I wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Question
What are you unwilling to optimise?
Values & belief
Question
Which teacher, parent, coach or friend most made you who you are, and what did you learn from them?
Relationships
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the biggest obstacle you have faced professionally?
Craft & work
Question
How do you balance creative work with other responsibilities?
Daily life
Question
Who helps you get things done?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I’d have lesser expectations — those expectations not being as great might actually be more effective
MEL Magazine source ↗
Others on this question
View all 205 →
Tracy-Ann Oberman
Actor and writer
I am a living self-help book – I’ve managed to train myself to never regret anything.
Gareth Bale
Welsh footballer
Nothing. Without my past I wouldn’t be who I am today.
Gregg Wallace
English broadcaster and writer
I wouldn’t marry anybody until I met Anna.
More from Ephraim Asili
View profile →I am my target audience
she convinced me to use a Bolex. Then suddenly I got obsessed
I would say start off small, build from there.
I tried to get funding to shoot this film and couldn’t—nobody wanted to touch it, you know?
I prefer not to compartmentalize my life.
MOVE was very supportive through all of that. My wife had a natural childbirth — MOVE coached us through a lot of that.
More on failure & regret
- What has been your biggest disappointment? 369 answers
- Who most deserves an apology from you, and why? 209 answers
- What is the worst thing anyone has said to you? 124 answers
- Which moment embarrassed you most? 124 answers
- How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? 77 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 39 answers
Also answered this
Felicity Jones, Harriet Walter, Ralf Little, Jenna Coleman, Jessica Brown Findlay, Rosanna Arquette
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject