Recently, I watched a video where people were given the opportunity to write down their biggest regret in a public forum in the center of New York City.

Upon the end of the day, the large chalkboard was filled with a myriad of responses from people all over the city. After the regrets written down had been accounted for, they were all reflected upon and compared.

The striking thing about this public experiment was that despite the fact the responses were all unique and distinguishable from each other, nearly all of them had one thing in common.

The aspect that tied all of these regrets together is that they were all about things that the individual had never done...chances they'd never taken, opportunities they let slip away, and things they'd never said.

All these regrets were about what these people wished they had done but never did. Things they could go back in time and change if they could. Things that slowly tug at their heartstrings when they lay in bed at night, subject to their raw thoughts.

One was "I wish I hadn't doubted myself and went to medical school," another was, "I wish I'd had the courage to tell her how I really feel."

This hit me pretty hard and reminded me of another saying my dad would tell me when I was younger: "Youth is wasted on the young."

For a while, I didn't think much of it because I was rather naive and too caught up in my own little world. Now when I reminisce back to the various times he said this to me, I realize that these individual conversations span across years and years.

Time goes by so fast... I still remember when I was not even 10 years old with my little brothers on a family vacation. We were gathered around the breakfast table and we had all fervently agreed that only "teenagers" didn't push their cereal under the milk in the bowl. And at the time, a "teenager" was something none of us wanted to be. A distant concept. Something that would never apply to us.

That was over 10 years ago. I'm 20 years old now and it's hard for me to wrap my brain around that ever-so-vivid conversation that happened over a decade ago.

Ferris Bueller so famously quipped, "Life goes by so fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

Individual days may sometimes seem to take forever to end, but eventually the days turn into weeks, the weeks into months, and the months into years.

The most painful thing about "what if's" is that they never seem to leave you. This is because a part of yourself will always be haunted by the possibility of what could have been. It's one thing to try and to fail; it happens to the best of us. It's quite another thing to never trust yourself enough to make the leap of faith in the first place. Not all leaps of faith have happy endings, but I know I would much rather take the risk than be left wondering and regretful for the rest of my life.

You don't want to wake up one day to a life you settled for, rather than chose for yourself. Take chances; you never know what could happen.