Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 139: Getting Over Your Biggest Regrets + What Causes More Divorce? (Online vs. Real Life)

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Your old pals Matt and Stephen talk about: - Whether you should have regrets - What kind of mistakes we regret the most - Getting over your screw ups - Online vs. Real life (and which causes more divorce!) --- Join us on our virtual retreat on March 18th-20th! Go to MHVirtualRetreat.com and spend a magical 3 days with us transforming your confidence and relationships... (EARLY BIRD SPECIAL OFFER - book your spot before November 30th and get over 30% off the full price! Claim your ticket here) --- Follow Matt @thematthewhussey Follow Stephen @stephenhhussey

🎵 🎵 Welcome everybody to another Love Life Podcast with me, Matthew Hussey, and my wonderful brother, Stephen Hussey. Hello, Steve. They call me Brother Biscuits, and here we are, old Hussey boys. You know no one outside the family calls you brother biscuits when you say they call me brother biscuits that's just there's like eight people in the world that call you biscuits and they don't call you brother biscuits like you're part of some strange biscuit eating cult well i consider all 10 of our listeners family so they can call me biscuits too how dare you we don't have 10

listeners we get over half a million downloads a month i'll have you know that's true and thank you very much for that everyone how are you matthew do you know i'm doing pretty good steve i'm back in los angeles as of the last four days i'm back with my jameson jameson i should be asking how are you now that i'm back i I'm good. I'm good. I'm busier now that you're back, you know, and it's not, it's not because I'm doing more. It's because I'm just, I'm dealing with your stress more. I see. It's a lot. It's a lot to deal with and good for you. Good for you for dealing with this. He's saying it's not, it's not a good busy is what he's saying. No, I think what he's saying is I think that our friendship is such that he really feels my energy.

And I've got a lot on my plate and he notices that and he's a very sensitive friend who absorbs some of that. We'll let the listeners decide. Well, Steve, we've got a pretty good episode coming up. I'll tell you that much because we're going to be talking about, well, firstly, there's an article about how couples who met online are more likely to get divorced. So I want to talk about that just as a little intro to this podcast. That won't be our main topic for today, but we are going to talk about it. And we're also going to talk about our main topic, which is dwelling on mistakes and how our regrets and our dwelling

on our mistakes has the potential to kill our happiness and our potential in our present and our future. Before we get into that, Steve, I want to let everyone know out there, we have a big announcement. The virtual retreat has been announced for 2022 and it is taking place from the 18th to the 20th of March. And for the month of November, we have an early bird offer, which involves a significant discount on the main price. That means that if you're going to come to the next virtual retreat, and why wouldn't you? People all over the world have been talking about the last couple, which have been incredible. Now is the best price ticket you're going to get between now and the event, but it is only for the month of November. And as I've said to you before, Steve, I'm a big

believer in putting something in the diary that you know you can look forward to, that you know guarantees your growth in 2022, and that motivates you to start doing some good things for yourself, some good habits now in the run up to it. I'll give you an example, Steve. Between now and the virtual retreat in March, I am training really hard because I want to look my best on that virtual retreat. And I'll be honest with you, Steve, I've eaten more than my fair share of pizza in the last four weeks, more likely in the last seven weeks. It's been an off season. I saw it. It was like a sort of a gorging before a battle that you were doing in London. You mean you saw it in the way i

was eating or you saw it through my shirt no no no i'm not i'm not body judgmental like that i just saw that you were enjoying your pizza a lot right yeah that's one way of putting it um but i i is enough's enough and i've said what i'm doing is and and I, Jameson, I don't know about this. Maybe I shouldn't be saying it live on the podcast because, you know, I can't commit to this yet, but I thought it would be really cool to get everybody who is coming to the virtual retreat in March, who is excited about, you know, taking on some kind of goal for their body and their health. It doesn't mean everyone, but for those people who are really like, yeah, I need to do that too.

I need to sort out either the way I look or how healthy I am or how healthy I feel that we sort of could all use it as a benchmark by where do we want to be by the 18th of March with our training so that by the time we're all together that weekend, we feel really good about ourselves. I think it's a really great idea, except I'm just, I'm a little concerned at how much you're looking at me as you say all of this. I wasn't looking at your shirt.

