One of my favorite movies is the Academy Award winner, The Bridge on the River Kwai. In this movie, the star, Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guiness) becomes so obsessed with his goals - build a great bridge and improve troop morale - that he completely forgets his mission - winning the war. At the end of the movie, he realizes that he has been building a fantastic bridge to support the wrong army and exclaims, "What have I done?"
Your life is your life. It is not my place to tell you how you should live it. I would just suggest that you ask yourself two challenging questions:
* What are the most important values in my life? Are my values reflected in the way I spend my time?
* What is my mission - as a human being? Am I ever becoming so focused on achieving my goals, that I forget this mission?
At the end of life, you don’t want to look back like Colonel Nicholson and ask, "What have I done?"
- Marshall Goldsmith
This Week's Question for Ask the Coach:
In your experience, what are the biggest regrets people have at the end of their careers? What do people wish they had learned sooner?
This is a great question. A wise person learns from experience. A wiser person learns from someone else’s experience. The best way to answer this question is to ask the people who actually have the experience.
My friend John Izzo is the author of a great new book - The Five Secrets You Must Discover before You Die. The book is based on 250 interviews he conducted with people from age 59-106 asking them to reflect back on their lives and careers. Though the people he interviewed ranged from a town barber to successful CEOs, the themes that emerged were clear. Here is some of what he learned about regrets and the things we wished we had learned sooner.
The first thing he learned is that people don’t regret their failures and that most people wished they had risked more. Most of us go through our careers fearing failure, but Izzo discovered that trying and failing is something we can deal with. The happiest people felt they had pursued their dreams and stretched themselves in their lives and careers. So we are more likely to regret having not tried for a dream than to have failed at it. This is particularly interesting because most of us think failure is about the worst thing that can happen to us but it turns out that not trying or playing it safe in our careers is what we should actually be worrying about.
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When I asked Izzo about his own regrets (being recently introduced to the over fifty club), he told me that his only regret mirrors what he heard from those he interviewed. "I look back and wish I had not been such a know-it-all earlier in my career. Instead of trying to prove how smart I was, I wish I had sought the advice of those who knew more than me." In his interviews, many people talked about the importance of learning and growing throughout your career and that the more we keep learning the more success we discover. "Basically these people never got stuck in a rut; they were always trying to learn from people smarter than themselves."
- What Will You Regret
