Top 5 Regrets of the Dying (don_t make these)

Imagine you sitting in a room reflecting on your entire life. The highs, the lows, every twist and turn. What if it suddenly hits you there were things you regret not doing? After all, it's been said at the end of your life, you don't regret what you did, you regret what you didn't do. The reality is everyday souls leave this world, but they don't just leave behind profound insights that if we listen to, can teach you and I, while we still have life, a bit more on how to live. And so in this video, we're talking about the regrets. So you don't have to come up with them. You can learn from thousands of people who came before you looking back on their life. Hey, what do you regret? Some context before we get into the five regrets of the dying. This was first introduced by Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware. She worked with terminally ill patients, patients that had three months left to live, six months left to live a year left. And she went in and asked them, looking back on your entire life, what do you regret not doing? And what she gathered were thousands of these responses. And she would categorize them into five categories and publish them in a blog post that went absolutely viral. When I first heard these back 2015, they had a really profound impact on me. You look at one of these regrets and it helps put things in perspective. In this video, we're going to walk through all five. I'll give you a bit of my interpretation of it and how you can apply it in your life. Regrets number one, I wish I had let myself be happier. Now notice something, let myself be happier. It's been said that happiness is the brief space in between your changing desires. Happiness is not about what you get. It's a choice that you can make. And because if you don't, you'll get caught up in this bling treadmill where it's just a belt spinning under you, chasing the next material thing. Or some people, you know, it's, if I have a hundred thousand in the bank, then I can feel satisfied and secure. Well, no, that didn't make me feel that way. 500, a million, 2 million, 10 million, and it never ends. Now it's also being very cautious that there's things that take away from your happiness. Like it is very hard to let yourself be happy if you don't sleep right. If you're not fueling yourself with the right nutrition, if you're not moving, you ever had a house plant and maybe you weren't the best plant parent, it kind of slowly started withering away. And after like a week or two, you look at it and you're like, dude, I forgot to water the thing. I'm such a bad plant dad. And then what happens? Maybe you take out some water and you start nurturing it. You start putting it in better sunlight through your window. That plant that was on the brink of like death and not looking good at all comes back to life. I think that we're kind of the same way. You can be in a bad spot, but man, if you start taking care of yourself and treating yourself like you would treat a friend and giving yourself the right nutrition, the right sleep, the right environment, watch yourself start to come back to life. You know, the times in my life I've felt extremely depressed. I look back and I'm like, dude, no wonder you were depressed. You were playing Fortnite for hours on end. You were drinking. You weren't sleeping. You were smoking. What did you think was going to happen? Give yourself the right nutrients. Give yourself the right environment to flourish. And it's not easy because it takes a lot of effort to just feel normal. But you realize that it's the only path and that happiness is a byproduct of doing all of those things. So this regret really slapped me in the face that happiness is a choice, yet we also need the right environment to come alive and feel good. Regrets number two. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Human beings are social creatures. We need others around us. For another video, I was researching this and loneliness, according to the CDC, increased people's risk of premature death as much as smoking, obesity, and being physically inactive. From just being socially isolated and lonely, having like no friends, it was a 50% plus increase in dementia. Now I'll be honest, this one hits me hard because I don't think I was the best at staying in touch with friends. I've kind of had packs of friends throughout my life. Like I went to high school, I had this little pack. And then I went to a college and I had this other pack. And then I had the band, which is a tight pack. And now I'm in Scottsdale and I have this other pack. I said pack like 20 times. Pack it up, baby. If I was looking back at what I could have done a little different, in my 20s, it would probably be staying in touch with friends and just being there for them. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it seems like there's this myth of where life is supposed to be one giant friends episode, where you have your friends all around you 24 seven, every single day, you're just hanging out. And the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that quality matters more than quantity. Like if you have two or three close friends that are like your ride or dies, that's going to feel you way better than having like 20, 30 superficial friends in my experience. Now, maybe you're wired for more of an extroverted, like more is better approach and just energy from everyone and more power to you. I don't think there's a right or wrong here. I look at some of the people around me, like my girlfriend and how close she is and how she stayed in touch with her friends. Not that I have like these deep, intense regrets, but it's made me more aware that friendships are a two way street. And if you don't nurture it on your end and you don't go first reaching out to people, some people you grow up with and some people you grow out of. And that's just how life works. Number three, I'd wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. There's a saying, what you don't express, you suppress. And it's natural to want to suppress down your negative feelings. But the analogy I would use here is like a trash can. You throw things in it, it starts filling up. And then what do most of us do? We take like a paper towel or a cardboard box and we just push down the trash so we can get that little extra room on the top before taking it out. But if you never take out the trash, there's only so much suppressing you can do before it's going to stink up your whole house. It's natural to do that with your emotions. You push them down deeper and deeper until eventually there reaches a point of where they start to bubble over. And this might show up in the form of projections to your partner, to your friends, to your family, to your coworkers, where you just snap all of a sudden. And it gets to a point and you're like, dude, I don't even know where that came from. I'm so sorry. It might show up in terms of judgments, your self-talk about yourself, about others. What you don't express, you suppress down. So finding ways to express your feelings on this regret. And I don't just mean like being this emotionally loose person who's just emoting everywhere and has no control over their feelings and emotions. I think that's equally as dangerous. There's a sweet spot in where expressing your feelings doesn't necessarily mean to other people. It can mean to yourself through things like processing them in letting go, in meditation, in opening up a journal and just writing for 20 minutes about what you're feeling. Don't censor yourself. Just let it rip. Speaking with a coach, a therapist, someone who can guide you through these. There's a great book, The Body Keeps the Score, about how suppressing your emotions or even traumas at a much deeper level can show up as physical symptoms in your body. You know, you have back pain all of a sudden and then you go in, you do some inner work, you release all these traumas and oh, the back pain goes away. People who have been holding on to like a resentment for 10, 20 years develop an illness because of it. So maybe this is asking yourself, what do I need to express? What am I suppressing? You might just be surprised at what you find. Number four, I wish I'd have the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected. My best friend was my roommate in college of three years and he came from a Chinese family and he would joke that his parents were like, you can be anything you want as long as it's a doctor or a lawyer. That story is not uncommon against kids in their early 20s going to college. We're trying to please parents or please society or fit in and we don't really go for what we want. We go to because we think that's the way it's supposed to be done. Maybe you felt this in your life, either unsupportive family, unsupportive friends. You want to be an artist. You want to be a musician. You want to be an entrepreneur. And then these people over here are like, dude, you got to be realistic. How is that going to pay the bills? Maybe you should get a career. And then you feel this pressure throughout your 20s. Like, dude, did I mess up going for this? Like everyone else around me is making 50, 60, a hundred thousand dollars a year. And I'm still working an entry level job trying to make this entrepreneurial thing work. Am I the loser? And we can fall into a trap of where we conform and we push aside and we suppress our dreams and we suppress what we really want to do so we can pursue the path that's socially accepted. Joseph Campbell has a quote, I'm paraphrasing. He says, where there is a path carved out in the forest, it's not your path. And that the hero's journey that you're on is about you forging your own path through the tree line, through the grass and carving out a life for yourself. And that's how you become fulfilled. I'm not saying you have to reinvent the wheel. I'm not saying you have to quit your job overnight, but how can you live a life true to yourself on your terms instead of always just looking for other people and places and things and society and norms to be like, is this correct? Can I do this? Do I have permission to do this? That's conditioned in us from childhood. You grow up, you look to your parents, they tell you what to do. You don't want to disappoint them, right? You go to school, you don't want to disappoint your teacher. You go to your job, you don't want to disappoint your boss. And that childlike behavior is ingrained in us. And we get to our 20s and 30s. And we're still, if we don't snap out of this, looking for other people as reference points for what should I do with my life. Now, people hear this about going for it and carving your own path and living true to yourself. Not all the time, but some people have a tendency to put it down like, Clark, why are you telling people to go for their dream? Why are you telling people to like, start a business? Or like, if they want to be a musician, go for it. Don't you know the chance of failure is this percentage and survivorship bias at the top? Whatever