Paapa Essiedu
British actor
To find as many moments to laugh as possible.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What happens when we die?
Death & what remains
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Healthy body and a healthy mind – very simple.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 January 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 137 →
Felicity Jones
British actress
Things, situations, people evolve constantly. Nothing is static.
One’s created sense of self is not who you are. The present moment is all we have.
Shinya Yamanaka
Stem cell biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2012
So I think failure is important in my career.
More from Jason Donovan
View profile →My relationship with drugs.
I haven’t grown up.
The inability to do things for myself.
Maybe in the 1990s, but I was so selfish at the time, I wouldn’t really have noticed what was going on.
My own biography! Being serious, there’s an Australian novel by Gregory Roberts called Shantaram that I didn’t read through.
I don’t know and I don’t really care – I’ll be dead.
More on time & hindsight
- When were you happiest? 577 answers
- What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore? 77 answers
- What scares you about getting older? 61 answers
- What is the best advice you have ever received? 28 answers
- If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say and why? 23 answers
- What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself? 22 answers
Also answered this
Derek Sivers, Shinya Yamanaka, Alex Hassell, Mark Bonnar, Robert Carlyle, Billy Crudup
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject