TED: Schulz talks regret.

An hour until babysitting and this is exactly what I needed: Kathryn Schulz whose other talk I adored so much discusses regret.

17 minutes. "Don't regret regret".

Schulz discusses regret as it applies to different components of life, quoting the Roese and Summerville paper I found so fascinating. Here's the bottom line: I had focused more on minimizing regret by using the emotion as a preventative measure (will I feel regret in the future?). But listen:

Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage... So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy. But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it.

She discusses three ways to deal with regret once you feel you've made a dumb decision:

And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. 

The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us.

I love that last line.

The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time...

But what may be a really important lesson to learn(in a "hate the game, not the player"-esque fashion):

Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.

This brings us back to remembering to forgive yourself and move on after a mistake, even though the experience pains us. I have basically Ctrl+C/V'd the entire transcript here, so go ahead and listen to it. If you are a twenty-something on major career crossroads, it will speak to you.