Scott Galloway, author, gives advice about future regrets: “A lot of your success and your failures are not your fault”
The NYU professor explains why self-forgiveness matters more than achievement, and why luck plays a bigger role than we admit.
Stop being so hard on yourself. You will regret it later in life. That is a direct order from NYU professor, entrepreneur, and best-selling author Scott Galloway.
In a Sprouht interview, Galloway offered a candid view on aging. When asked how old he was, his immediate response was, “Oh God…”. His eventual summary of being 60 was blunt. “Quite frankly, it kind of sucks,” he said, pointing to the fact that he is no longer a young man, or able to “fake” being one.
The downside of getting older
You could speculate about the many downsides of getting older, but Galloway is clear about the worst of them. It comes down to regret, and he claims there is research to back that up.
However, he explains that the main issue is not simply lamenting what you did or did not do when you were young. Instead, it is about how you reacted once you identified something as a regret in the first place.
“The number one regret, and the piece of advice I would have for young people, is that they wish they’d been less hard on themselves,” Galloway says. “They wish they’d forgiven themselves and allowed themselves to be happy.”
Success, failure, and luck
Galloway also believes that what you have achieved in life, and what you missed out on, is not primarily down to your own choices.
“I think a lot of that comes down to... A lot of your success and your failures are not your fault. A lot of that it’s just luck,” he says.
If that is the case, and we are not fully in control of our own destiny, then why do we punish ourselves so harshly when things don’t work out, Galloway asks.
The real source of regret
“People regret in looking back on their life, it’s not a bad thing that happened to them. But how upset they were about that bad thing. And they look back and think, ‘You know. That wasn’t that big a deal in retrospect. What was a big deal is how hard I was on myself.’”
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