The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(23)

In his current job, Jason oversees workplace policies and programs for a retailer that employs more than a thousand associates, many of them young. He approaches the position with a greater sense of mission than he did back when he was a teenager peddling DVD players at Best Buy. “I help them navigate a lot of the basics in life. I’m not the only one with a less-than-great foundation,” he said.

He explains to the associates the importance of building their skills and connections and, yes, putting aside a little from every paycheck for the future. He tells them to plan, then tries to show them how—all while attempting to heed the advice himself.

“I’m very transparent about being forty-three and not having any money. I only wish more forty-three-year-olds had been honest with me [when I was younger],” he said. “I’m telling the cautionary tale of the grasshopper.”

All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With foundation regrets, the human need it lays bare is stability: we all require a basic infrastructure of educational, financial, and physical well-being that reduces psychological uncertainty and frees time and mental energy to pursue opportunity and meaning.

The lesson reaches back two and a half millennia. Think ahead. Do the work. Start now. Help yourself and others to become the ant.

    “When I was 13 I quit the saxophone because I thought it was too uncool to keep playing. Ten years later I realize oh how wrong I was with that assessment.”

Male, 23, California

//


“Thinking that working eighteen hours a day, six days a week, when I first started out would help me become successful. Instead, I destroyed my marriage and almost my health.”

Male, 68, Virginia

//


“I regret not getting married in front of my mother. My husband-to-be was in the military and we had to get married fast and in Oklahoma, which is far from Ohio. She was very ill and died a month later. I could have given her the happiness of seeing me married and I selfishly didn’t work to make that happen.”

Female, 51, Ohio





8.


    Boldness Regrets



One November evening in 1981, a twenty-two-year-old American named Bruce was on a train speeding northward through France when a young woman boarded at a Paris station and took the seat next to him. Bruce’s French was meager. But the woman’s English was decent, and they began talking.

Bruce had spent the past year in Europe. He’d lived with a family in Sweden, worked odd jobs, and hitchhiked across the continent. Now he was heading to Stockholm to catch a flight back to the United States. He was in a hurry; his Eurail pass expired the next day.

The woman, a brunette perhaps a year or two younger than he, was from Belgium. She’d been working in Paris as an au pair, and was traveling back to her small Belgian hometown for a short break.

The conversation came easily. Soon the two were laughing. Then they were playing hangman and doing crossword puzzles. Before long, they were holding hands.

“It was truly as if we had known each other our whole lives,” Bruce told me recently. “And I have never felt that way again.”

The train chugged on. The hours raced by. Just before midnight, as the train was approaching a station in Belgium, the woman stood up and told him, “I have to go.”

“I’ll come with you!” Bruce said.

“Oh, God,” she replied. “My father would kill me!”

They walked through the train aisle to the door. They kissed. Bruce madly scribbled his name and his parents’ Texas address on a slip of paper and handed it to her. The train doors parted. She stepped off. The doors closed.

“And I just stood there stunned,” said Bruce, who is now in his sixties and who asked that I not use his last name.

When he returned to his seat, his fellow passengers asked why he hadn’t left the train with his girlfriend.

“We just met!” Bruce told them. He didn’t even know her name. They hadn’t exchanged names, Bruce explained, because “it was almost as if we already knew.”

The following day, having made it to Stockholm, Bruce boarded a flight back to the United States.

Forty years later, when he completed the World Regret Survey, he relayed this tale and concluded, “I never saw her again, and I’ve always wished I stepped off that train.”



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If foundation regrets arise from the failure to plan ahead, work hard, follow through, and build a stable platform for life, boldness regrets are their counterpart. They arise from the failure to take full advantage of that platform—to use it as a springboard into a richer life. Sometimes boldness regrets emerge from an accumulation of decisions and indecisions; other times they erupt from a single moment. But whatever their origin, the question they present us is always the same: Play it safe or take a chance?

With boldness regrets, we choose to play it safe. That may relieve us at first. The change we’re contemplating may sound too big, too disruptive, too challenging—too hard. But eventually the choice distresses us with a counterfactual in which we were more daring and, consequently, more fulfilled.

Boldness regrets sound like this: If only I’d taken that risk.





SPEAKING UP AND SPEAKING OUT


Regrets of boldness often begin with a voice that isn’t heard. Zach Hasselbarth, a thirty-two-year-old consumer lending manager in Connecticut, offered this to the World Regret Survey: