These days actor Terry Crews is best known for his work on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and his courageous public stance against sexual harassment. But Crews wasn't always a successful performer and advocate for respect and decency. Back in 1986 he was just the starting center for his high school basketball team in Flint, Michigan when they faced regional rivals in the a high stakes district final.

Crews' everyday past as a student athlete might not sound like it's connected to his current success, but as he told Tim Ferriss in an illuminating recent interview, his experience in that game taught him much of what he knows about facing down the fear of failure and avoiding regret.

When you shoot and miss...

The game, Crew relates, was not going as planned. "We were expected to trounce them, but they tried something we'd never seen before. They didn't play. They would bring the ball down the court and just pass it back and forth at the top of the key. There was no shot clock, so they did this forever," he relates.

Crews and his teammates were understandably frustrated by this attempt to "park the bus" (as European soccer fans say), and by final seconds of the match the opposing team was up 47-45. Crews decided to do something dramatic to turn the game around:

One of their players made a mistake and tried a long pass cross court and I stole the ball. I desperately dribbled the entire length of the court . . . 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . for our only chance to win. I missed. Their fans go crazy, as it was the biggest upset of the year, and I collapse in a heap, thinking my life is over.

Things didn't get immediately better for Crews following this public humiliation. His coach told him he had no business taking the shot and should have passed to the school's star player in front of the whole team. His failure was even covered by the local paper.

"I was beyond crushed," Crews reports.

... just tell yourself this.

It's the sort of searing high school experience that could make someone shy away from going out on a limb and risking failure in pursuit of their dreams for a long time after, but after licking his wounds for a few days, Crews found a way not only to bounce back from his humiliation, but also to teach himself (and, via the Ferriss interview, all of us) a life-changing lesson in resilience.

"A few days later, as the fog of failure began to lift, I remember having a rare time alone in my room (I usually shared it with my brother). As I sat in the silence, another thought pierced through my sadness," he tells Ferriss.

This insight was enough to completely change Crews's perspective on his specific on-court disaster and on risking failure in general. What was it?

"I took the shot."

"Hey, when all the chips were on the line, you didn't leave your future up to others, YOU TOOK YOUR SHOT," Crews told himself. Those simple words were "invigorating, even exciting," he explains. "Instantly I felt free and in control. I knew from then on that I could have the courage to fail on my own terms. From that moment, I decided that if I was going to succeed or fail, it was going to be up to me. I was changed forever."

Science says you won't regret taking your shot.

Crews' revelation was only four little words, but it actually captures a powerful truth about regret that science confirms: we regret the shots we were too scared to take much more than we regret those we missed. Or, in other words, looking forward, failure seems more terrifying than quietly limiting our dreams, but research shows that, when we look back, lack of courage will bother us much more than crashing and burning in public.

Remember that next time you're deciding whether to dare to try for whatever type of buzzer beater populates your fantasies or whether you should simply pass that dream off to someone you imagine has more star potential.