Fancy French restaurants seem to have strict rules.
Which knife do I use? Is this a fork dish or a spoon dish? If I get it wrong, will everyone think, "This guest has no idea what they're doing"?
With thoughts like that, it makes sense that some people want to practice table manners before they go.
But in real life, something quite different can happen.
One diner used the wrong cutlery several times during a set course. Nobody said a word. The restaurant carried on as usual. The diner was also watching the cooking, the sauces, the plating, the timing between dishes and how the staff moved. In the end, the staff reacted as if they thought the diner worked in the business.
They used the wrong fork, yet people thought of them as a pro.
It is possible they were taking a manners exam that nobody else had set, and it only existed in their own head.
This story is not interesting because of French table manners.
When you want more choices in life, "I can go because I now know it's fine to make small mistakes" is often much stronger than "I can go because I can do it perfectly."
This article starts with two small examples, a French dinner and a roller coaster. Then it connects them to several ideas: the gap between what you expect and what happens, self-confidence, how we react to uncertainty, how experience builds on itself, what we learn from sharing, a psychologically rich life, and regret over the long run.
Here is the answer first. What changes a life is not "courage to be afraid of nothing."
It is being accurate about the unknown: not rating it higher or lower than it really is.
1. How we react to the unknown is not only about being nervous
A new restaurant, a new town, a new ride, a new form to fill in.
People's reactions roughly fall into four types.
- "I don't know how it works, so I don't do it."
- "I don't know how it works, so I look it up. Once I understand, I do it."
- "I looked it up and I know the rules, but I'm afraid of messing up on the spot, so I don't do it."
- "I look it up and go. If I mess up, I watch what actually happens afterward."
The important point is not to split people into "timid" and "brave."
People stop in front of the unknown for many reasons, not only personality. Missing information, little experience, a guess about how bad the damage could be, other people's eyes, hassle, time, money and safety all mix together.
The biggest one is often "What do I think will happen if I make a mistake?"
Not knowing the right answer and having a disaster after a mistake are two different things. But with something new, the two easily stick together.
2. "I can go if I do it right" and "I can go even if I get it wrong" are different things
If you must do it right before you join, the bar to start is high.
You look up the dress code. You look up how to book. You look up how to eat. You look up the cutlery. You look up how to pay. Only when you know everything do you finally leave home.
But suppose real experience teaches you these things:
- If you don't know, you can ask the staff.
- One wrong fork does not make the food vanish.
- Even if you look a bit awkward, other people are not watching that closely.
- The restaurant usually handles it smoothly so the guest does not feel embarrassed.
Then the amount of preparation you need drops.
That is a big difference.
It changes from "no entry until you score 95" to "avoid only the serious accidents and learn the rest on the spot."
Of course, this does not apply to every kind of mistake. Debt, important contracts, safety, the law, shared money, and decisions that affect other people's lives or trust are a different matter from choosing a fork.
Still, in daily life there are quite a few things that cause little real harm if you fail, yet look like a big deal just because you have never done them.
3. "It was okay, actually" on a roller coaster is more than just a feeling
A roller coaster is an easy example.
Before you ride, the drop, the speed and the floating feeling look huge. After the ride, some people say, "That was better than I thought," even if there were scary moments.
What you gain here is not the rough conclusion that "roller coasters are completely safe."
It is the gap between the prediction you made beforehand and what really happened.
You expected a level-100 disaster.
What you measured was 40.
The next time you meet something similar and unknown, your brain no longer has to start from 100.
This "it was better than I thought" can become data you carry over to the next unknown thing.
4. When a prediction misses, you can update your picture of the world
People act on a guess about what will happen. When the guess and reality differ, research calls that gap a prediction error, and treats it as something to learn from.
In studies on treating anxiety, it is considered an important learning chance to clearly take in the fact that the feared thing did not actually happen.
In a randomized controlled trial in 2025, 249 adults with high anxiety about public speaking did intensive exposure tasks. In the version that included behavioral experiments stressing the gap between prediction and reality, people's predictions of threat changed more. The bigger the change in prediction during the task, the bigger the drop in anxiety. [1]
This is treatment research, so you cannot say you would get the same effect size just by going to a fancy restaurant.
