• not having enough courage in your life
• not taking enough risks and chances
• little things in life - love, friends, family - and not so much about big things - career, money, reputation
• not being happy when you had all the time and chance in the universe
• not so much about being at work

right?

A palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, watched many dying people who shared their regrets when they knew their end was near and wrote a memoir,  recollecting how these regrets of the dying people she cared for has transformed her own life. According to her, these are the most common five regrets:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.  This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.   
• *I wish I didn’t work so hard. * This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence. 
• *I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. * Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result. 
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.  Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying. 
• *I wish that I had let myself be happier. * This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

I keep looking for meaning, but all I’ve found so far is that in order to be at peace with the present, we must be at peace with the past, because the present is a product of the past. Accept. Accept. Accept. Learn to love the present moment. What happened, happened. It’s difficult to understand the big picture when our lives are mere brush strokes on the canvas of reality. Trusting that it all fits together to form something beautiful is the purest form of faith. Anything else is a dangerous distraction. No contracts with God, no expectations of reward, just trust.

On a more practical level, what matters most in our day-to-day lives is that we’re good to ourselves and to each other. It’s actually not possible to only do one or the other – we must do both or neither, but that’s a topic for another time. Sometimes, when I write about startups or other interests of mine, I worry that perhaps I’m communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it’s important to remember that it’s all just a game. What’s most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we “win”, but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing. This doesn’t mean that we can’t push ourselves or stretch our own limits. Those things can be very healthy, but only when done for their own sake. Ultimately, the people who learn to love what they do who will be the ones who accomplish the most anyway. Those who push only for the sake of some future reward, or to avoid failure, very often burn out, sometimes tragically. Please don’t do that.

Please be good to each other, and your self.

 ~ Paul Buchheit (Source: http://j.mp/ypTfLK)

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
~ from “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

• Is it better to be a far-ranging generalist or to take the path of the concentrated specialist?- i.e. Is it better to be a fox or a hedgehog?- Or Is it better to be part hedgehog and part fox?

The Story aka What’s this all about?

In Isaiah Berlin’s best known essay , he distinguishes between two archetypes: the hedgehog and the fox. **“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows but one.” **

*There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’…[T]aken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle…The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes. —Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 1953 *

The fox is the generalist, who moves from domain to domain with ease and agility,examining large surface areas, covering wide spaces; the hedgehog is the specialist, who slowly and meticulously delves deeply into the nature of a single domain, uncovering secrets that lie beneath.** **

So who would you want to be?

A Hedgehog, who have a single big idea or explanation, or a Fox, which looks for a lot of intersecting causes?

Jim Collins, the good to great fame, says: “The fox is complex; the hedgehog simple. And the hedgehog wins.”

But I also have a different opinion.

It seems that, by and large, the foxes do better at predicting what’s to come, except once in a while when the steadfast hedgehogs see something really important, and don’t get distracted, no matter what.

**So why is this something I have been thinking about? **

for all the obvious reasons - personal and professional.

What do you think?