I was looking at the way that you're enjoying that pizza right now. I mean, I think it really does. I mean, this is where social pressure really is great. If you can be harnessed and used for good, it is a very powerful pressure. And that's sort of how I'm seeing the virtual retreat in March is that not just is it going to be three days of immersion and growth together, but that it's going to be a chance for us to kind of put something in the diary where we achieve a bunch of things before that even happens with that being the deadline for those goals. So anyway, if you want to come and get in on that early bird offer, go to mhvirtualretreat.com. We've got a beautiful

page there waiting for you that'll explain all about the program. There's a video from me you can watch. You can ask your questions. And of course, you can book an appointment with one of our specialists to talk about the program itself and any questions you have. Go to mhvirtualretreat.com for your early bird offer, only available in November 2021, in case you're listening to this in the year 2030. All right, Steve. It's optimistic, I suppose, to assume that our podcast people will still be listening in 2030. But I feel hopeful. Yeah, I mean, some people wonder if people will still be reading Shakespeare by then. But you're very confident in the longevity, the posterity of the Love Life podcast.

And that is the kind of self-belief we're going to need if we're going to succeed in this game. We've got an advantage on Shakespeare in that you can hear our voices. Right. That is true. We don't know what the bar would sound like. He might have had a ridiculous squeaky voice. I imagine he did, Steve. I imagine he was unbearable to listen to.

All right. So the article that we wanted to talk about today, Steve, was couples who meet online are more likely to get divorced. I was quite interested when I saw this headline. Jameson brought it to the table as something interesting to talk about. This study found that 12% of couples who found their significant other online got divorced within the first three years of marriage which by the way doesn't actually sound as bad as i thought that percentage 12 percent divorced in the first three years that's not that's not too bad as a percentage however only two percent of lovers who met through

friends got divorced in the first three years of marriage. So 12% compared to 2% get divorced in the first three years after meeting online. What are your thoughts? And I'll add a little color to that. The study suggests that in the early years of marriage, couples who meet this way, i.e. online, might lack sufficient social capital or close support networks around them to deal with all the challenges they face. So I'm curious to know what you think of this, Steve. Yeah, that does, that rings true to me intuitively that there might be a little less stability in online couples only because maybe they are coming from you can meet theoretically you could meet someone anywhere

in the world from any social different social group from you and you know uh there might be benefits to that but it also might just be harder because it's that sort of like from different worlds things or very different families and there's a lot you discover and yeah there's probably something isn't there where just people who are from their friends share communities probably just share pressure they just like there's just there's social capital but there's also just social pressure like we, we met through friends. We have all the same friends. What's that line in American Psycho? He says to her, I want to break up.

And she's like, no, I don't think that'll work. And he's like, what do you mean? And she's like, well, your friends are my friends. We know the same people. I don't think we should see each other anymore. But your friends are my friends. And my friends are your friends i really don't think it would work and and uh there's something there's something to

that right it's just more in a way the exit costs are higher if you are more socially intertwined yeah that's interesting isn't it because that's kind of what it seems to be alluding to is that the entwining of your worlds as opposed to each having a world. Because when it says it talks about social capital, you can have your own social capital coming to a relationship with someone you meet online and they here is that independent social capital doesn't keep a relationship as strong as social capital that's combined i mean i i understand i understand the pressure of this for people even through our own mother steve i remember mum at a certain point going i can't i can't do it I can't get to know any more of your girlfriends I can't I can't do it I can't do it Matt I can't get close to him anymore I can't keep having it I keep having me heart broken she got too attached she got too attached but in

fairness you know people have already always got very attached to mum it's always been a loss hasn't it to anyone really in our lives friends or otherwise to to lose mum from their lives but she's ended up she ended up with ptsd right she's just it took her a long time when it took her a long time to believe that you know this that was worth getting close to someone again, because she, she struggled with it. But I, I, conversely, I remember being with someone who was literally halfway across the world in my early twenties and that breakup being easy as pie at the time, not because there was no heartbreak,

but because there was none of the normal mess. I shouldn't say was easy as pie it was easy as pie compared to you are a heartless monster no no it wasn't it wasn't easy in terms of heartbreak but it was easy in terms of it didn't come with all of the mess that breakups come with when you have all the same friends when you like each other's friends when you come to to share each other's worlds i suppose the moral of this story steve is once you've been on a date with someone make them meet all of your friends and family on meet on week one so that if they break up with you they've got to break up with all of them too they have to go up to your dad and go i'm very sorry and then your sister and go i'm very sorry and then your best friend and go i'm very i'm very sorry for your loss of me

