Gemma Speck

going to college we heard a similar number for both go and listen to that full episode if you want the entire list of the full 20 because it's honestly so fascinating what we found but that was just for our 20s that was just for this decade if you were to ask a room full of people of all ages what they regret about life in general some clear patterns do actually appear and become pretty consistent

researchers from the University of Illinois published a meta-analysis of this very thing.

They looked at 11 studies where people talked about regret and they analyzed it to figure out what the biggest themes were.

They then ranked them in terms of most regret to least regret.

Across all samples, all of these studies, the top six regrets were education number one, career number

romance, parenting, identity, and then leisure.

So above all else, education was interestingly the thing that people regretted the most, mainly for not pursuing more of it.

Daniel Pink, the author, actually went further into this with his World Regret Survey.

He turned this into a book, The Power of Regret.

It was released in 2022.

When he sorted through, and I think it was like 16,000 people's regrets from more than 100 countries, what he found was that it wasn't a specific thing.

We might say education is the biggest, but actually what he found is there's categories, four big categories of regrets.

foundation regrets number one that is where education comes down to comes to so not building stability not pursuing an education not taking care of finances your health foundation regrets number one boldness regrets number two so not being brave enough not taking chances moral regrets were number three not acting in line with your values doing something that you felt hurt other people and

And number four was connection regrets.

So letting relationships wither or break down or not pursuing the person you really cared about.

There's a phrase he says in the book that I love.

Most people actually ended up regretting what they felt they had the greatest opportunity to change.

They didn't regret the stuff that was totally out of their control.

You know, the person who didn't love them back.

The friend who just was never going to be on their team.