How to Live Life With No Regrets (7 Important Lessons)

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Why do we throw away time as if it will last forever…?

Every day millions of men like you wake up and run around in jobs they hate, so they can buy things they don’t need, to impress people you don’t like on a social media platform you never use.

That’s a life stuck in the rat race.

A life filled with regrets.

The people who really love you will love you for the man you are, and not the material items you own. This has always been the truth – but so many men choose to buy into the idea that “the more I own, the more of a man I am.”

And that idea slowly kills every one of those men. Life is short, and there are so few things that really matter in the end.

What will you take with you to the grave, except the memories, experiences and joy you had while you were in this world?

We all know what really matters to us. But we often choose to ignore those things, because then we’d have to look in the mirror and face the scary reality that our life is nothing like we hoped it’d be when we were 10 years old full of innocent hopes and dreams.

Remember that 10-year-old boy?

He wanted to be happy.

He wanted to be free.

He wanted to play.

He wanted his beauty to join him on this glorious adventure of life.

But instead, he slowly settled year after year for so much less and bought into a different reality.

He became depressed and hooked on prescription drugs.

He imprisoned himself in an eight-by-ten room with a computer for 10 hours a day.

He became a slave to the career grind with no end in sight.

He settled with Beth, who’s now filing for divorce and maxing out both of his credit cards.

This is the life of many men today. But I’m here to tell you – it doesn’t have to be this way.

Take a second to read this quote, and really think about it:

“A man is not old until regrets take the place of his dreams.” – John Barrymore

Regrets don’t have to become your reality. I’ve lived that life, and let me tell you it’s a living hell.

I’ve escaped that prison – which is why I’m crying out loud, with all my heart, to get your attention and read this fully. I want you to wake up, break out of that prison, and live life with no regrets. 

There’s simply no other option.

Your future can be rewritten today. Stop what you’re doing and pay attention. I’m going to tell you the top seven regrets of men, so you can escape them once and for all. Take a deep breath and let’s go in.

Regret #1: I Wish I’d Lived a Life True to Myself Instead of the Life Others Wanted me to Live 

Not the life other people wanted for me.

Or the life portrayed by popular movies, TV shows, and social media.

Or the life of my parents’ unfulfilled dreams.

Not the life my friends told me I should live, believing they knew all the answers, and telling me I should dedicate my finite time to the goals they were blindly pursuing.

None of these lives are yours. None of them belong to you at all. You have to listen to that voice deep inside your head – the one that softly whispers, “There’s a better choice. Have the courage to walk in that direction…”

One of the biggest regrets of men is that they waste their lives pursuing things that are inauthentic and incongruent with their deepest desires.

We waste so much of our finite time on earth doing things we don’t even enjoy. We watch TV and scroll through pictures and videos on social media, we spend our days watching porn with women we’ll never meet, and dream about the lives of people we don’t know. Do you actually like doing those things? 

There is a better way. We have such limited time – but unlimited curiosity. We must use that curiosity as our guide to find our path and purpose in life, and to go after it fully, with every ounce of focus and drive inside of us.

Life can feel like a heavyweight sometimes – which is why we need to face it with the same intensity we bring to our last rep at the gym, bearing all the weight against us as we fight voraciously to lift it up with our last ounce of breath.

If we approached life in this same way, we could move mountains. We could live a life we never thought we’d experience.

The choice has always been yours.

Regret #2: I Wish I’d Loved Myself More Instead of Chasing Approval From Other People

Everything in our culture screams that we need to be in love with another person in order to be happy. Movies, TV and books show us that we only feel truly alive when we’re in love with another person – that’s when we can sing in the shower and shout in the streets.

But this is a lie.

The only way to live life with no regrets is to live, first and foremost, a life of self-love.

The most important relationship you’ll ever have is with yourself. Until you fall in love with yourself, no other love will ever satisfy you.

You’ll suffer for a lifetime, putting your heart at the mercy of others. No wonder you got hurt.

Think back to a time when you sacrificed your own desires – your own happiness – for the sake of a person you loved, who didn’t love you back at the same level.