that's a strategy some people use is really get yourself in the old friend group wedge yourself in there so you're irreplaceable the um the thing i will say that there could be a wider point about social glue of yeah that that whole thing of like you know the sebastian junger tribes book that i know jameson's a big fan of but you know when i like closely knit together communities or even just some community does help to keep things in place it helps when you've got these support systems i mean that's one of my sort of critiques of modern relationships is this idea that you know couples get together silo themselves away maybe in their urban apartment or whatever and then it's just expected we will just do this all together and then they wonder why they're going mental with

a kid screaming in a flat somewhere in new york or london and it's like because it was probably was meant to be that you have all these people around you who help pick up slack make the relationship easier support it you know all those things do help and probably if you meet through friends there's a little bit of that effect where you have these other parts to the relationship. I suppose what this teaches us, if anything, is that there is a power in combining your two worlds, which presupposes that you each bring a world to the table in the first place. But combining in some way where appropriate, your friends, your family, creating more bonds between your respective worlds, as opposed to just between the two of you, gives you a support network when things go wrong. It gives you a healthy amount of

social pressure, as you alluded to. And it also just gives you the sense that you're losing something when you lose that person that transcends merely that person, that you're not just part of a relationship, but part of a world that you're really enjoying being a part of, that you don't want to walk away from. And all of those things, in in reality do contribute to our decision of whether to leave a relationship i agree and those of you think you'll solve this by running off to the countryside you think i'm critiquing the city no isolating yourself in the countryside is also a big mistake so don't think oh oh he's saying get out of london and everything will be fixed no right i'm not leaving london that's what i'm saying okay that's seems clear steve i can't imagine you on a farmyard property somewhere with

a few pigs and chickens roaming around i'll be honest it's not my vibe mate i don't want any of it no i don't want the mud i don't want all of it well steve we had a lovely reviewing uh from kim who sent uh an email to us at podcast at matthew hussey.com where you can send your reviews or your thoughts or your feedback or your stories she recently, I found out my partner of two years cheated on me the whole time. It ended because I started to feel like his efforts were falling. I wish I could be someone that knew my worth. Someone can hurt me and I still try to understand their reasons. I'm in line for counseling for trauma due to previous circumstances. I'm too much of a people pleaser, but your podcasts get me through some difficult times. I don't think you'll ever know how important it was to me. The timing, the words used,

the calmness of you both was everything I needed. It felt like having two big brothers that had my back. Thank you so much, Kim. Wow. That's so kind. Thank you, Kim. So kind, so beautiful, so honest. And Kim, I want to remind you to give yourself some credit in this. You wrote, recently I found out my partner of two years cheated on me the whole time. It ended because I started to feel like his efforts were falling. So you ended it. He may not have been treating you right, but you ended it. And you did that because you realized you're worth more. So you already have that realization that you don't need to, I'm not suggesting you don't go

to counseling or you don't go and get coaching or get, get, do work on yourself. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying, don't think that someone else has to come into your life to give you the worth in yourself because you already had it it or you would never have left that situation. What you need to do now is take that flame and nurture it. Fan that flame, make it bigger, build your life right now, build your sense of self, do the right things. Because what will happen is if that ever happens again, it won't take you two years to realize it. You won't hang around past the point where you realize someone's not treating you right. You'll be out of there so much faster and more likely someone like that won't even get through the door because you'll be willing to turn someone away at the door the moment you realize something doesn't feel right.

And you'll start attracting more of the people that are going to treat you right because they're going to be attracted to that confident energy that I'm talking about. And by the way, I'll say this again, for anyone out there who is looking to go through that process of building your life, building your sense of self, building your confidence, the virtual retreat is where we do that. So come make sure you do come check that out. Let's get to our main topic. Steve, we're talking about dwelling on our mistakes and the ability for our regrets and the way we beat ourselves up for the mistakes of the past to kill our happiness in the present and also blind us to our potential in the future. I would say to anyone out there, can you call something to mind right now that you have as a regret? It might be one thing, it might be several things. It could be something very specific and monumental as

