Regrets Aren’t a Bad Thing
Have you ever asked anyone whether they have regrets? The most common answer is a forceful: “I never have regrets; I did what I did and don’t dwell on the past.”
I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, at least not fully. Yes, living in the past is useless if you get stuck in it, but regrets can help us uncover what we really value or want.
For example, if you let yourself feel the sadness at having lost friendships through neglect, being too busy to find time to hang out, you might be motivated to take “friend-time” today.
So yes, let’s not live in regret but let’s not push them away without contemplating what we can learn from them. Isn’t that the point of making mistakes?
We Could Be Happy If We Didn’t Have to Work
The freedom to get up when we want, do what we want. Not to have to worry about getting ahead, or even keeping our jobs or our clients. Not having to solve problems all the time.
Can’t you feel the relief? No wonder the hammock swimming from the tree is such a frequent setting for ads.
But is it really true that people who don’t have to work are happier? To make it a fair comparison, you can’t look only at retired people but also at people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are, as they say, independently wealthy because of inheritance, marriage, or prior lucrative businesses (or even lottery winners, but that’s a story in its own).
And guess what: once a basic lifestyle has been secure, there is little correlation between wealth and happiness.
Isn’t that counter intuitive? We’ve all said “money doesn’t create happiness” but the vast majority of us deep down really thought: “But I’d be different. Give me the money to free me from my rat race and I’ll have it made.”
We want the freedom to play, create, and have flexibility. The trouble is, many of us forget what we wanted to have money do for us in the first place. We might travel, buy nice things and entertain ourselves, but when we take time to reflect on it, our life feels rather aimless.
In his best seller book, “The 4-Hour Workweek” Tim Ferris says that when he goes on one of his extended stays in a foreign country, he always creates for himself both a physical and an intellectual project. His life purpose seems to be to challenge himself and to learn.
That sums up rather well the psyche of the human spirit.
And you know, we can do that even if we still have to work.
Other People’s Success
The last sentence on last week’s post caused a reaction: I was listing a few problems faced by affluent children, and said that it was another example of how success can cause problems if it’s not managed properly. But it was their parents (or earlier generations) that were successful, so some thought it wasn’t a good example of a success trap.
True enough; but there are similarities in the corporate world. For example, what if you got transferred to a division that has been the star performer for years; don’t you think you’d be affected by that success even if you didn’t personally contribute to it?
Managers in those circumstances feel the pressure of having to keep up the same rate of performance or be branded as the ones who broke the winning record.
What if you found that the high performance was attained at the expense of long term financial health and/or practices detrimental to the environment or employees’ well being? What if these practices could continue for a few years yet before things start unraveling, giving you enough time to get a big promotion?
You’d have important decisions to make, decisions that would impact you personally, and all caused by other people’s success.
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