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The Top 5 Regrets of The Living
Paperback
Series: Top Shelf, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 28 2025
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.15 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
At the Olympic Games, bronze medallists often look happier than silver medallists. Psychologists filmed the podiums to prove it, and the reason tells you almost everything about regret: it depends on what you compare your life with.
In 2012, a palliative carer called Bronnie Ware shared the five regrets she heard most often from people in their final weeks. Her list was read by more than a million people. The Top 5 Regrets of the Living takes those same five regrets and asks a simple question: what if we caught them early, while there is still time to act?
Each chapter takes one regret and sets it beside the best research we have. Why do we regret the things we never did more than the things we did? Why do people underestimate how much a short thank you note will mean, or how much a stranger enjoyed talking to them? Why did a Stanford economist's study of First World War munition workers find that seventy hours a week produced little more than fifty six? What did a famous coin toss experiment reveal about people who finally made the change they had been putting off? And why do we keep waiting for the right time, when Seneca warned against exactly that almost two thousand years ago?
Along the way you will meet Grandma Moses, who began painting in earnest at 78, Colonel Sanders, who franchised his chicken recipe after losing his restaurant at 65, and Julia Child, who did not finish cookery school until her late thirties. You will hear how Frank Sinatra's great anthem of no regrets was recorded in a single take by a man who thought he was about to retire, and why Édith Piaf's Non, je ne regrette rien is sung by the French Foreign Legion.
Every chapter ends with small, practical things to try this week, and a closing section sets out honestly what the research does and does not show.
This second edition has been fully rewritten. Every fact, figure and quotation has been checked against named sources, which are listed at the back of the book.
Warm, curious and grounded in evidence, The Top 5 Regrets of the Living is for anyone who would rather learn from regret now than discover it later.
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