an event in your life. You know, you may be able to recall a particular moment in your life where you can think back to a single decision. And you wish you had done something different in that moment, you wish that you had made a different decision and you have never truly stopped beating yourself up since that moment because of the effects that it's had on your life of course it's easier to move on from something when the effects of it are been and done when they're no longer having any impact on our life, but when we're still in some way feeling the effects of a decision we made days, months, or years, even decades ago,

it can be difficult for us to move on from that. Or maybe as you bring to mind something from the past that you beat yourself up for, it's more akin to a habit or a set of habits that you've had that have lasted a lifetime that have had a bad effect on your life, on your happiness, on your lifestyle, on the results that you've ended up with in your life, on where you are in your life. Maybe it's not one single event that your regret is centered around, but the ongoing behaviors that you have found difficult to shift. Either way, it's very easy for regret to make us beat ourselves up and create a genuine sense of self-loathing to the point where it's truly difficult to connect with ourselves in a positive way. And regret can also make us very resentful and angry towards the world. You know, I can easily bring to mind people that I'm aware of in my life

who were in a relationship for many years and got to the point where they realized that they had to get out of it, but then looked back on the years where they'd known something was deeply wrong years where they knew that they had stayed with the wrong person and are now finding themselves oscillating between anger towards that person or towards the opposite sex in general and anger towards themselves for allowing it to happen.

So these things can cause a tremendous amount of pain for us in the present. They can cause an immense amount of trauma, and they really can stop us from enjoying our lives in the present day. So I wanted to talk about this today and get into it, not necessarily as a specific topic about our dating lives, although many of our regrets may intersect with our love lives, but as a general theme that I know will be affecting a lot of listeners out there of this podcast. Steve, what are your thoughts on regret as a concept? Well, let me just turn this around one moment. Does, does Matthew Hussey have regrets? Yes. Yes. You know, the quick answer is yes. And,

and I have in my life, if I added up the amount of time that I have spent beating myself up for certain things that I have done. And in my case, they fall into both categories. I have regrets that fall into the category of, I remember a very specific moment in my life where I wish I had, you know, I was met with a fork in the road where I could have gone one way or the other. And I wish that I had gone the other way. And I can also look at regrets I have around things that I did for a long time that have had an effect on my life. There is a paradox to my regrets and I suppose to regrets in general. I'm sure I've quoted this on the podcast before, but Anne Lamott said in her book, everything, almost everything I know, I think it's called, but she says all truth is paradox. And it can be true it certainly is true for me that I both have regrets that

I would be tempted if I were capable of doing so I would be tempted to go back and do something differently but I would also in truth be too afraid to change it yeah because I would be too afraid of losing all the good that has come from those moments in my life. So there is this paradox that I both have regrets, but also don't think that I would change those things if I could, because I'd be too afraid that the life that I love today and the things that I love in my life today would be adversely affected or wouldn't even exist if I did change one of them. Well, this is where it gets sort of existential because some things, there's a Cormac McCarthy quote that says, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. And there are certain things that you might regard as bad things befalling you, bad decisions, things where you could have made a more optimum decision.

You know, say you chose somewhere different to go to school or you chose a different partner when you were 21. You chose a different girlfriend and you go, man, if I knew, I would have never dated that person. But you don't know what that turned you into today, dating that person. You don't know what forks in the road that changed. It may have saved you from some other kind of catastrophe. So it is a little difficult to play, as Neil Ferguson calls it, counterfactual history with your own life. There might be obvious ones, right? Maybe some people regret they didn't quit smoking earlier. It's hard to say there's going to be an upside to having

been smoking for an extra 20 years. So there might be obvious ones where you go, ah, I should have done that sooner. Or people go, why didn't I start working out when I was 20? This is great. I love doing this. I should have enjoyed it then, or I would have enjoyed it. But, but that could, you could play that game with every life, right? No one made all the right decisions. So, so is in some ways that part is a bit of a moot point because, well, of course, everyone will go, they would have liked to have invested in some weird cryptocurrency five years ago as well that 10 times the price. So there's all decisions and opportunities that people missed or didn't make. But I don't think that's the point really, is it? Life is not about going back and saying,

