The regret of Watching someone else do your thing
Readtime: 3 minutes
There's a fear that's worse than the fear of failure, and most people don't talk about it.
It's the fear of watching someone else do the thing you wanted to do.
Failure is recoverable. You can learn from it and turn it into a story about how you got a bit better at something. Regret is much harder to deal with.
When you try something and it doesn't work, there are always explanations. Things like bad timing, the wrong market, or maybe it wasn’t quite right for you anyway.
But when someone else succeeds at the thing you didn’t do, those explanations evaporate.
You can't say it wasn't possible, because it obviously is. You can't say the timing was wrong, because someone else clearly got it right.
The stories that we build up about why we didn't do something very often don’t hold.
The cost we don't count
We normally weigh the cost of doing things much more carefully than the cost of not doing them. The cost of acting is obvious – money spent, time taken, and our ego on the line. Whereas the immediate cost of not acting is invisible, so we ignore it.
Jeff Bezos has talked about this. When he was deciding whether to leave a comfortable hedge fund job to start Amazon, he imagined himself at 80, looking back. He realised the regret of not having tried would have been far worse than the regret of trying and failing.
When you see someone else do the thing you’d like to have done it confirms to you that it was possible all along. That it could have been you.
People often call that feeling jealousy, but I'm not sure jealousy quite captures it. The sting comes from what their success forces you to face about your own choices. It makes your cost of inaction very visible, and that's why it hurts.
Two pre-mortems, not one
Here's something worth trying:
Imagine yourself in a few years, watching someone else do the thing you’re currently thinking about. Actually picture it. The version of them in a senior role, or in a news article, or running their own company. What does it feel like?
That's the piece of data most of us are missing when we weigh up whether to make the change we’ve been thinking about.
We tend to run one pre-mortem when we're considering doing something hard. We imagine we tried, and it didn't work, and we ask whether we could live with that.
The second pre-mortem is the one we skip. Imagine you didn't try, and then you watched someone else do it instead. How would that feel?
The version of you in a few years’ time probably already knows what they wish you'd done.
The question is whether you're going to listen.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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