Perfectionism that leads to procrastination.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Having no purpose.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 January 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 255 →
John Lewis
U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
As a participant in the movement, as I was sitting in, I came to that point where I lost all sense of fear.
Willem Dafoe
Actor
A crippling accident.
That we won’t act fast enough to save the planet.
More from Helen George
View profile →Going through a divorce.
A grandfather clock for my partner’s birthday.
Waitressing. I was so bad. I smashed things. I once mistakenly ordered a very expensive bottle of wine for a table. They thought they were ordering a very average bottle of wine, and I ordered them an £800 bottle and they drank it. I got the sack a few weeks later.
When I was young, I was pretty reckless – my 20s were quite hedonistic. I don’t know whether I’ve been close to death, but I may have been without realising.
To let things go.
To still be working.
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Ai Weiwei, Alan Arkin, Alfred Molina, Alison Steadman, Allison Janney, Ally McCoist
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