I wish I'd made a perfect game because there's no such thing as that. The thing about even the example of I wish I had stopped smoking 20 years earlier and the idea that it's hard to. It's hard to stand back and reframe that and draw a positive from it. You know, we look at that and we say, that's not the same as I wish I hadn't messed up that relationship 20 years ago because there are countless more people you could have a relationship with. Even if you mess up a relationship with someone really special, there's lots more special people out there. And we can say that in the smoking example we only get one body

and we don't get a chance to replace it with another body if we get it wrong so if i have that regret i wish i'd stopped smoking 20 years ago it it's hard to draw the same reframe from that. Firstly, you can easily go down that path of saying, well, you know, there's me who wishes that they stopped smoking 20 years ago. There's also the person that did a, did an overdose, overdosed on drugs and, and died and doesn't even have the chance to regret the fact that they did that. You know, that's what happened in that moment. It's so much of life hangs by a thread, even in moments where we think things are put together well. I want to remember the name, Jameson, of that palliative doctor who climbed during, I think he was in college and he climbed on a train. And maybe it was a drunken night, I don't know. But, you know, climbed on a train and got electrocuted by the lines above the train.

And I think he ended up, Jameson, was it he lost two of his limbs or i think he may have lost part of his arm and his leg bj miller bj miller is his name bj miller yeah bj miller is is worth looking up because he talks about this this incident in his life and and you you know there are all sorts of crazy things that happen to people in life that they don't deserve. And I suppose the smoker could say, yeah, but I've chosen to smoke over years. But if you're the person who on a drunken night climbed on top of a train and, you know, got electrocuted by the line, of course, there's going to be an instinct to say, yeah, but I was just being an idiot that night. And I'm now, you know, I deserve everything that

comes to me because I've ruined my life and it's all my fault. Except when you hear BJ Miller talk, it, he doesn't talk with any of that regret. He, he doesn't talk with any of that remorse or that self-loathing. He talks about what he's been able to do as a result of that moment in his life. And it is a really, when you watch him on stage, he's so powerful. And you see how powerful he is in the present with whatever physical limitations he has. It has not limited him in the present. So I think there's that to consider. And I also, in the smoking example and in any example like that, it's always so easy to say, oh God, I would have, you know, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have smoked or I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have dated that person. I wouldn't have married that person. I, I would

have, I would have changed. And you go, yeah, but you weren't ready. That, that wasn't who you were then. You weren't ready. If you were ready to hear what you're hearing now and acting on now, you would have done something different. And, but you can't play that game because you weren't that person. So it would literally, you would be reinventing the universe to, to be the person that you're saying you wanted to be during that time. You know, we look back on, if you look back on when you were 15, most of us can't remember that much of being 15. We get fragments of memories that reappear on occasion. But can you really go back and exactly remember who you were at 15? And even if you think you can, you're remembering that through the lens of you today.

So who knows how biased that picture is? My point is that if you really do that thought experiment of trying to go back to another time in your life, you don't even truly know that person anymore. You only know your memory of that person because over time you've changed, you've evolved. You're all, you know, and I'm channeling Sam Harris here, Jameson, but all you know is that you, you feel like a lapse in consciousness hasn't occurred. Yeah. That's all you really know that you've gone to sleep a lot of times and you haven't experienced consciousness in the same way as you do when you're awake, when you're asleep. But all you really know is that you still believe you exist as the same human being that has existed all throughout your timeline. But as I, I was listening to Sam Harris

on his podcast, uh, uh, what's his podcast called? Wake, uh, making Sense. He was talking about how we shouldn't be afraid of death because if you really experience, if you really think about the way you experience consciousness, if you went into a coma today for the next 15 years and then woke up as a different person with a completely different set of memories or with none of your memories, if then woke up as a different person with a completely different set of memories or with none of your memories if you if you woke up with none of your memories from that coma and your personality had completely changed you wouldn't say you died yeah you'd still experience consciousness as a continuation even though nothing of who you were remains. Well, to me, when I was thinking about regret, I actually drew a parallel between that example and us in our own lifetimes, that over time, we do kind of lose most of our memories.

