Have you ever found yourself asking, “What if?”
I do it more than I'd like to admit. Sometimes I reminisce about decisions I made, and sometimes I get frustrated with the ones I didn't. The road not taken has a way of looking suspiciously smooth from a distance — no potholes, no detours, just the clean line of a life that would obviously have been better.
It's a trap. And it's also, handled differently, one of the most useful instincts we have.
Two kinds of “what if?”
There's the backward-looking kind — “what if I'd taken that job, said yes to that person, started a year earlier?” That version is mostly grief wearing the costume of analysis. It can't change anything, and it quietly taxes the present.
Then there's the forward-looking kind — “what if this works? What if the small thing I'm avoiding is actually the doorway?” Same two words, completely different engine. One looks at a closed door; the other looks at one that's still open.
Regret asks “what if?” about the past. Courage asks it about the future. They use the same words and lead to opposite lives.
Using it as fuel
What's helped me is simple: when a “what if?” shows up, I check which direction it's pointing. If it's pointing backward, I let it go — gently, without pretending the feeling isn't there. If it's pointing forward, I treat it as a tiny dare and act on the smallest possible version of it that same week.
Most of my best decisions started as an uncomfortable forward-looking “what if?” that I almost talked myself out of. So now I try to listen for that question — and, more often than not, answer it by starting.
