Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀

Some mistakes hurt more than others.

When you’re 20, everyone tells you that what you’ll regret most are the wasted opportunities. That’s a lie.

You regret the things you are most ashamed of because when two decades go by, you look back and are no longer the person you were: you are a different person, and looking at your 20-year-old self makes you feel ashamed.

I know this from my own experience.

The good news is: you can learn from the mistakes of others. So learn from the four things I regret the most and save yourself the embarrassment.

1- Mistreat others

When I was 18, my parents divorced, and I had to work to pay for my industrial engineering degree. This meant that 1) I was separated from my family for a while. And 2) upon my return, their interaction with me ended in an argument (yelling included).

I believed that I was right and that my family was constantly wrong. I would argue with them over anything and treat them like they were stupid.

When I turned 33, life hit me so hard that it still hurt. And it also awakened my conscience. And with shame, I discovered that for years I victimized myself like a little boy and all my discussions with my family were about punishing them for letting me down.

Lesson: don’t mistreat others. Don’t lose your patience. You are not more intelligent than they are. When a loved one gets on your nerves, what usually happens is that both parties have not healed an old wound, and one of those parties, on top of that, has not matured enough.

2- Cheating yourself

I did not finish my degree. I was two or three subjects away from the end. But the truth is that I never liked engineering.

I didn’t dare to admit it. And I fooled myself for so long that I lost a decade of my life.

That’s too long.

The worst is that when you deceive yourself, you deceive others and end up alone.

Very lonely.

Lesson: you only live once, don’t do things just for money, do them for passion because when you are passionate, you love. And when you are self-deceived, you hate because you end up doing things you hate, which can never go well.

3- Needs to be tidier

When you’re young, it seems sexy to be a bit chaotic and messy. Spoiler: it’s not.

Everything you repeatedly do grows.

And there will come a point when you’re not so young, and your lack of tidiness isn’t seen as “sexy” but as a lack of self-respect and personal hygiene.

Besides, clutter is like cancer that spreads to all areas of your life.

I look at my 20-year-old self, and I remember her sink full of dirty dishes, her clothes strewn on the floor, her ashtrays full of cigarette butts, and her fridge full of expired food, and besides shame, I feel pity.

It is sad to remember it.

Lesson: being organized will save you time and money. Being organized will take you far. Being organized is lovely; if you combine it with being polite and clean, you’ll be halfway there in everything you set out to do.

4- Sins

There is an old church in Galicia with this motto written on its walls, “The devil takes away your shame to sin, but gives it back to you when you want to confess it.”

It doesn’t matter if you are a believer or not. Let me tell you something: all sins engender misery and pain. And only by confessing them will you be able to dissolve the darkness you accumulate inside by committing them with the light of truth.

• I have been unfaithful, and I repent.
• I have hidden my OCD from the people I had relationships with, and I regret it.
• I have betrayed a friend, and I regret it.
• I have used drugs, and I regret it.
• I have been an alcoholic, and I regret it.

And thanks to repentance and confession, the darkness in me has dissolved.

Lesson: Talk about it with someone when you have a problem, no matter how embarrassed you are. Only what is hidden grows. If you confess, you heal. This is one of my biggest lessons in the last 20 years.

A virtual hug

AG