Whatever we remember, you know, it must be a fraction of what's happened. And like you say, like you say, sometimes it'll hit you if you go back and see an email you wrote when you were 18 and you'll be like, what cringy idiot wrote this? Yeah, you think, who was that? You won't even recognize it and you'll be like, what is this cringy crap I'm writing? Try an old journal if you have ever kept a journal try reading an old journal and it some of those things you you laugh because you're like that that's so funny i thought that you know i i did that i we we shift our memories shift, our memories of our memories shift, our personality shifts. For all intensive purposes, we are no longer the same person that we were. And so when

we regret something, all we're really doing is holding onto a story, a memory of something we wished we'd done differently, but who was done by a person we no longer are. So what is regret but this story we keep telling ourselves that we are the person who has done this to us, when in fact, you may as well say that a stranger in the street did this to us because since then, so many iterations of us have come along. And that's why I, when I say regret not only kills our happiness, but blinds us to our potential. I sincerely mean that we have no concept of just how much we're capable of today. We have no concept of what is possible for us, of what we can do. I went to Poland with Wim Hof and a group of 10 people for an ice retreat where

I was jumping off of cliffs into frozen lakes, doing 10 minute ice baths, climbing up a mountain in nothing but my shorts in the snow for hours on end. I would have thought that I would get hypothermia and die previously in my life if I attempted that. And I did that. And that was something that I never imagined I could possibly do. was someone that you know me Steve we would go skiing when we were teenagers and my hands would freeze and that was underneath two sets of gloves you're a right little shivering ninny in your big old onesie scared of the cold couldn't hack it on the chairlift and that's i'm saying that in the nicest way possible no yeah no i appreciate you handling that delicately i um no i was uh well mum used to have is it rainers where you you have bad circulation and i seem to have inherited that

from her my fingers would go yellow in the cold and then i oh now you make me now you make me sound like a jerk because you have an actual condition so don't do that and that is chess but i i you know it was it was something that i never would have thought i could do and then i went and did this thing and and it's completely here's the thing the literal thing is oh it changed my relationship with the cold and what i thought i could do in the cold but it did did so much more than that. What it did is it made me realize what else in my life am I capable of that I've been telling myself I can't do. And I would say to everyone out there listening right now, if you're listening to this in your car, on the train, wherever you listen to this in your house, think right now, have you ever had a moment where you

did something that previously you thought you couldn't do, or you thought you wouldn't enjoy? And it made you realize, oh my God, I've, there must be so by just, just the logic of this means that there must be so many other things in my life that I can do. The world just got so much bigger because there's all these things I told myself I couldn't do. And that was a lie. And it was based on this idea that I had of myself, which is all wrapped up in our regrets and our self-loathing and what I've done in the past. This idea of what I'm capable of. This idea of what my limitations

are, that is only based on looking in the rear view mirror. It's not based on the future. This isn't some, I really want people to understand this. This isn't some motivational kind of rant I'm going on. I'm saying that the sheer logic checks out that what we know ourselves to be capable of today is only based on what we've done before. It is not based on what's possible in the future, on what we haven't done yet. And if we want to do more, then it starts by saying, like, here's, it's almost like here's a formula that we can all use. Okay, I have regrets. Wonderful. As David White, the British poet says, regret, if you don't never know regret nothing where have you been yeah in little miss sunshine steve carell says proust said about suffering it's like that's where he learned everything right all that suffering he that's that's where he learned all the richness all the stuff of life was in that and and david white mentions you know you could if you bullied

someone at school and you regret it that regret changes the way you treat people for the rest of your life. Without the regret, where's the impetus for change? Where does the fuel come from? When you regret something, it gives you an opportunity to change. So if we take our regrets from the past and we say, okay, the first part of my formula is to use this regret as fuel. What is it I want to do now? What is it I want to do differently? And if you're telling yourself, oh, but I don't have much time left, or I've already wasted so much time, there's not that much left on the clock. Well, guess what?

You're still here, which means you can still suffer from making the wrong decisions. So if all you want is to avoid suffering, it still makes sense to do things differently because whilst you still exist, the potential for you to still suffer remains. So if we want a different feeling in our lives, we do things differently, right? Now that's both going to give us a different experience of the present and a different experience of the future. Because by the way, there's the potential for more regret in the future. You can regret more. Christopher Hitchens said, choose your regrets in life.