Now imagine how your life would be different today if you’d treated yourself as someone you love, truly and deeply, in your thoughts, words and actions. Imagine how that situation would’ve played out if you’d made your choices out of a genuine love for yourself.

Loving yourself doesn’t mean being narcissistic. It doesn’t mean being obsessed with yourself at the expense of all other people, or thinking your above others as some sort of superhuman.

No. All it means is prioritizing your needs and making sure you’re getting those needs met, instead of putting other people – especially women – on pedestals.

One thing you can’t hide – is when you’re crippled inside. – John Lennon

A lot of us rate women on a scale where “10” is the most attractive. Imagine if you thought of yourself as a “10” – not necessarily in terms of physical attractiveness, but in terms of the value and worth you placed on yourself. How would this impact all of your decisions?

The foods you put into your body…

The people you surround yourself with…

The work you do…

The thoughts you tell yourself when you’re alone at night…

Think about a choice you’re facing right now. How would you choose differently if you truly loved yourself – if you thought of yourself as a “10” in that situation?

Love yourself now like your life depends on it – because it does.

Regret #3: I Wish I Hadn’t Worked so Hard 

No man lies on his deathbed and sighs, “If only I’d spent more hours at the office and closed one more deal.” Men dedicate the best years of their life to achieving goals that yield very little happiness in the end.

But most men continue to pursue those goals, assuming life will get better over there on the other side aka the illusion of success.

“Once I get that promotion, then I can rest” or “once I hit X amount of revenue, then I can rest.”

But the truth is, “over there” is just a continuation of the endless cycle of more work – unless you choose to break that cycle.

Men all over the world are slowly figuring out that the pot of gold is not at the end of the rainbow – and those men are getting very, very pissed off.

Some men earn plenty of money – but don’t even have the time to spend it on things they enjoy.

I know successful businessmen who own Lamborghini’s and Ferrari’s – but those exotic cars sit in the garage with car covers over them, while the men who own them work long hard hours to pay off the lease. Who owns who you might ask…?

We must stop trying to validate ourselves through what we own, and seek validation in terms of how fully we’re living our lives.

It’s time to change the definition of success altogether from ”having a high net worth” to “being able to wake up and do whatever the hell you want, without having to answer to anyone you don’t want to answer to.”

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do. – Bob Dylan

We get caught in a vicious cycle of chasing material possessions for our entire lives – but that’s not a purpose. The purpose of life is to be free. The validation we’re truly searching for can only be found within you and the beautiful part about all of this is – it doesn’t cost you a dime.

Regret #4: I Wish I Had Been Courageous Enough to Share My Truth 

Emotional freedom means expressing 100 percent of your true feelings, and not holding anything back.

There’s tremendous relief in letting it all out. It’s like a heavy weight being lifted off your shoulders and mind.

Are you free – or are you weighed down with the burden of unexpressed thoughts and feelings?

If you live your truth and share it openly and fully, you will be free.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, or what kind of car you drive, or how many women you’ve slept with. All that matters is that you are living your truth.

Right now, you’re holding back a truth. You know something at your core, but fear the consequences of sharing it openly. Speaking your truth means becoming vulnerable – and that’s often very hard for men to do.

But vulnerability is not weakness. In fact, it’s the epitome of a strong grounded man. It takes tremendous courage to get emotionally naked and express your truest thoughts. That’s not weakness – it’s real strength.

When your thoughts align with your words, and your words align with your actions, you will gain respect from both men and women. You will become known as a well-spoken man who makes his voice heard – who says what he means and means what he says.

This is a rare quality in man today that women are dying to see. When you begin to speak your mind without fear of the consequences, many people will begin to treat you differently. This is called respect.

They’ll begin to tell you things they’d been holding back for years. They’ll speak to you with a new sense of openness and safety.

But not all the consequences will be positive. Speaking your truth will turn some people off but that’s all part of the package.

Accept the consequences, deal with them, and move on. Done.

Reach out. Share your truth. Tell others, “This is who I am. This is what I stand for. Hold me accountable to it!”

