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What has been your biggest disappointment?
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
If you had only one day left to live, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid doing?
Death & what remains
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This exact question recurs in The Guardian's institutional Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Realising that success wasn't going to keep me happy all my life.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 January 2009 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 368 →
Gino D'Acampo
Italian-British celebrity chef and media personality
That Italy didn’t qualify for the World Cup this year.
Sebastian Coe
British athlete and politician
Not hearing the Ellington band live.
David Hasselhoff
American actor, singer, and television personality
That I wasn't Indiana Jones.
More from Mike Skinner
View profile →Original Pirate Material.
My brother was singing Yellow Submarine on stage with his class. I was singing along with them, showing off cos I knew all the words. The song ended suddenly and I was the only one in the whole hall who sang, 'We ...'
I would obviously be in a good place chemically, the synapses would be content. I would play with my kids. I don’t think I would have time to watch anything by Ingmar Bergman. Bergman would suddenly feel like not that good a director if I only had a few hours.
We used to have one of those gat guns that shot pellets. My friend pretty much had the thing at point-blank range to my temple. It popped out and completed its trajectory about a millimetre from my head.
When I was a child and I got a new toy.
Infinite money might allow me to achieve unbounded creativity.
More on failure & regret
- Who most deserves an apology from you, and why? 209 answers
- If you could edit your past, what would you change? 205 answers
- What is the worst thing anyone has said to you? 124 answers
- Which moment embarrassed you most? 124 answers
- How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? 74 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 38 answers
Also answered this
Esther Freud, Lemn Sissay, Kevin Pietersen, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Jacqui Smith, Keren Woodward
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Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject