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What I've noticed over the years, and I've like, dude, I've done a lot of stupid shit.

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The only things I regret in the long run is how I've treated people.

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Oh, okay.

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I never regret a bad decision.

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Like I've, I've, I have done so many stupid, I've wasted so much money on like,

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dumb decision, like bad business ventures.

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Like I have made a fool of myself.

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I've embarrassed myself.

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I have fucking shot myself in the foot in so many, so many contexts, so many situations.

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The only things I regret are times that I've hurt somebody I really care about.

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Sure.

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Okay.

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Some people would point to you and say, well, you're just not prone to regret, Mark, I guess.

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You're just not a person who regrets things.

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I would argue, no, that's not actually the case because in the research, what they found is that what people

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is the actions not taken.

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You have this tendency to just take action.

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It's exactly what they find in the research is that in the short run anyway, people kind of like, they make a decision 50-50, they regret it or not, right?

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In the long run though, when people look back, they're like, I don't regret making that decision even though it turned out horribly.

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Like, I don't regret making the decision.

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What they regret is not making a decision, is inaction.

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You know, Warren Buffett points this out too about a lot of the investments.

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He's like, the ones I regret are the ones I didn't make.

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He's like, if I lost money, I lost money, whatever, on the ones I made.

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But it's the ones I didn't make that I regret the most.

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And the same is true throughout life as well.

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So I don't think you're actually not a regret prone.

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I thought that for a little while, but then I thought about it more and I was like, no, he's not regret prone.

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He just- I compulsively take action.

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He compulsively takes action, yeah.

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I will say this.

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I do have like very like kind of subtle regrets, but it's always, it is similar to that.

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It's around wasted time.

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Wasted time making a decision.

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Wasted time making a commitment.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And in my case, it was, it's never like not making a decision.

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I mean, I've known people who spent years, wasted years avoiding making a decision.

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And then once they make the decision, they're like, oh my God, I can't believe I wasted so many years.

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and they feel really bad about it.

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For me, it's more like I pursued things that in hindsight were kind of dumb, not very aligned with my values or my long-term who I wanted to be.

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And so I just kind of look back and I'm like,

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all right, that was stupid.

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In my case, it's actually kind of the opposite.

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I think there's like, maybe I took too much action on some things.

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I spent too much time pursuing things that were like kind of dumb and ultimately didn't add a whole lot to my life.

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That gets into the self-concordance thing.

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Yeah, so it's like, I look back at the amount of partying I did in my 20s and I'm like, okay, I'm glad I did like,

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75% of it.

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There's about 25%.

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I'm like, dude, stay home and work, watch a movie or something.

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You know, I took it too far.

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Yeah.

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This kind of reminds me a little bit to, you know, we had Annie Duke on last time and in her book, she has a book on quitting.

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One of the big points I got out of that is people wait too long to quit usually.

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And I would just generalize that people wait too long to make a decision period.

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I can definitely point to a lot of things in my life where it's like, I spent way too long considering this.

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They've shown studies around people trying to make big life decisions around work, school, relationships, right?

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And they measure how much they, you know, how much do you think this is going to affect you?

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This is going to be a bad or a good decision at the time.

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And then they follow up with them months later.

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And did you quit or not?

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The people who quit earlier report a lot more satisfaction than people who don't.

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So it's like you're waiting too long to quit.

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And I would just say in general, you're waiting too long just to make a decision, period.

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I'm not prone to regret, but I do agree with you.

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I am prone to action.

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I would rather just do something and then figure it out along the way.

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And as somebody who does that kind of compulsively, I can report from the other side that like, there's never been a time where I'm like, I should have waited longer to do that.

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I cannot think of a single thing in my life.

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that I'm like, I should have waited longer.

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I do things very quickly.

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I do not sit around and agonize over many decisions in my life.

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I cannot think of a single one that I'm like, oh, I should have thought about that for another month or another year.

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I think you just get better at making decisions, too, the more you make, obviously.

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It's a volume game at a certain point.

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Here's the thing, though.

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Kierkegaard's Ethical Life, his argument, that Judge William character he made up, Judge William's argument was not, you're going to feel better, right?

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about your decisions if you just make them, right?

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If you commit to something, you're going to feel better about.

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That was not his argument.

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His argument was that making commitments creates the self.

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It creates an identity for you.

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Something solid and something worth standing for is what commitments do for you.

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Yes, you'll feel better about it.

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Like, that's a benefit.

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I think that's the kind of like the psychological sneak in that we have is that there is some well-being you're going to get from some of this.

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But ultimately, what Kierkegaard argued was the ethical life is not defined by feeling good about it.

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It's about creating a self.

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You can't create a self without commitments.

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And the research bears this out too.

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There's this guy, James Marsha, back in the 60s, who kind of started this work on identity formation.

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And he operationalized your identity formation along these two axes, or these two components, really.

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One he called crisis, which is really dramatic because all that is is actually exploring.

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You're in exploration phase.

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That's your crisis phase, he called it.

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And then commitment was the second phase too.

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So investment in some part of your life and some firm decision in your life, right?

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And so if you take those two components, you can come up with kind of four different things.

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If you have low crisis versus high commitment or so on and so forth.

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Right.

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OK, so he comes up with these four identity statuses out of this.

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OK, and I'll just run through them really quick here.

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So the first one is what he calls diffusion, which is low crisis, low exploration and low commitment.

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This is just somebody who's not thinking about their options and not really committing to anything, right?

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They're just, it's very much go with the flow.

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You're not really engaged with life at all on any level.

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The next one, though, he called foreclosures.

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That's low exploration and high commitment.

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So these are the people who definitely look around and it's like, it's more like this is what I'm supposed to do and I'm going to commit hard to it.

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You know, I'm going to take the safe job and marry this certain person.

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Do what my parents told me.

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Do what my parents told me.

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So there's a very high level of commitment.

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So you might get some psychological immune system benefit from that.

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But at the same time, you haven't explored that deeply.

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And so we talked about the self-concordance thing.

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You don't have the self-awareness around whether or not that was good for you, right?

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The next one is moratorium.

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So this is where there's high exploration, but low commitment.

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This is where the asthete lives, at least for like younger people in this phase.

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They were a lot more likely to reach the next phase, which he called achievement, which is both a high exploration and a high commitment.

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So this is someone who's very deliberate, eyes wide open type of decision that they make.

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And they found through all of this, you know, that the people who do reach that achieved commitment status, they're the ones who have the highest well-being and everything we just talked about, too.

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The psychological immune system kicks in.

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And then they also like, oh, I have this long-term sense of well-being.

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It's durable and I feel good about it.

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I have good mental health, good relationships, all of that.

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But also they have a very strong sense of who they are.

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A strong sense of self.

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I think somebody hears that and somebody who might not have a real strong sense of themselves might not know what that means.

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Like, what is a strong sense of self?

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What is a strong sense of at all?

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I'm going to ask you that first.

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What do you think that entails?

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I think it's a high degree of confidence in knowing what you value yourself.

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what you prefer, what you're good at, what you're bad at.

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And I would argue that some degree of self-exploration is necessary for that.

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You kind of need this exploration phase when you're young to put yourself in a bunch of novel situations to get that information.

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Like you have to go to Chile to find out that you don't want to

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live there long term, because that teaches you something very important about yourself when you come back.

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And so that makes it easier to do future decisions.

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Now you're better able to close off alternatives because you know more about yourself.

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I think that's what the research bears out too.

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And you kind of just have a...

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Almost no matter where you are or where you go, you kind of feel the same in a way.

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We all kind of change who we are in different situations.

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I get that.

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But there's still like a sense of yourself that you have throughout those different situations.

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You know who you are, right?

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And if you don't have that sense of yourself, I think a lot of it is because you haven't really committed to...

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something in your life, right?

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And you don't have that to fall back on.

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If we come back to my definition, which by the way, I just totally pulled out of my ass, but I feel pretty good about the high degree of confidence in one's values, preferences, talents, and abilities.

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Commitments solidify that, right?

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If I commit to this career and I spend all of my time doing this one thing, that is going to increase my confidence in who I am.

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Right.

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It's like, I am a podcaster.

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I am an author, right?

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Like it's, I've been doing this for 20 years.

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So I have a high degree of confidence that that is who I am.

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Whereas like, if I haven't really.

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tried many things and if I haven't really had many jobs and I haven't done anything for more than a year, then I'm going to have a very low degree of confidence in who I am because I haven't accumulated that evidence to gain that self-understanding.

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It's funny how this is tying into the confidence piece of like, right, we did a whole confidence episode and one of the big takeaways from that is that actually confidence is

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It's not the input of performance, it's the output of performance.

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And it is built through accumulating evidence that you're capable of handling a situation.

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And it's like a positive feedback loop.

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It's like the more I'm able to make a decision and commit to something, the more I learn about myself.

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the more I learn about myself, the better able I'm going to be to make commitments and decisions in the future.

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And so you kind of get this upward spiral of commitments and self-knowledge.

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Hey, everybody.

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Hope you enjoyed this video.

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It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.

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If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description.

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And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment.

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See you in the next one.