This really struck me. The list so simple and so easily managed. Yet most of us don't have the sort of guide or insights we need to avoid these future regrets.
I have said often that the key objective of financial planning is to avoid future regret, and these are those regrets.
No-one regrets paying tax at the end, or that their investment performance wasn't what it could have been, they regret not having lived the life they could have.
And our work with you aims to redress the balance and make sure gratitude is what you experience, not regret.
An excerpt from the excellent book “The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
“Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse who served patients for the final weeks of their lives, wrote a moving article called “Regrets of the Dying.”
She shared the five most common regrets of the people she had come to know:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. (“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.”)
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. (“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others.”)
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. (“Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.”)
It is striking how many of the principles we’ve encountered would serve as antidotes to those common regrets:
1. Stretching ourselves to discover our reach;
2. Being intentional about creating peaks (or Perfect Moments, in Eugene O’Kelly’s phrasing) in our personal lives;
3. Practicing courage by speaking honestly - and seeking partners who are responsive to us in the first place;
4. The value of connection (and the difficulty of creating peaks);
5. Creating moments of elevation and breaking the script to move beyond old patterns and habits.
Ware’s patients were people who had let the demands of the present interfere with their hopes for the future.
In life, we can work so hard to get the kinks out that we forget to put the peaks in.”