Joe Kita, writer of, “Another Shot: How I Relived My Life in Less Than a Year” said that when he turned 40, he began to question how he had lived his life so far.

He made a list of “regrets” and then set out on a journey to relive them. One of Kita’s regrets was that he wasn’t already “filthy rich.” He hired a butler to serve him for a week for $1,000 and began to experience how it would feel to live the life of a wealthy person.

By the end of the week, Kita learned that he didn’t really enjoy having another person in his house. He discovered that he could feel like a wealthy man by creating his own luxuries – the ones that made him feel like a million dollars.

One by one, Kita attempted to relive his regrets and at the end of his journey he came away with a new understanding of what life is all about – and a blueprint on how to live the remainder of his life with absolutely no regrets.

Kita learned valuable lessons throughout the venture, and he eventually developed the motto, “Take an opportunity to be the driver in your life instead of the passenger.”

Are you the driver in your life – or are you simply being driven without your consent or, worse, against your will, in directions you don’t want to go? Whether or not you live your life filled with regrets depends on how you take charge and handle the present moments and how you go about mapping your future.

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

Short term goals are steps to achieve what you want your lifetime accomplishments to be. But don’t get mired down in setting goals and forget the big picture.

If one of your lifetime accomplishments is to write a novel, you’ll have to set short term goals that might involve finished a chapter per month – or attending writing seminars that may help you achieve your goal.

No matter how old you are or where you are in your life, you can choose to live the rest of your life with no regrets by seizing the life you have and making it the best it can be.

Some people have trouble identifying what their life goals should be. Here are some tips you might use to help recognize what you want your life’s accomplishments to be and how to reach them with no regrets:

Take charge – If you’re not living your life in a manner that you specifically choose, make a conscious decision to change.

Are people or circumstances keeping you from living the life you desire? If you feel that you have no control over daily hassles in your life, it’s probably true that you’re the passenger – not the driver in your life.

Taking charge of your life might upset the proverbial apple cart for awhile, but to know that the decisions you make are yours and no one else’s can be the first step to living your life with no regrets.

Develop a mission statement – If you don’t already have a mission statement for your business and personal life, make it a point to create one as soon as possible.

A mission statement will help identify your life’s desires and set your goals. You should create one for your business as well as your personal life. The statement should be one or two sentences and filled with lots of verbs – action words.

From the initial mission statement, you’ll be able to plot short-term goals that will help you reach the mission you’ve identified. There are many websites available that can guide you in creating a mission statement that truly reflects your life’s wishes.

Don’t tolerate undesirable conditions in your life – If something is bothering you about your life and preventing you from living it to the fullest – address it, fix it, and go on.

By all means, don’t ignore the problem(s) and attempt to push it under the rug or, worse, dwell on it and stress over it every day without finding a solution. Either of those strategies will make the problem bigger. It won’t go away by itself and you don’t want it to develop into a major regret of your life.

Take a different path – If you aren’t happy with the way your life is progressing now, try something else. Take some courses on subjects you’ve always enjoyed, but have never pursued.

For example, if you’re a television news junkie and read the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover, you may want to take a course in “Current Affairs.” A new way of looking at and thinking about things may point you in an entirely different direction in your life.

View past mistakes as learning experiences – Don’t spend time fussing about bad choices you’ve made in the past – that just makes them worse and wastes time.

All of your choices, even your mistakes, have made you what you are. If you keep making the same bad choice over and over, analyze it and attempt to figure out why you keep doing it.

After you’ve identified the reasons for the bad choices, take steps to repair the situation. If you allow bad choices or past mistakes to worsen, they will eventually become part of your life’s regrets rather than stepping stones to a life that you’re excited about and proud to live.

Sometimes, regrets in your past will raise up to slap you in the face and give you a wake up call to change. You may suddenly realize that your child is growing up and you’ve been oblivious to some of it due to stresses in your own life.

You can’t go back in time and relive the moments you’ve missed with your child, but you can make it a priority to take full advantage of the time you have left before he or she leaves the nest.

You may regret that you didn’t spend more time taking your business in a different direction than the one you chose. Use this revelation as a catalyst to spur you on to trying another path that you know will be a positive move for your business.

George Eliot once wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Take time to reevaluate past lessons and put them to work for you rather than regretting them for the rest of your life. Live the remainder of your life with passion and the knowledge.

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