Higher levels of vulnerability bring higher levels of freedom.

Regret #5: I Wish I Had Quit My Day Job and Pursued What I Really Wanted 

To settle is to suffer.

Are you trying to drive your happiness and fulfillment into the ground?

The comfort and security of a job you hate will send you straight to that point. The despair of your job may open the way to the instant gratification pleasures of modern society (alcohol, drugs, porn, food, tv binging…) causing you to be numb.

You were put into this world for a reason. You have a unique combination of talents and gifts that no other person has, or has ever had.

To withhold those gifts from the world is to slam the door on your own success and throw away the key.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. – Friedrich Nietzsche

You will never regret going after your dream job or business – no matter how it turns out. But you will unquestionably regret passing up the opportunity later in life.

When you’re lying on your deathbed, you won’t regret the times you tried and failed – or the adventures and invaluable life lessons you had along the way. Instead, you will regret all the times you could have tried, but cautiously chose to back down from the challenge.

Every time you choose comfort over a challenge, you’re choosing to live in a world of “what ifs” and “could have beens.”

It’s time to start rising to challenges and facing them head-on. It’s time to stop surviving and start conquering. It’s time to stop getting trampled day after day, and start grabbing life by the horns!

The world has been waiting for you to show us who you are. 

That doesn’t mean your life will be all successes from now on. In fact, one of the core aspects of being a man is accepting that success and failure come and go like a roller coaster – but none of these ups and downs define your worth as a man.

You are not entitled to the outcome but only to the effort itself.

All that matters, in the end, is who you are, and how authentically you lived.

Regret #6: I Wish I’d Gone After the Woman I Really Wanted Instead of Settling

Think about the last time you walked by a beautiful woman and did nothing about it. Your imagination filled with dreams of what it’d be like to see her smile, to touch her, to bed her – but you did absolutely nothing to make any of this a reality.

She kept walking right on by. And in that moment, a part of you died as a man.

You felt your desire clearly. You wanted her. But your fear overcame your honesty. “I’m not enough!” you shouted to yourself. And in that pain and fear, you failed to act. You failed to exercise your masculine drive to penetrate the world.

You’re not alone in these feelings. All men feel them at times. Many men believe what these feelings say, and accept that they’re too unattractive, too poor, too short or “not the right type” for the women they desire.

But these are all lies!

You will only know the truth at the moment you go after her.

Do whatever you have to do. Make yourself known to her. March over to her and plant your two feet in front of her and speak your truth!

(Never forget this fact: you are here, today, because of thousands upon thousands of ancestors who summoned the bravery to approach the women they wanted. Picture all those thousands of ancestors cheering you on. The men of your family have a long history of success with women, and you are here to perpetuate your family name.)

Tell her how you feel. Walk up to her and grab her hand and spin her around and say “My gosh what a beautiful being you are, let’s go on an adventure!”

When you refuse to give in to fears of rejection and approach a woman in a way that aligns with your true desire, you fully embrace your masculine self – and women appreciate a man living in his truth.

A rejection isn’t a bad thing. It means you tried, and this wasn’t the right woman or the right moment. She’s just saved you years of wasted time! Thank her.

A rejection means absolutely nothing about your worth as a man. It means you’re out in the world, fighting for what you want.

That’s what makes you a man after all so embrace it.

It’s courageous to put yourself out in the open. It’s masculine to call her forward and tell her how you feel.

To accept anything less is to accept a lifetime of mediocrity and suffering.

This is so important because many men settle for relationships that they’ve emotionally clocked out of – or instead settle for no relationship at all and chase “success”. They live vicariously through a premium PornHub account. They spend hours on adult cam sites, and follow amateur models on Instagram, dreaming of a life with them with their hand in their pants..

You don’t know any of these women! But if you go out and learn what you need to know, you can find a beautiful woman to join you on the adventure of life.

You have the right, as a man, to pursue the woman you want  All around the world, millions of women want to be swept off their feet by you. They’re waiting for their knight in shining armor to appear – but you are nowhere to be found.

Get out there!

