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Failure & regret

Failure & second chances

Seven questions about setbacks, bad advice, embarrassment, apologies, and whether you would edit the past.

7 questions, 1,009 answers on the record, from 691 members. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.

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Worth reading

What is the worst advice you followed anyway?

Soman Chainani

Novelist and screenwriter; author of The School for Good and Evil

Recorded · The Tim Ferriss Show · 2018

This professor was obviously on the jury, and I wanted to stay the faculty’s blessed son, and so I trusted external validation at this point in my life more than my own creative compass.
Mario Molina

Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995

Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2014

I did. As a kid, I liked music. I still like it a lot of course. I used to play the violin. I did contemplate, well, maybe that’s an option. I could become a musician.
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Every question in this questionnaire

  1. How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
  2. What is the worst advice you followed anyway? 4
  3. What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 35
  4. What disappointment has stayed with you longest? 367
  5. When were you most embarrassed? 122
  6. Who deserves an apology from you, and for what? 209
  7. If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change? 203

Who has answered

Members with enough answers in this questionnaire to be worth arriving at — listed A–Z, not ranked by count.

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