to enhance the feedback they are able to provide their clients in order to constantly improve their performance. As technological advances enhance human capabilities, our need for human guides will only grow.”

WSJ: “In “Look,” Mr. Madsbjerg attempts to impart the wisdom he has acquired from art and philosophy and from the practical experience of running a corporate consultancy and teaching a class on “human observation” at the New School in New York. His book is full of intriguing goodies: anecdotes and precepts originating in a wide array of sources, as well as summaries of the work of gestalt theorists and practitioners of phenomenology, a discipline he defines as “the study of how the human world works and everything that gives our life meaning.” The breadth and vagueness of that definition bespeaks the book’s enthusiastic overreach. There’s a lot here, and a lot of it makes sense, but there are moments when the argument is so diffuse as to feel precarious. At times Mr. Madsbjerg teeters on the edge of banality, even incoherence. Yet he never tips over, for there is unmistakably truth in what he’s getting at. And, to be fair, the distinction between apparent understanding and deep understanding is difficult to draw. It is difficult even to describe. Mr. Madsbjerg does a heroic job of seeking to capture the experience of sudden insight…To pay attention is not solely to concentrate or focus; it can mean entering states of heightened awareness, like a predator on the hunt.”

Walter Russell Mead: “What unites the subcontinent, say Hindu nationalists, is a shared culture in which Hindu religion plays a central role. Even Indians who aren’t Hindu have been shaped by this traditional culture. Cultivating pride in that heritage and freeing it from injuries of both British and Mughal domination is the only way, Hindu nationalists believe, to hold this vast and diverse population together. Nehruvian secularism and liberal abstractions like “constitutional patriotism” can’t do the job, they argue…RSS leaders believe that India can remain united as the shock waves of modernization propagate across the subcontinent only if the changes are seen as grounded in ancient Hindu principles. While conciliating and reassuring more-conservative Hindu thinkers, they are promoting a future-oriented Hinduism in the hope that its ancient religion and culture can bring a united and self-confident India into the 21st century.”

Martin Wolf: “Modi’s India is moving in an illiberal direction. His government has taken huge risks in riding the tiger of politicised religion…As India’s polity has become less liberal, its government has become more effective. World Bank indicators show that “political stability and absence of violence”, “control of corruption”, “regulatory quality” and “government effectiveness” have improved since Narendra Modi became prime minister. But “voice and accountability” and “rule of law” have worsened. His government is more repressive and more effective than its predecessors…This government rides the tiger of politicised religion on what it hopes to be a long journey towards the destination of creating a modern, prosperous and strong India. The question is not just where it will end up, but whether it can avoid being eaten on its journey.”

My Life System #87: Regret – 2

At times, when alone, my pendulum swings from thinking forward to pondering regret. It is usually a response to a trigger – an email, a conversation, or something I saw. A memory from the past swings by and if I am not careful, I can end up opening door after door from a past long gone by. There is nothing I can do to change what’s happened and yet this game of alternate universes begins. What if I had accepted the offer an investor made? What if I had not refused the price point the customer wanted? What if I had said Yes instead of No? What if I had followed my doctor’s advice? What if I had been more careful walking (and therefore not tripped and fallen)? Some are trivial regrets, while others are more profound. Some don’t leave a mark, while others cause deep hurt.

Marshall Goldsmith writes in his book, “The Earned Life”: “Regret, in the words of Kathryn Schulz in her wonderful 2011 TED talk on the subject, is “the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.” Regret is a devilish cocktail of agency (our regrets are ours to create, they’re not foisted upon us by others) and imagination (we have to visualize making a different choice in our past that delivers a more appealing outcome now). Regret is totally within our control, at least in terms of how often we invite it into our lives and how long we let it stick around. Do we choose to be tortured or bewildered by it forever (as in the case of my friend Richard), or can we move on, knowing that regret is not finished with us, that we will surely live to regret again someday…Regret is the depressing counterweight to finding fulfillment in a complex world. Our primary theme is achieving a life of fulfillment—what I call an earned life.

An important point made by Goldsmith is that “our lives reside on a continuum that roams between Regret and Fulfillment.” He adds: “Something truly earned makes three simple requirements of us: We make our best choice supported by the facts and the clarity of our goals. In other words, we know what we want and how far we need to go. We accept the risk involved. We put out maximum effort.”

Control over one’s mind is key to dealing with regret. We must appreciate the good that has happened in the life we have lived and look forward with excitement to the life that is to come. We have control over many decisions. What we need to do is to make sure we choose the best possible option we have – based on the information available at that point. My approach is to always think that there is some good in all that happens, and at times that good may take time to manifest itself. Close the door on regret and open the door to fulfilment.

**

While I had not intended it that way, the three themes of “Closing and Opening Doors”, “The Second Side” [Parts 82-85] and “Regret” form a triad of sorts . The common theme is to let the past go and look forward to a future we can craft by considering options which at times may not be obvious.

A few good quotes to think over:

  • “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” – Steve Jobs
  • “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’ ― John Greenleaf Whittier
  • “Very few regrets in life are about what you did. Almost all are about what you didn’t do.” – Kevin Kelly

So ask yourself: Which doors do you need to close? In which current situations do you need to see the “second side?” How can you limit regrets and think about your “earned life”?

