Humans have an asymmetry of errors. We over-index exceptions - we use things that break the pattern we’ve come to expect as a serious learning opportunity. But we tend to only learn much faster from errors of commission (things we do), not errors of omission (things we don’t do).
- You only learn the sting of misplaced trust when someone betrays you, but when you refuse to trust and miss out on love, partnership, or help, the loss leaves no scar to remind you.
- It’s obvious when quitting for a new career turns out to be a mistake; it’s far less obvious when staying put quietly drains years of your life that you’ll never get back.
- We terrify ourselves with the thought of leaving a relationship and ending up lonelier; we almost never see the equal danger: staying forever with someone who never makes us feel fully alive.
- We recoil from the humiliation of saying something stupid in a meeting, but we don’t clock the cost of never raising our hand at all.
- We treat one bad investment as catastrophic, but rarely tally the unseen compounding of never investing in the first place.
- We remember the awkward rejection that came from asking someone out, but never name the decades-long regret of not asking.
- We dramatise the scandal of a friend’s failed new habits, but forget the corrosive damage of decades of drift and inaction.
- We catastrophise the risks of starting a company that fails, but ignore the equally large risk of letting someone else succeed at launching the idea you had a decade ago.
- We obsess over the fallout from saying “yes” to the wrong opportunity, but rarely notice the quiet erosion of habitually saying “no.”
History makes the same mistake. Kodak invented digital photography in the 1970s. An engineer showed executives a clunky prototype that could store photos on a cassette tape. They shelved the idea, afraid it would cannibalise their film business. For thirty years, they sat on the future. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Their great failure wasn’t a wrong bet; it was never placing the bet at all.
TLDR: We remember the noise of bad choices. We rarely count the cost of silence. Commission teaches lessons in days. Omission teaches lessons in decades, usually too late to apply them.
I’m not saying you won’t regret the obvious agony of jobs you quit, loves you lost, or words you blurted out; I’m just saying you need to pay more attention to the unseen pain of the jobs you never left, the loves you never dared and the words you never spoke.
We wince at mistakes that make a noise, but it’s the silent mistakes that do the real damage. Errors of commission bruise the ego, errors of omission starve the soul.