Choose your regrets. We're all going to have them. Choose your regrets. Now, are you going to live to regret this moment where you found something out and then still ignored it? And you still had all this time left on the clock where you could have made a shift, where you could have done something different. You could live to regret spending more years beating yourself up instead of more years

living or making an impact. But we use that regret to go out and do something and I believe that even though change is a slow process we wildly overestimate how much time it will take to feel better. I'll repeat that change is a slow process getting different results in our life can be a slow process whether it's the path to building financial independence and freedom, whether it's the path to building a great relationship, whether it's the path to having a great body, whether it's the path to having strong friendships, whether it's the path to just being a better person. These things don't happen overnight. We know that

because we know how hard it is to change a habit. Changing a habit is a difficult thing. We have our reflexes, we have our wiring, and it's about unwiring and rewiring, and that takes time. But feeling better doesn't take nearly as much time as we think it will. I am always surprised when I'm feeling terribly low or when I'm feeling behind or when I feel overwhelmed and I am telling myself that I'm going to have to move a mountain in order to get out of this situation. Part of that has some truth to it. In order to fundamentally change the situation that I'm overwhelmed by, usually it is going to mean a lot of work over time. The part that I'm miscalculating is how quickly I can feel better. It's like writing a book. If I feel overwhelmed by the prospect of writing a book the feeling that writing a book is is going to require a ton of hours is appropriate it will

what i'm underestimating is how good i'll feel just by writing for one hour absolutely 100 agree because you you write for one hour. Absolutely. 100% agree. Because you write for one hour and you get this immediate feeling of empowerment and satisfaction in your day. And even a kind of, you know it, Steve, that writing euphoria you get after you've done a writing session. Just the mere act of having written gives you a kind of euphoria that is detached from whether you got, you may have only got half a percent closer to finishing the thing, but the euphoria is actually attached to more so to just having been the person you wanted to be in that hour than it's attached to the progress you made. Oh, for sure. And I think people get way uh bogged down in the oh i made these mistakes

earlier way too bogged down and overestimate the cost of that and they underestimate everything they can do now and the possibility now the next month ahead the next year ahead 10 years ahead you know there's so much you can do to change how you feel that there's not there's so little value in being bogged down in that mistake and decoupling the results that you'll get in your life from changing something now from the feeling you can have now by doing something different yeah the results may be slow but the feeling doesn't have to be. The reward of doing something different and the pride that that creates, the feeling of I'm finally living, or I'm finally being the courageous person I wanted to be, or I'm finally

having difficult conversations that I've been putting off forever and the pride that gives us. And it's not, oh, I'm finally proud of the person I hated before. No, it's you're not the person you were before. Stop associating with that person. You're a new person and you get to be proud of this brand new person today. You get to be that. It doesn't mean that that new person today is going to have wildly different circumstances from the person who woke up yesterday because the circumstances take time to change in most situations. But you can have a completely different feeling about the person who woke up today just by

doing something different. And when you get a different feeling, that starts to breed confidence. Because when you feel like, man, I just went for a run this morning and, you know, my weight didn't change, but I'm really proud of myself. I went for that run. I did a hard thing. That gives us confidence. You start thinking, what else could I do today? I get the same feeling when I tidy the house. I just, it's a small thing, but I tidy a room in the house and I suddenly go, what else could I do right now? Or when I complete a piece of work for the, or even make progress for an hour or do something difficult, I think, what else do I want to take on today? You get momentum. The feeling creates momentum and momentum creates consistency and consistency over time creates results.

And so that is the formula. Let your regret have you make a different decision right now. I want something to be different. I want to have a different feeling about the person I am today. Well, what does that mean I have to do today? Go do that thing. Even if you don't get results, get the feeling. When you get the feeling, you start to get that confidence. And when you get that confidence, you get momentum. Momentum is consistency. Consistency is results.

You're alive today. So don't let your regret blind you to how happy you can be right now by being the person you want to be. And that also starts by changing the meaning for ourselves of the word regret. When I say I regret things, and people may have heard me say that earlier in this episode and thought, man, that's really sad that Matt wishes he could go back and do things differently. I want to make it very clear to people. When I say I regret something, I don't, that's not imbued with all of this emotion and the poison that we associate with regret when we just keep drinking this poison of self-hatred. It's not that. It's, it's really me saying, I wouldn't do that today.