Thinks 993

George Will: “Today, industrial policy’s political purpose is to defuse angry populism that is blamed on “deindustrialization” displacing workers. But declines in the portions of labor forces devoted to manufacturing are normal as nations become richer, regardless of wide variations in nations’ economic policies. And the U.S. government’s would-be industrializers should hope that surly populists, who are eager to cause society’s upper crust to crumble, do not notice how industrial policy makes eager bedfellows of government bureaucrats and corporate elites — for their mutual benefit.”

Jamie Sears: “I wrote How to Love Teaching Again because I am a former teacher and I’ve seen firsthand how teachers are becoming burned out in the classroom. I know that really quality educators are leaving long before they truly wanted to because they have no choice. They need to leave the classroom. I feel like our children really need the best educators possible in the classroom. I’m hoping that the strategies that I share in this book are things that teachers can implement tomorrow to see a better work–life balance.”

From a comment on Tyler Cowen’s blog: “Singapore is often seen as a model for other developing countries for any number of the policies it adopts. But I think one truly underrated high impact policy is this scholarship system. It largely solves the problem governments in many countries face of keeping talent in the public sector, while redressing some degree of inequality (of course, the scale is limited). To a government, the cost of funding the higher education of a couple hundred students a year (Singapore’s birth cohort is small, after all) is relatively insignificant, even at the most expensive American colleges. I’ve always thought of this policy as one of the single lowest-cost, highest-impact things that other developing countries can borrow from Singapore: a marginal revolution, if you like. The second point is on how the civil service is enmeshed with the elected government. The PAP often draws its candidates from the civil service, and because of its electoral dominance, it largely has the power to decide on the career pathways of its MPs and ministers. Unlike the UK, therefore, where ministerial promotions are largely dependent on political opportunity, the PAP does do quite a bit of planning about who its ministerial team a few years down the line is going to consist of, and often draws civil servants to fit into that system.”

Ishan Bakshi: “Considering the lament in the past over the inability to accurately estimate the Indian middle class — households with significant discretionary spending capacity — the sheer range of firms now venturing into the country is indicative not of the potential down the line, but of the market now. So, how big is the market? India’s per capita income is just under Rs 2 lakh or around $2,400. But this statistic conceals more than it illuminates…Though their share in the overall population is minuscule, the absolute number of these households is nothing to scoff at. So even as vast sections of the labour force face near stagnant real wages, millions more seek work under MGNREGA compared to pre-pandemic levels, and, the country’s political and financial capitals, its millennium city and Silicon Valley are submerged during the rainy seasons, for these households, well ensconced in their gated islands, and they are just that, it’s the roaring Twenties. So while India may not be the next China by the end of this decade, even if it only manages to chug along, averaging 6 per cent, it could well eclipse some major markets.”

My Life System #86: Regret – 1

As we grow older, we tend to look back at some of the choices we have made and paths we have taken. The tendency is to focus more on the decisions which went wrong. This is where there is a danger that we can journey down a river of regrets rather than focus on the things that went right. A “What-if” analysis of the past is good up to a point to help us analyse what went wrong with a decision and what are the learnings that we can take forward. But there is also the danger of this spiralling down an “if only” track which can cause sadness and frustration.

There are times when something triggers memories of decisions which have led to unsuccessful ventures. I have failed many times in my life. Every failure is an outcome of decisions I made. When I think about them, there is an element of regret – time and money wasted, and in some cases relationships soured. The past can be a dangerous room to enter because it has many doors which can take one deeper into a mental morass. And it is therefore important to stop the “regret pathway” quickly – before it takes over the mind. It is important to keep in mind the present and focus on the future – think about what one can do next, rather than ponder on the failures and mistakes of the past.

Regret, although a natural human emotion, can become detrimental to one’s well-being when it dominates our thoughts and prevents us from moving forward. It is essential to recognise that we all make mistakes and experience failures. These are opportunities to learn from and grow, rather than chains that hold us back.

Jelena Kecmanovic writes: “A typical feature of regret is self-blame over making the ‘wrong’ choice, whether it was doing something that you now believe you shouldn’t have done, or not doing something that you now think you should have. Some regrets are mild and fleeting and, as such, do not cause much heartache. But it’s possible to be haunted by regret – consumed by self-reproach, sadness, and a sense of loss over what you could have had.”

Shannon Thomas adds: “Regret stems from a deep, soul-level disappointment that things haven’t worked out because of something you said or did…Learning how to deal with regret is about having to step back and realize that you did what you did with the information you had at that time.”

To avoid being consumed by regret, we must adopt a proactive mindset, focusing on actions we can take to improve our current situation, and future prospects. Surrounding ourselves with positive influences and engaging in activities that promote growth and development can also help counter the negative effects of regret. It is also helpful to practice gratitude for the experiences we have had, both positive and negative. Acknowledging and appreciating the lessons learned from these situations can help shift our perspective from one of regret to one of appreciation. By doing so, we can gradually transform regret into wisdom and resilience, empowering us to face new challenges with confidence.

While regret is a natural response to past mistakes and failures, it is crucial not to let it overwhelm our thoughts and dictate our lives. At no stage must we let the “regret pathway” take over. A more positive and resilient mindset is what we need. Embracing this attitude allows us to move beyond our past and embrace the potential that lies ahead.