The decision that must be made in order not to regret life in 30 years

"The definition of hell:" The person you have become, on your last day on earth, will meet a person you could become. "
- Author unknown

Leaving your parental home, you leave behind 93% of the time you spend communicating with your parents (if they live long enough).

And vice versa: after the children leave you, you will see them only a few times a year.
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We have only 80,000 hours on a career, and if we try our best we can become a professional in only one or two areas.

Tim Urban very briefly depicted the brevity of life.


Source: The Tail End By Wait But Why

Each diamond represents one year: one winter with sledding and snowmen, one blooming spring, one summer with weary beach blight, one autumn with rainbow leaves - one revolution of the Earth around the Sun.

I remember in high school I tried to understand what it was like to have children. Now two pranksters of seven and nine years old are running around my house. And after 18 years, I will have less than half the time allotted for my professional activity, and the children will go to an independent life. Perhaps they, like me now, will even reflect on the transience of life.

Every second, minute, every hour, day and every year are precious!

And this brings us to the most important and always relevant issue ...

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How should you live NOW so that you don’t regret living on your deathbed?

Well spent time. (Reuters / Susana Vera)

One of the most brilliant answers to this question I heard from the world famous Harvard professor in his speech at the TED conference, which was called “The Strategy of Life ”. Clayton Christensen defeated cancer (he had follicular lymphoma - a similar disease claimed the life of his father), which made him think seriously, and the result of this reflection was this presentation. In particular, he talks about people who have achieved a lot.

Here is the most inspiring part:

“In 1979, I graduated from the MBA program at Harvard ... When we met with fellow students five years later, everyone had a completely happy life: the majority were in a successful marriage ... and they had a successful career. But after 10, 15, 20, and then 25 years after graduation, my friends no longer seemed so satisfied with their lives. Many of them divorced, the former spouses married again and got married, and the children grew up on the other coast of the country and almost did not communicate with them.

And I am sure that none of the fellow students after graduating from the business school had ever planned to divorce, and did not want the children to hate him, and someone else would take care of their upbringing. However, most classmates life still went the way they never wanted.

It turns out that the reason why this happened is the same mechanism - the desire for achievement, success. We all strive to achieve something here. And when we have an extra bit of energy or half an hour of time, we unconsciously give them to those occupations that provide direct evidence of at least some success. In this case, a career gives us the most direct evidence that we achieve something: we make a sale, deliver the goods, complete the presentation, close the deal, go up, get paid. Work gives us a direct feeling of success - and the time invested in family, on the contrary, does not pay off for a very long time. Moreover, our children do not behave in the best way. And only 20 years later, having overcome a tremendous path, you can proudly look at your offspring and say: “We raised beautiful children!” But in everyday life, when we give time to communicate with our families, children and spouses, this achievement does not loom before your eyes. Therefore, people who want to live happily (we, for example) and understand that the most profound source of happiness in life is family, end up sacrificing their time, their energy and their talents for the sake of what they absolutely did not want. ”

Further, Christensen continues to talk about how the reappraisal of short-term successes relates to his well-known theory of disruptive innovation :

“Successful companies sometimes fail, and the reason for this is that they invest in what gives the most immediate, tangible evidence of success. They have such a short-term perspective because these companies are managed by people like you and me [achievement-oriented]. ”

Christensen applies this theory to the breakup of a family and business failures, but I would say that it can be spread even more widely. Here are some examples ...

The main causes of premature death in the United States are associated with a harmful lifestyle . Nobody wants to die “prematurely”, but at the same time, many people cannot switch to a healthy diet and do physical exercises every day - because this is exactly what is not very motivating in the short term.

No one plans to become unemployed or lose demand as an expert, but many do not want to devote time to study purposefully every day — after all, this does not give an instant sense of success.

No one plans to live in constant nervous tension, but at the same time games and rest can seem like a waste of time.

So how to stop thinking in the short term, learn to see long-term and thus achieve the desired results?

The solution is to understand the key principle of “promising activities” that have been used and enjoyed by successful people, such as Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey, Ray Dalio, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison.

The effectiveness of the principle of perspective occupations

I used the term “promising activities” in the article Why successful people spend 10 hours a week on “promising activities” , where classes are called so that pay off in the long term, but not always in the short term.



Examples include reading , experimenting , walking, a short dream, keeping a diary and talking. Interestingly, many of the people who achieved success constantly spent a lot of time on these activities. Warren Buffett spent 80% of his time reading and thinking throughout his career. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs follow the five-hour rule — giving training at least five hours a week. It is well known that Einstein regularly from the difficult tasks in physics moved to playing the violin. His son described it this way : “When the father realized that he had come to the end of a task, or had difficulties in his work, he turned to music, and usually it helped to solve all the difficulties.”

Independently making his billionth state fortune, Ray Dalyo, manager of the world's largest hedge fund, perfectly explains the possibilities of such an approach in his new book Principles :

“Understanding the consequences of a higher level on which nature works, I came to the conclusion that people who overestimate the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second, third, etc. orders on their goals rarely achieve the desired goals. This is because the first-order consequences often have the opposite “second-order” effects, which leads to serious mistakes in the decision-making process. For example, the primary effects of exercise (pain and loss of time) are usually considered undesirable, and minor consequences (good health and attractive appearance) are desirable. Likewise with food: tasty food often hurts us, and vice versa.

Often, the first-order consequences are temptations that cause us to lose what we really want, and sometimes they become obstacles to achieving what we want: as if nature throws up our choice with a trick that has both of these effects and punishes those who makes decisions only on the basis of the consequences of the first order.

And vice versa: people who choose what they really need, avoid temptations and overcome the pain that removes them from the desired, rather succeed in life. ”

Conclusion: understanding and using the principle of "promising activities", we can increase the likelihood that we will live without regrets.

Start spending time on prospective activities.

It is difficult to take time for promising activities, because they cause contradictory feelings: people have evolved to think about food and sex in the short term. Evolution did not teach us to think about the intricacies of how our decisions today can respond 30 years later. Zat Rana (Zat Rana) perfectly grasped the essence : “Our feelings about something at the moment are not always the best way to predict how we will relate to this after some time. The fact is that we are focused on the present day, and tomorrow may seem to us not the most important problem. ”

My experience tells me that the best way to find time for promising studies is to make the hours allocated to them inviolable, non-negotiable. Here the logic will not help: it will ALWAYS seem that there is something more relevant and important than, for example, purposeful training - therefore, you need to insert it into your schedule and put it into habit.


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