Still, the mechanism is easy to follow.
"If I use the wrong fork, it will be awkward" → I used the wrong fork → nothing happened.
If you shrug it off with "that was just luck," your prediction barely changes.
If you can think, "I was overestimating the damage in the first place," your next decision changes.
What matters is not only how many experiences you have, but whether you update your prediction afterward.
5. Confidence may not be a ticket to get in, but a stamp you receive afterward
The belief that "I can handle this task" is called self-efficacy.
There is an interesting meta-analysis on it.
Sitzmann and Yeo looked at how self-efficacy and performance change together over time within the same person. After adjusting for the general upward trend over time, the link from past performance to later self-efficacy was ρ = .30, while the link from self-efficacy to later performance was only ρ = .06, weak and not significant. [2]
Of course, this does not say that "confidence is meaningless" for every action in life.
But we should at least take this order seriously:
not only wait until you feel confident → act,
but also act → find you could handle it → confidence gets updated.
Confidence may be less like a ticket you pay for in advance and more like a stamp card that gets stamped after you go in and come back.
6. There is a normal gap between "I'm curious" and "I actually did it"
Wanting to do something and doing it are not the same.
A meta-analysis by Webb and Sheeran combined 47 experiments. Interventions changed people's intentions by a medium-to-large amount (d = .66), but actual behavior changed less (d = .36). [3]
In other words,
"I'd like to go" earns no experience points. Your data grows only when you book, travel and walk in.
On the other hand, plans that spell out "when, where and how I'll act" can help people act. A meta-analysis of 94 independent tests found that this kind of plan had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = .65). [4]
Not "I'll go to a French restaurant someday," but "I'll book a table for one on Saturday lunchtime."
Not "I'd like to travel someday," but "I'll take this train to this town."
In many cases, making the first step concrete works better than psyching yourself up.
7. The thing that changes a life may be how accurate your guess about the unknown is
Here is a handy way to think about it.
There is no single standard psychology test called "accuracy of your advance estimate of the unknown." But nearby research areas include calibration of predictions, accurate self-awareness, risk perception and reactions to uncertainty.
Even so, the structure of a decision can be sorted into four cases.
| Reality | Your advance judgment | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Actually low cost | Judged low cost | You do it, and it works out |
| Actually low cost | Judged high cost | Missed chance |
| Actually high cost | Judged high cost | You rightly avoid it |
| Actually high cost | Judged low cost | Accident or loss |
The goal of improving accuracy is not to become a person who does everything.
It is to reduce both mistakes: avoiding what is actually fine, and rushing into what is actually dangerous.
The French restaurant fork is usually the first kind.
For debt, housing, important contracts, safety, the law and shared money, you must never take the second kind lightly.
Getting better at sorting things correctly beats maximizing courage.
8. As experience grows, you also learn what you do not need to look up
For a beginner, every unknown looks equally big.
At a fancy restaurant, clothes, booking, entering, conversation, how to eat, cutlery and payment all look like "must check."
After one visit, the importance becomes uneven.
- Check the price and booking conditions first.
- Always tell them about allergies.
- Check the restaurant's own dress code.
- Choosing one fork is not a fatal mistake.
- If you don't know something, you can ask.
So with more experience, you do not just search more. You spend your searching better.
The tendency to strongly dislike uncertain situations is called "intolerance of uncertainty." In a 2024 study, 247 people reported real-life decisions on their phones six times a day. People higher in this tendency had more trouble deciding and used more problematic safety-checking behavior, and that safety behavior also predicted more trouble deciding later. [5]
In a 2025 preregistered experiment (N = 301), raising intolerance of uncertainty on purpose made people more indecisive about personally important decisions. [6]
This does not mean "don't look things up."
Looking up what needs looking up, and stopping when you have enough, is also part of making decisions.
9. Experience does not just add up. It partly compounds
The first experience is not always used only once.
Booking, entering, asking staff and paying at your first fancy restaurant can partly be reused at the next one.
Transport, luggage, opening hours and fixing problems on the spot, learned on a solo trip, can be used in the next city.
As a result, the research and nerves you need to start the next thing can get smaller.
A loop forms:
experience → better estimates → lower cost of the next action → more experience
In careers too, "exploring" is not unrelated. A meta-analysis of 109 studies and 34,969 students on career exploration found that exploring was positively linked to career decidedness (r = .22) and perceived employability (r = .35). [7] This is a correlation, so you cannot say exploring is the only cause. Still, it shows that looking things up, trying them and collecting information is not unrelated to results.
There is also an experiment finding that taking part yourself in a rare, unexpected event raised mental flexibility more than just watching. [8]
A GPS-based study of daily life reported that on days when people visited a greater variety of places, their positive feelings were higher. [9] This does not prove cause and effect, but it suggests that a life going around the same places and a life going out to many places may not feel the same inside.
However, it has not been shown that learning is transferred so simply that riding a roller coaster makes you better at contract talks.
What mainly compounds is similar structures, procedures you can reuse, and the higher-level lesson that "even unknown things can sometimes be handled."
10. Sharing as you go adds one more loop to your experience
You can learn from experience alone.
But people who share while they do things get another loop.
do → observe → put into words → get other people's questions and reactions → think again
To share, you have to pick out again "what was interesting," "where my prediction was wrong," and "what the real point was."
A meta-analysis asked whether making teaching materials for others helps your own learning. It combined 23 papers and 62 comparisons and found a small but significant effect overall (0.17). [10]
Of course, you cannot say that social media posts or casual chat have the same effect as that school experiment.
Still, it makes sense that putting an experience into words shows the holes in your understanding.
And when others reply, "Why is that?" or "It was different for me," new ideas come in.
Sharing is not required for experience, but it can create a second learning loop: experience → words → reactions → new reading of it.
But if the reactions come only from a narrow group, they can strengthen a wrong belief. Sharing is an amplifier, not an automatic truth detector.
11. Not just "happy" or "meaningful," but a good life of "I've seen a lot"
When thinking about a good life, psychology long focused on the "happy life" and the "meaningful life."
Oishi and Westgate proposed a third axis: a life full of varied, interesting experiences that change how you see things. They call it a psychologically rich life. [11]
The point is not simply to collect lots of fun events.
What matters is having the way you saw the world shaken.
In an experiment using a picture that looks like different things depending on how you see it, the group that saw the picture rated psychological richness much higher than the control group (d = 1.38), while the difference in positive mood was small (d = .13). [11]
In other words,
"That was fun!" and "Wow, I never saw it that way" are not the same.
In two studies from 2024, people with higher psychological richness were more likely to think of a person's behavior as having several causes, and to see the whole picture including context and relationships. The main results mostly held even after accounting for personality traits. [12]
We still need to be careful about the direction of cause.
Maybe varied experiences build complex thinking. Maybe people who think in complex ways choose varied experiences. Both are possible.
Even so, a life of many experiences can be studied not just as a life with many events, but as a life with more ways of looking at the world.
A psychologically rich life can include experiences that were not comfortable. So you don't need to go looking for hardship, but it also isn't true that "one bad experience reduces the richness of your life."
12. The regrets that last tend to be about what you did not do
You often hear that "people on their deathbed regret what they did not do."
This needs a little scientific correction.
The famous internet "top regrets of the dying" list is not an established result from a large, representative end-of-life survey.
On the other hand, research on ordinary adults has long found that regrets about not acting tend to stay as time passes.
Gilovich and Medvec reported a time pattern: in the short term, regret over things you did tends to be stronger, but in the long term, regret over things you did not do tends to last. [13]
In six studies by Davidai and Gilovich, people had more regrets about falling short of who they wanted to be (their ideal self) than of who they felt they should be. Of the regrets participants named, 72% were about the ideal self and 28% about the duty self. When asked for the one biggest regret in life, 76% were on the ideal-self side. [14]
In a 2024 systematic review of 31 studies, having many regrets in life was linked to several signs of lower well-being, such as lower life satisfaction and depression symptoms. [15]
This is not an order to "do everything right now."
