This is hard because you want to be sure it's squarely something that's a net-negative.
I think I'd try to find the biggest lie I told and not tell it. When I was younger I had a certain kind of desperation that made me feel like I had to lie about things that I didn't. I was constantly in trouble and I thought the problem was that I had the wrong story. The lies I told were afaict harmless to the recipient, like lying about why I didn't want to work full time. Even so, I ache with regret about it.
I tend to think about the chain of events around and following a lie as lost time, time that I lost getting to be "me" in the world, and as cliched as it is, time really is the most precious thing. I tend to think the worst thing a person can do to themselves is lie to other people, mislead them, or manipulate them. We are betraying the other people, but also ourselves (our truth isn't good enough) and the world (the facts aren't good enough) we are living in.
I've actually put a lot of thought into this comment. When I was much younger, I had a deep need to "fit in" which also manifested itself in constant lies. My parents moved us around a lot, so every new school was a chance to be a new me, and "this time people will like me for sure."
Thankfully it's a habit I grew out of but I never really considered it from the perspective of time lost. I think the most damaging lies, however, is the ones I told myself to justify not doing the things that I wanted to do.
"I don't have time" is probably most damaging lie I told myself, and I did it constantly. Looking back, there was a lot of lost time due to lies for sure.
i moved around a bit too. I wonder if that's what motivates the kind lies we both told. It's difficult, and formative, to have to make new friends while you're still trying to figure out who you are.
I told myself to justify not doing the things that I wanted to do
I find the worst ones to be these self-psyop ones. One of my big ones was "I don't need to move to a big city to succeed as a founder. I just need to code harder."
"I don't have time" is probably most damaging lie I told myself, and I did it constantly.
One of my personal fables I like to tell is that I wanted to snowboard since I was 12, which is the first time I went, but I told myself I was too old to begin learning.
"Too old" and "Too late" are definitely some of the worst ones. I used to be under the impression, that if I did anything, I needed to be the best at it.
After I hit my mid to late 20's I missed out on a lot of things because I knew for a fact that I was too old to ever be truly great at quite a lot of things.
Luckily my "mid-life crisis" was centered on fixing myself instead of buying a sports car.
How did the snowboarding work out? Do you still do it?
Buying my current house just over 10 years ago. The last 10 years have been a nightmare and we’ve outgrown the house as a family with no possibility at the moment of getting a different place.
Here's a previous discussion on something related. #653601
The related posts needs to improve and can be better if it also include the title phrases as priority.
I mean for sure I could go back and I would have told past me to just spend a grand on btc back in 2016 and would have kept stacking and now I would never have to worry about inflation again, I'd be out of the matrix.
But, if we're not talking sats, one thing I would change was shutting down an email list I had.
I used to have a site where I published how-to articles related to selling on amazon, I had thousands of subscribers and I'd usually do a weekly email.
Then I decided to pivot into being a nutritionist and I shutdown the old website and email list to 'burn the boats'.
Well, in this age of attention economy, that was the wrong thing to do. My pivot failed spectacularly I should have kept that list that I worked hard to build and then when I came back to amazon work, I would have been able to pick back up and offer my services again.
related postsneeds to improve and can be better if it also include the title phrases as priority.