Dr. Ellen Langer

It's just an event.

Again, you don't want to be living in a world of pressing the elevator button.

Or, you know, getting a hole in one every time you swing the golf club.

There's no there there.

So it's the difficulty that makes the adventure.

And this is one where I think all the experts, virtually all the experts have it wrong.

The thing to remember about a decision is that you can never test the different alternatives.

And if you can't test the different alternatives, you can't know what the other alternatives might have been like.

So randomly flip a coin, have a rule that the first thing that comes to mind is the choice you're going to make.

Just make the decision, any decision, and then make it work for you.

Look and see how it's to your advantage, how you can grow with it, enjoy it.

and essentially make it work because outcomes, again, are not independent of the way we see them.

So making it work means appreciating what it is rather than looking over your shoulder at some outcome that you didn't experience.

You know, what people don't realize is regret is mindless.

Regret suggests that if you only did this other thing, life would have been fine.

And that other thing, even if you were mindless, could have been worse.

We don't know.

But the important thing is that it is neither good, bad, or indifferent.

It's nothing until we act on it.

And so if we know why we did what we did, appreciate the good things that followed from what we did, there's no reason for regret.