Be careful with anything dangerous, expensive, impossible to undo, or that involves other people.
But things that are actually low-cost, yet put on hold forever just because "I've never done it," may stay with you decades later as "I was curious, but I never did it."
You cannot bring regret to zero.
But you can avoid carelessly piling up a stock of "I wish I had."
13. In practice: small experiments and updating afterward, not courage
You don't have to do everything on impulse.
Here is a simple way to go about it.
1. Write down what you think will happen
Don't just write "embarrassing." Be specific.
- Will a staff member scold me?
- Will I lose money?
- Will I get hurt?
- Will it stay on my relationships or reputation?
2. Sort the possible damage
- Small damage you can undo right away
- Damage where money or things can be recovered, but trust is hard to win back
- Big damage, such as safety, health, the law, debt, housing, important contracts and shared money
Never treat the last group lightly by saying "it's for the experience."
3. If you can try it small, try it
If you can do it alone and a failure would cause little real harm, running a small experiment to get real data is very worthwhile.
If it clearly affects other people's time, money, life or trust, do the sharing and arranging you need before you start.
4. After you finish, compare your prediction with what happened
- What did I think would happen?
- What actually happened?
- Next time, what should I look up, and what can I skip?
If you do this, the experience does not just end at "I did it." It goes into your model for estimating things.
For the fork at a French restaurant, the conclusion is probably short.
I got it wrong. The food did not disappear. Nobody blew a whistle. Next.
Summary: Widening your life comes less from having no fear and more from knowing what to watch out for
The difference between people who act and people who stay stuck at "I'm curious, but I've never gone" is small after one try.
But when you repeat this:
do → see reality → fix your prediction → handle the next unknown more cheaply → do again
experience partly compounds.
If you add sharing on top, another loop runs too:
experience → words → other people's reactions → new reading
What grows is not just plain "nerve."
It is your resolution of the unknown.
You stay careful about what is truly dangerous.
You can treat small things as small things.
And decades later, when you look back on your life, you may have more to work with. You won't say "I was perfect the whole time." You will say,
"Well, I did a lot of things."
Getting one fork wrong does not end your life.
If anything, learning that "it doesn't end" makes it easier to start the next part of your life.
References (15)
- Johnco, C. J., Norberg, M., Wuthrich, V. M., & Rapee, R. M. (2025). Cognitive restructuring before exposure therapy or behavioral experiments? doi.org
- Sitzmann, T., & Yeo, G. (2013). A Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Within-Person Self-Efficacy Domain doi.org
- Webb, T. L., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change? doi.org
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement. )38002-1 doi.org
- Appel, H., Krasko, J., Luhmann, M., & Gerlach, A. L. (2024). Intolerance of uncertainty predicts indecisiveness and safety behavior in real-life decision making doi.org
- Appel, H., & Gerlach, A. L. (2025). Intolerance of uncertainty causally affects indecisiveness doi.org
- Kleine, A.-K., Schmitt, A., & Wisse, B. (2021). Students' career exploration: A meta-analysis doi.org
- Ritter, S. M., et al. (2012). Diversifying experiences enhance cognitive flexibility doi.org
- Heller, A. S., et al. (2020). Association between real-world experiential diversity and positive affect relates to hippocampal–striatal functional connectivity doi.org
- Ribosa, J., & Duran, D. (2022). Do students learn what they teach when generating teaching materials for others? doi.org
- Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning doi.org
- Oishi, S., Westgate, E., & Cha, Y. (2024). The cognitive complexity of a happy life, a meaningful life, and a psychologically rich life doi.org
- Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1994). The temporal pattern to the experience of regret doi.org
- Davidai, S., & Gilovich, T. (2018). The ideal road not taken doi.org
- Rutledge, J. A., Williams, J. D., & Barlow, M. A. (2024). The relationship between life regrets and well-being: a systematic review doi.org