I wouldn't do that today, but I don't hate me today for something that a past me did. I wake up today and get to be who I want to be. And instead of seeing it all as wasted time and, oh, look at all that's been lost, I can, A, look at what's been gained through the insight and also acknowledge that I literally wouldn't have that insight without that regret. So to wish to not have the regret is to also rid yourself of the insight, but also to realize that if I just take on the attitude that I am a brand new person today, I don't actually think in this timeline of, let's say you were 70 years old and you were going to die at 80 and you only had 10 years left and you'd been doing something your entire life. And you looked at the calculation of your life and said, this is so sad. I've missed

out on 50 years of a certain thing because of what I've done. And I only have 10 years left. I want to offer a different perspective. What if the life of that 70-year-old began today? What if instead of thinking about yourself as someone who's been alive for 70 years that's going to be alive for 80, what if instead you said, I'm a person who was born today who has 10 years to live. You'd have a completely different, but you inherited all of the insights of someone who's been alive for 70 years. So I am being born today and I have 10 years to live as hard as I want, as much as I want, as richly as I want, as enjoyably as I want. I have 10 years to live as hard as I want, as much as I want, as richly as I want, as enjoyably as I want. I have 10 years to live. Not I've got 10 years to live, but I've got, I have 10 years to live as much as I want. This is a gift. I woke up today and I have 10 years to

live, but I also inherit the insights of this other dude who's been around for 70 years. What do I want to do with these 10 years? Now you don't think of it as I've got 10 years left. You think of it as I have 10 years starting from scratch now to go hard and live the way that i want to live that to me is exciting yeah and that's the game we all get to play with ourselves starting today love love the person who got you the insight and make the person proud who started today yeah you might like be an alien who drops in this body and you'd be like huh this person's in some toxic crappy relationship they've wasted 10 years yeah i'm gonna go and i'm gonna go and have a conversation now and end that shit yeah and uh

let's do something else that's exactly it and it's like huh we have all this to play with now look i can go and call that person make that connection have that adventure it's like my slate to paint on instead of like carrying everything from the past with you all the time and i remember charlie munger who i see as sort of a a bit of a spiritual mentor um you know, great investor, sort of wise man, 97. And he, you know, he just talked about in this one meeting about the cost of bitterness and the cost of carrying,

you know, anything, carrying any sense of bitterness of past decisions, past things someone did. He said, it's just, it's so, so fundamental to not carry bitterness with you and it was sort of one cornerstone thing he said a drum into anyone is don't don't carry bitterness from the past and past decisions past problems with you now

if you want to you know be fruitful enjoy your life do things now that's beautiful really important to let go of that well I think that's a great place for us to to stop I have loved this episode I think this is one of my favorite episodes we've ever done Steve and um and I would sincerely love for anyone listening right now to let us know what you thought of this episode. One of the ways that you can tell us is through a review on iTunes. Um, I just would love to hear from you. I don't care if it's a, you know, you can say whatever you like, just tell us what you

thought of this episode, but I just say, tell us what this means to you and what this podcast means to you, because we really are enjoying reading those. I have one here from Anthony on iTunes who said, just discovered this podcast after going through a lot of emotional pain in my relationships over the last two years. I searched for anything related to relationships and these guys came up. Searched for the episodes that most closely matched what I needed to listen to, painful as it was to hear, and they have been a revelation. We'll now be going through your entire back catalog of podcasts over the coming weeks and months. Insightful, sincere, intelligent, direct, empathetic, thought-provoking. Thank you, chaps. Well, thank you, Anthony, for such a generous and lovely review of the podcast. It means the world to us.

Thank you, Anthony. And for anyone who wants to do something really live and exciting with us this month, we have something very rare, a live webinar called Dating With Results that is perfect for anyone out there who is struggling in dating right now, which could either mean that you're struggling to get dates right now, or it could mean that you're struggling to take a situationship with someone who's not giving you what you want to the point of being a real committed relationship. So we're going to be giving you the five secrets to end casual dating traps and the authentic no games path to a real committed relationship. And this is all happening in a webinar that I am doing absolutely free on November the 16th. All you need to do to sign up is go to datingwithresults.com.

You can sign up for free and we'll notify you when it's getting close as well to guarantee that you don't miss it. I've been so busy, as you know, Steve, with appearances and training our members and everything else. Pizza. It has been a very difficult time to fit in free trainings like this. So this is the first one of these I've done in a long time. But I am very, very excited to be joining everyone

in this live. It's going to be completely live. And also, by the way, by signing up on that page, you'll also be on the list to get the replay. If you don't sign up, you won't get the replay. So sign up even if you can't make the live date because you will get the replay. We'll send you an email with the link after it's happened. Go to datingwithresults.com to join that live webinar. And as always, thank you so much for being here with us. It means the world to be having these

kinds of meaningful conversations with you. And Stephen and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks, friends. Thanks, fans. Thanks, Matthew. I'm out of here.