Top 5 regrets of the dying…No 2 will impact your midlife career today
Bronnie Ware, a Sydney-based, palliative care nurse spent 8 years caring for individuals at the end of their lives and wrote an article about her learnings during that period of her career.
She summarised the end-of-life wisdom offered by her patients into the 5 points below.
Her article was picked up by the global media and the full story has been crafted into a book. That book transformed Bronnie’s career and at the same time influenced the lives of many, including mine.
No 2: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”
My only focus today is on No2.
It surprised me that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE MEN who’d been interviewed in the last 3-12 weeks of their lives expressed this regret: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
These men were often octogenarians who had spent their lives as the sole bread-winner for their family.
Of course, the world for midlifers has changed greatly.
The interviewees were mostly octogenarians. I wonder if our Generation (Generation X) will have different regrets when we’ve been on this earth for 80+ years?
Men and women of our generation today have infinitely more choice about their careers than the previous generation. We also share more of the mortgage payments with a partner than in previous generations.
But has that freed us up to do less work?
Or more joyful work?
More fulfilling work?
Or does that mean that more of us have our noses to the grindstone?
I wonder when we midlifers are nearing the end of our lives whether “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” will remain one of our top-listed end-of-life regrets?
It’s not how hard you work…
Look, the’s nothing wrong with working hard…
In fact, some of us are just built to work hard - either led by either our personality type or by the training offered by our baby-boomer parents. I don’t know about you but I certainly get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of working hard, ESPECIALLY when I am working hard at something that matters.
When we work hard doing something that matters or something that we are brilliant at, it simply doesn’t drain the life out of us.
I bet you’ve invested many weeks/months/years working hard on something you either don't enjoy or are not that great? It’s exhausting. Boring. Stressful. Or just plain vanilla.
When we work on something that matters using skills and talents that we love using…
We feel more fulfilled.
We occasionally feel exhilarated..even joyful.
We feel like we could keep going for hours.
We often want to keep going for hours.
We feel more youthful and energised.
ALSO, crucially, there is more of us left over at the end of the day for the people we love in our lives who probably, well certainly…would like to see us feeling happier.
Win, win.
Working hard at something you don’t love or something that you are not great at for years or even decades appears to me to be such a waste of a life.
I have very high hopes that my fellow midlifers don’t feel as trapped in their “jobs” as the previous generation who had fewer career choices, less opportunities to re-train and less opportunities to share a mortgage with their partner.
The reality crunch
However, it appears that successful professional careers (here in UK at least) require 8-12 hour work days sometimes PLUS a commute.
Is that the same for you?
If all of us midlifers (GENERATION X) worked hard for 8-12 hours a day doing something we cared about/loved doing/were great at, we’d all have these wildly interesting careers and we might even be transforming the world during our work day…wouldn’t we?
As it happens, many of the patients in Bronnie’s experience also worked hard for 8-12 hours a day for 40+ years…but still wished they hadn’t.
They may not have had a choice…
BUT WE DO.
Don’t we?
If you’re doing work that doesn’t make you feel great, satisfied, joyful, energised 51%+ of the time, or if your work is draining the life out of your life and you want to work out the corner pieces of your happier-work jigsaw, book in for one of my (free) 30minute Light at the end of my tunnel calls.
It’s time!
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