it is, people defend not going for your dreams for their life. That's just the crowd screaming at you, it's not going to work out because they didn't go for it. Here's a little secret I've found about going for your dreams. It's not even about achieving your dream. It's about taking the journey and at the end of your life, you still feel good that you went for it and you had a taste of it. Even if the result didn't work out, didn't hit, you almost transmute it into something else. Take someone who wanted to be a professional NBA player or an athlete, right? If you played a sport, maybe that was your dream. Well, the guy who gets to like 30 or 40 years old and he didn't go big, he didn't go pro, is he a failure? If that person coaches his son's basketball team or is able to be a coach and level people up that do go pro, he's still on purpose, it's just transformed. When you live a life authentically for you, not the one others expect, it is always a win because even if you don't get the result, it's still about who you become along the way. Regrets, number five. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Now, one interpretation of that regret would be, great, now I can set my life up to prioritize less work at the office. Or great, now I can rest more and I don't have to worry about work. But I disagree. I think there's a massive difference between work and struggle. And how most people view work is a struggle. Things they don't want to do, people they don't want to be around, jobs they don't want to work, it's a struggle, it's a grind. You hear that term, just listen to it. You go up to someone and say, hey, how are you? I'm grinding. You know what grinding is? It's a salt shaker where you have kernels of salt and you literally crank it down till you grind the salt to the smallest piece, it's almost invisible. That's what grinding is to yourself. It's grinding yourself down. That doesn't sound fun to me. That's a struggle. And yeah, absolutely, you shouldn't do that. Most people, I think their work is a struggle, unfortunately. And so I think what this regret, if I interpreted it, would be saying is not never work hard, because I think work is a gift. I think you need work, rest, and play. And if you have any one of those out of balance, you're going to wish you had the other one. Most people's view on work is to be avoided. But what if you had a job? What if you had work that you didn't want to escape from? Work that fulfilled you? You know, it's easy in this hustle culture world where the answer is always just a couple hours of work away. If you want more money, just have a side hustle and on the weekends, you know, drive Uber or DoorDash or whatever side hustle and work more hours for dollars. Personal story, I followed that in my 20s. And look, I benefited a lot from the hustle culture. I just flat out did. But what I didn't expect is early on when I would work really, really, really, really hard and I got a result, whether it was a certain goal or a certain metric, what I experienced in that moment wasn't what I thought I would. I thought I was going to hit 50,000 subscribers or a million views or whatever. And it was going to be this big joy, like a sense of, yes, I did it accomplishment. But I noticed that when my energy was from that hustle mode, that grind mode, what I experienced at the end wasn't joy. It was a feeling of relief. That's very different. It was relief that, oh, man, that didn't fail. It wasn't like pride of, I did it. It was awesome because it was coming from a different energy. So there's a huge difference. And I think work, if it's done wrong and it's from a hustle culture, kind of a negative, desperate energy, it's like trying to pull yourself metaphorically from underwater above for your next breath of oxygen. And then you have to go back down again and work, work, work. And then you come up and you get that brief sense of relief at the top. And then you got to go back to holding your breath. So I think there's another answer to this. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. If I had an interpretation, it would be, I wish I had a job that didn't require work as a struggle. I wish I had a job that I wasn't just relieved from when I wasn't doing it. I wish I had a job that made me feel excited, that allowed me to be on purpose, that allowed me to be authentic. A thought, what's interesting about those regrets is, was building a legacy on there? Was getting my name on a library or a statue named after me? Man, I regret not having that library. I regret not having 10,000 likes on that Instagram post. My dropshipping store didn't take off, man. No. And so I think these regrets put things in perspective, perspective that you and I probably don't have because these come from people who were on their way out. And there's a lot we can learn from their hundred years of living. Because remember, at the end of your life, you don't regret what you did. You will regret what you didn't do. If you want to create the 2.0 you, I'll link down below to our metamorphic program where you can work with myself and my team closely and create the 2.0 you in under 10 weeks. Free call to learn more, no pressure, but it's there for those of you who are interested. I'll link up right here, the five regrets I wish I knew in my twenties. Now, these are things that if you're in your twenties are more specific to that 20 to 30 range for you, I'll link it up right here. It's a perfect follow-up to this video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.