A corollary to this may be that those who get many chances are more likely to succeed. This is often the case for people that have a safety net of some sort compared to those that don't when it comes to, for example, starting businesses. Those with a safety net can fail and try again and again and eventually tell the story of how 'gumption and spirit' made them a success while those that didn't have a safety net 'just didn't try hard enough'. I know I have been exceptionally lucky in that I have been given many chances to fail, and taken them! Without those opportunities to fail safely I wouldn't have the success I have now.

It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.

Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!

Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.

I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"

"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."

My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.

Ay, that's the spirit, lad.

To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".

And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.

As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.

Pull yourself together!

Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"

The myth is that that there is one optimal path through life that will make you happy and that any deviation from it will cause you to lose that happiness. While mistakes might take you down a path that you didn't anticipate and you might regret it for some time; they might also have opened up doors that would never have presented themselves.

We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.