Take that chance, live without regret

You better leave your torments out of your head.

Talking about October being the spooky season, let us dive into a horror story of hunters and ghosts. Those ghosts that haunt us and ruin us. I'll call the ghost Regret.

Regret can kill, it can make you miserable, and it can haunt you for the rest of your life. So better to stay out of its sight and live a life with as few regrets as possible. A life full of "what ifs" is something I wouldn't wish upon anyone. 'Oh, I should have tried’, ‘What if I had done it'. They weigh heavily on the soul. So what cure to get rid of a hunted soul? Go for it and give it a try. If it doesn't work out, at least you know you gave your best. Better to know that you gave yourself that chance than to regret never taking it.

If you keep pausing cause it takes to much time just start now. Otherwise you will see the years pass by as autumn leaves falls from trees, and as long as you keep delaying it you'll be feeding your ghost to a point of no return.

I personally try to live my life minimizing regrets. If I stumble to a situation, or I am making a big life decision I think if this is a "what if" situation, am I gonna down the line look back and ask my self what if I had…if it is a yes, then I just do it. I rather deal with failure than regret and keep my peace of mind. I would like to look back on life and say, 'Man, I've LIVED my life, what an adventure' I would like to look back with excitement and joy for the life I've got to live.

We somehow plan and think about what is the "perfect" time, sometimes waiting for certain conditions to be met, but here is the thing, do we know when all of them will be met? There are some we can know, but many are unknown. For instance, before moving to Spain I thought it would be better to wait for our business to take off, naively thinking it wouldn't take so long, fast forward to today and I don't know when my business will take off, so if we had stayed in France and waited for that condition to be met, well we would probably be turning into a 100 year old tree just sitting there waiting... As the years go by and I experience more of life I have come to see that life can't be paused just to wait for the moment. Things take time, so you better start now and take the first step towards it. Yes there can be good timings and things unfold when they are meant to, but if you don't start walking in that direction and preparing yourself for that moment to unfold maybe you would miss it or not get the most out of it, you need to work that muscle so when the opportunity hits you will be ready for it.

It is funny, because I was reading some past notes, and in one of them I said this to myself. I wrote it when we wanted to do a headless e-commerce store, we wanted to do it but kept postponing it for other things that were "faster" to build, back then I said to myself ‘if it takes too much time, just go for it and do it’. I must admit that when I read those notes I felt a little bad, because for a moment I felt that I hadn't learned anything, here I am writing a post about it not because of my past notes (I forgot they existed) but because of my current venture, one that has been in the back of our minds for a while, and when we decided to close our past business, we told ourselves that we should go straight to it. So I felt like I was in this spiral of déjà vu, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me? am I in a loop? And if so, where is the way out!

I mean at the time I followed my advice and we went for it. Now that I have some space and time to reflect, I see a silver lining. As I said before, the sooner you start the better, it is like testing your own hypotheses, you have to test them to see if they work right? Halloween and all, we ain't no witches and have no magic wand, you can’t predict the future, so to the point is I am glad I took the advice and went through it, tested the idea, saw it did not work and moved on to my next idea. After all, in life or in business, aren't we trying to validate one hypothesis after another?

And as we go and try our hypotheses, we'll start to get clear on the idea or the path to continue. Is only by doing and testing that we can learn, like kids they learn things by testing, failing and seeing their results of their experiments. We should not lose that as we grow older. And I try to remind myself of that as we take on a new venture. Let us just say that the path is far from clear, we still need to figure out many things and many questions remain unanswered, but we are experimenting and testing and as we go things are becoming clearer and taking more shape.

It takes to much time….just go for it. And if you have regrets do not turn over the graves and better take those regrets as lessons instead of agonies.