Regret #7: I Wish I Hadn’t Lived Life as If It Would Last Forever

We have it all backward. We spend our work hours helping someone else build their dream, and spend our free time watching TV and surfing the internet. We think we enjoy these things – but this is a lie.

The truth is that these mindless things distract us from achieving the things we really want to achieve in life. They make us forget that time is the most precious and irreplaceable commodity in the world.

When your final countdown begins, you cannot buy more time. Not even if you’re a billionaire (Steve Jobs died at 56!) The time you’ve spent is all there is. 

What’s scary? You don’t know when that final countdown will come. It may be fifty years from now, or ten years – or tomorrow. You’ll never know…

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costumes and come back as a new character… Would you slow down? Or speed up? – Chuck Palahniuk

Every time you choose to put off your dreams – to avoid speaking your truth, or taking a risk on a better career, or backing down from talking to a beautiful woman – you are locking away your own happiness. You are your own jailor – and you hold the key to your imprisonment.

So many men live in a constant state of worry. They put themselves under intense amounts of pressure to live up to an ideal of “success” that you didn’t even create for yourself.

Most of us are so anxious about the future that we forget to live today. Next thing we know,  decades have gone by – and we realize we forgot to smile, laugh and be happy.

Men waste their entire lives worrying about what others think of them. They place themselves in a destructive comparison trap, hung up on the achievements of others, while forgetting that millions of people would kill to have the exact life they’re living right now.

While you’re wishing you were someone else, someone else is wishing he was you.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” – Epicurus

We have forgotten how to be present and have fun.

Think about a young boy you know. He’s 100% play. Even his work is playful. This is the natural state of man. We are not meant to dream of lives we don’t have – we are meant to be fully present and play our hearts out in this great big sandbox called life!

Somewhere along the line, though, many of us unlearn this natural instinct to play and have fun – then those people turn on others, and do their best to beat the fun instinct out of others around them. Many of us dream that someday if we attain some arbitrary level of success, we’ll be “allowed” to play and have fun again.

But that time doesn’t come unless we intentionally create it for ourselves.

You can play and have fun right now. The only person stopping you – is you.

Give yourself permission to enjoy each moment for its own sake. Life is full of little pleasures; fun moments; exciting surprises. All you have to do is open your eyes and let yourself see them.

Look, there is no pretty way to say this so I’m going to be real blunt with you:

To live life with no regrets, you need to live life with a higher sense of urgency. This is your life – and it’s ending one minute at a time.

Regret Quotes that Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life NOW!

Before ending this article, I wanted to share a few of my favorite “regret quotes” that will inspire you to step up to the plate and start living your best life today.

Whenever you feel down, depressed, or uncertain, return to these simple sayings and remember that it is up to you to live your life with no regrets.

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” -Sydney Harriss

“Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit.” –Rafael Sabatini

Seizing the Day: A Call to Action for Men Who Refuse to Settle

Most men will wake up one day and look back on all the dreams they never acted on; all the dreams they never tried to actualize; all the truths they never spoke. But by then it’s often too late. The game is over, and they never even pushed “start.”

These men all chose to play it safe. They chose to live in comfort instead of listening to the truths their hearts spoke.

But it doesn’t have to be that way for you and me. You can break the cycle. You can unlock the jail cell. You can prevent yourself from looking back on your deathbed and regretting all the shots you never took.

It all begins with a new sense of awareness on life – a commitment to accept the good and bad in every moment; to refuse to be just a passive participant aka a spectator in life; to take action; to live fully.

As for me, I choose to live boldly in the face of fear. I choose to summon the courage and go after the life I want, every damn day.

We only have a few more decades to live in this world. As long as I’m here, I want to live a life that’ll be worth writing about.

Someday, when you open a book about my life, you’ll laugh; you’ll cry; you’ll feel the beautiful human experience in each word.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a ride!’”  ― Hunter S. Thompson

Commit to making your life a wild adventure worth reading about too. Pass this knowledge on to your fellow brothers.

That would be my greatest gift to the world – to share freedom, love and happiness with as many men as possible.

That is why I wake up each day and do what I do.

It’s all for you, it always was.

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