Regrets in Life and Business

Regrets in life | BCBusiness
If your regrets are piling up, it’s time to change before it’s too late.

Regrets can be good for you if you study them and take corrective action before it’s too late.

When a birthday passes, a person tends to take a moment or two to perform reviews on life so far. At least I hope they do, because personal reflection is probably one of the greatest gifts given to humans.  

When my birthday recently came and went (thanks for the good wishes to those who contacted me on various forms of social media) I managed to get in a bit of rumination.

Yes, even journosaurs of – ahem – advanced age are capable of reflection on occasion. I guess being a writer helps. In a sense, it’s the nature of writers, business or otherwise, to reflect and chew on things a bit more, probably because we think more about people and emotional issues than numbers.

Part of reflection is a mental review of plans you have made, that rough map in your head that you probably designed some time ago and tend to follow most of the time.

But another part of mental review is regret. For doing or not doing something. For hurting or ignoring people. For not following the path you wanted to follow because it was easier to follow the same one everyone else was following.

But, in my opinion, regret has its uses, and has therefore been given a bad rap. It’s not considered useful – i.e. the “no regrets” culture – or, sometimes, even healthy, as in when people dwell morbidly on the past and ignore the future. Overall, society would prefer that you not have regrets; it might weaken your resolve to work harder or earn more or chase all those other trappings of success.

But there is one time when there’s no stopping regret – when you’re dying. Social scientists have studied this life passage and discovered that, as people near death, they begin to regret some things more and more.

Usually, the top regret by most people is that they didn’t live the life they wanted to, compromised too much so that they could get along. No surprise there. Most people have to give up some dreams in their life in order to get ahead. But each compromise takes you further from the path you originally set for yourself.

Another study in England showed that the second most common regret of the dying is a wish that they hadn’t “worked so hard” and ignored other good things in life. This appeared to be even more common when people viewed work as being on a treadmill, something they did to make money, which left them little time to spend with children or companions and sapped the joy from their lives. So, before it’s too late, perhaps we should all take the occasional moment to look at our own regrets. Even if we’re not dying, we probably have a few. Our fortune is that we still have time to do something about it.  

If today was the last day of your life, what would you have done differently?