Paul Winkler: Welcome. This is “The Investor Coaching Show.” I’m Paul Winkler, talking about money and investing. Here this hour with me is Mr. Jim Wood.
Jim Wood: Good day, sir.
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
PW: Jim, I know that you have some things that you want to talk about. What’s going on in your world?
JW: Well, this is right up your alley in terms of some of the psychology stuff. It’s a really good article. From the Best Interest blog, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.”
We talk a lot about planning and money and numbers and things like that, but sometimes people approach retirement without thinking through the happiness part. They’re just thinking about, “I need X amount of dollars, I need to do this. I need to have this covered,” and stuff like that.
But what do I need to do to make myself happy? And so this article is “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,” from people that went through life and thought, If I could have done something differently, this is what maybe I would’ve paid attention to.
PW: I love that topic. I actually did a college commencement one time for one of the local colleges, and that was the topic. I had just read an article that was like this one, and I said, “What if I do something like that? But I gear it toward college students so that they can avoid regrets?” And the guy who asked me to speak said, “I love it. Come out and do that.”
It was fun because I remember people coming up to me afterward with notes all over their programs on stuff that I had talked about. I’m curious what these people say. What did they come up with?
JW: Fantastic. This article was referencing Australian nurse Bronnie Ware, who worked in palliative care easing the pain of the dying. And this list was the top five regrets of the dying.
It’s traveled far and wide over the internet, because it’s a list that really is good to think about.
What kind of things should I be thinking about to make those later years happy?
PW: Integrity versus despair, as Erik Erikson actually put it. That’s the final stage of the eight stages.
I Wish I Had the Courage to Live a Life True to Myself
JW: The first one: “I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
PW: That’s good. Because as we often talk about, you’re playing to ghosts. That’s what we call that.
In other words, what happens is we have people—mom, dad, sisters, relatives, neighbors— who all have expectations, and they go, “You know what I can see you doing one day? I can see you doing blank, and I can see you going in and becoming this.”
Then what happens is, as a kid, you don’t have the ability to reject that. You take it on as, “Oh, I better do this or there are going to be a lot of disappointed people.”
JW: I know in that group that you just mentioned is your spouse.
PW: Absolutely.
JW: I know there’s a lot of us, myself included, that are people pleasers. Part of our makeup is wanting to make other people happy, other people like us, and stuff like that. A lot of times, that can really derail something that might make you happy because you’re living at the expense of somebody else’s wishes who you’re trying to make happy.
PW: And you’re miserable. What you end up doing is making other people miserable thinking, I am fulfilling their wishes. It is funny to think about that.
That was the first one. Trying to live a life based on others’ expectations. I guess we could put it like that.
In essence, that means not necessarily finding your gifting. Now that can be a double-edged sword because sometimes people go after their passion.
One of my recent guests came on the show, and he was talking about building a business. He was talking about the problems with pursuing your passion. I liked what he said.
He said, “Pursue your gifts and do what you do well. Find the things you’re good at and then apply them. And what will happen is what you apply them to will end up becoming your passion because you’re using your gifting,” which I thought was brilliant.
The example that I used is that I always felt that I was a terrible salesperson, but that I could explain things and I could teach. And the point that I made to him was, “I could probably have taught botany, or something. Finance is just where I ended up.” But the reality was I was good at talking about something that was very complex and bringing it down to something simple.
And everybody out there, listening to us, you’re brilliant at something.
I liked what one of our friends, Mark, used to call this. He called it, “Distinctive genius.” You have distinctive genius in things.
You have certain things that you’re just distinctively really good at.
It’s not bragging, it’s just saying that’s what you’re good at. It’s a gift.
You can’t brag over a gift. You can’t brag when somebody gives you ice cream, “Look at this card that I earned.” No, somebody gave it to you. You look at it that way and go, “Oh, maybe I should just be applying the gift that I’ve been given.” And then it will become a passion.
JW: Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with trying to make other people happy. It’s a multifaceted issue, but it’s certainly worth looking at in terms of, “Am I living for somebody else, or am I living for myself?”
PW: People look back on their lives and they basically say they regret that. What’s something else that they come up with?
I Wish I Hadn’t Worked So Hard
JW: Well, this is interesting because there are certain messages I teach to my kids, like you’ve got to work hard to be successful, that type of thing. But one of the five things is, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
There’s certainly tons of people out there who are workaholics. You do have to make sacrifices in life and try to achieve some balance, but sometimes that balance gets flipped on its head, and things that are most important or things that might make you happy get pushed by the wayside because it’s work, work, work, work.
PW: Some people do work, and they avoid connecting with people through that. They go to work because they have a hard time connecting with people in their lives and they have a hard time connecting with people in general. Is it due to that?
Now in some people’s work, they’re actually spending time connecting with people in their work, and they’re not avoiding people. They’re actually connecting and they’re actually doing something because they feel like it’s their God-given gift.
I can see where that can be taken too far in a way, but I can see where it also can be just dismissed because there are a couple addictions that we can have in America that are actually socially acceptable.
One of the addictions can be money. Wow. Look how successful he is. Look how successful she is. Wow. What a hard worker.
And then work is the other addiction that is a close cousin to that, because that’s socially acceptable, being a hard worker, being very industrious.
I think about that Protestant work ethic. There’s something really, really good about it. And sometimes what we do is we avoid life through burying ourselves in our work. I can definitely see where that would be the case.
JW: Time is a limited resource. You only have so much. We have to find that balance between working for the money that provides the means to do the other things that we like, spending time with our loved ones, and funding our passions. That’s what that time working is.
Really, I think the message here is balance. You can spend all your time working and driving and trying to be successful. Certainly, to a point, that is a very good quality.
But if you go overboard at the expense of everything else, that’s when it becomes one of those regrets of the dying.
PW: Exclusions. It’s interesting.
The choices that we make require exclusions of everything else.
That’s often the way I think about that.
Let’s say you’re an ice cream guy. Let’s just use that as an example. Maybe you have all of these different flavors. I like chocolate, I like vanilla, I like pecan, whatever.
You’re taking a spoonful. Whatever you’ve chosen as that spoonful, you’ve just excluded every other choice out there.
And that’s it with life. It’s so hard, when we think about it, that we have to choose things, but it creates an exclusion of everything else.
JW: Yeah, it’s a limited resource.
PW: It’s just reality. There’s nothing you can do about that. Make those choices and be okay with whatever fork you took in the road.
I Wish I Had the Courage to Express My Feelings
JW: How about this one? “I wish I had had the courage to express my feelings.”
Some people have no problem with that. Some people have no filter. They just say whatever they’re feeling at the moment.
But I think most of us at some point probably keep things in that we might like to say or might like to express, especially feelings about somebody that you care about. Let them know how important they are, things like that.
Or just if they make you happy or if things bother you. Sometimes people swallow that. Again, this is just another thing that people wish they did more of, which is sharing those things.
PW: It can be dangerous for people. And that is why a lot of times people don’t do it.
They feel like if they actually share what they’re thinking about something, then they’ll be shot down because for some people, it can be dangerous.
You have to know that you can have that give and take without necessarily coming down into judgment.
I hate to use that word, but the reality of it is, a lot of us don’t share what we’re thinking about anything because we’re so afraid of the ramifications of what it’ll cause for us and the hardships it will cause for us.
JW: In your mind, it leaves you exposed, and it leaves you vulnerable.
PW: Yes. Thank you.
JW: And that’s part of the feeling. I don’t want to share that because there could be blow back. I could catch some flack.
PW: Very good. Very good.
JW: And even it’s probably a bigger issue in your mind than the reality of actually doing that. But that doesn’t discount it. That doesn’t make it any less real.
PW: And for some people it is real because they don’t necessarily have that person who will accept what they have to say.
JW: Oh, absolutely.
PW: And a person who can listen to it and take it in. It’s a shame because that is something that actually plagues people.
I can tell you from the other side of the fence and working with people for as many years as I have in those particular areas that yes, it is an issue.
I Wish I Had Stayed in Touch with My Friends
JW: Okay. Number four. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
PW: That’s an interesting one for me because I didn’t have a lot of close friends growing up. I don’t know, when did you develop most of your friends? In high school? College?
JW: Well, probably the best friends I ever had in my life were from my early high school years. And it was one of the things where we ended up having to move in the middle of those years. Those friends I basically got ripped away from. You wonder, “Well, is that why I never had close friends?”
PW: Yeah, where did they end up? What did they end up doing?
JW: Yeah. I never had friends of that caliber again, that I’ve ever felt that close to. I was analyzing myself, wondering, was that trauma of losing those friends one of the reasons why I never made that good of friends again?
PW: Yeah, because why make friends if you’re just going to lose them?
JW: Right. And people like military families probably get that a lot, where they’re in one place for a while, then they have to go somewhere else, and they consistently have to meet new people in different areas.
PW: Guys especially have this issue. I’ve just noticed a lot of times that if they lose a spouse, then they end up not doing so well in general.
Some guys are not going to be like this, but in general, a lot of times that happens because they’re just not great at connecting. Whereas women just tend to have better ability to connect. When you look at studies of younger people, girls tend to be a lot more social, a lot more emotionally aware.
Typically you develop that through something called “parallel play.” It’s what you do with kids. With little kids, you get them parallel playing.
In other words, both kids are playing with their toys together. And then what you’ll notice with kids is that as time goes on, they start to share. And then what they do is they start to work together on a project. Little by little, they come together.
Same thing with guys. What you want them to do is go, “Hey, find hobbies, go out and do stuff with other guys.” I see guys do this. They’ll have Friday morning breakfast.
And then what happens is they develop that, and then they go out and they do parallel play. They go out and hunt together, or they go fishing together, or they go bowling together, or they go do whatever together.
JW: Golf.
PW: Golf, that’s another one. As they say, you get to really know somebody when you’re spending that much time with them. They also say that it doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
So often what happens is that, now when you have losses in your life, you have a support system around you.
I think it’s beautiful. And it’s a regret that seniors have.
Because we talk about retirement here all the time when we talk about money, and we talk about investing and all those types of things, but sometimes it really gets down to what is money for?
Money is a tool to help you express what you value. Well, what do you value? What we look at is what people look back at and they say, “Man, I wish I valued that more.” That’s how this all connects, if you’re wondering.
I Wish I Let Myself Be Happier
JW: And the last one, and this wraps them all up in a bow, is “I wish I let myself be happier.”
PW: I wish I let myself be happier. Basically saying to myself, “You have responsibilities and you must do that.”
We do have responsibilities, but you need balance. That is what that screams to me.
JW: Yeah. I think about letting yourself enjoy things more instead of worrying about the next big thing. We talk about this with investment. You are always so worried about the next market crash and things like that.
PW: That’s good.
JW: But just for life in general, I’m worried about something out there that’s going to happen. So I can’t enjoy the moment. I’m so worried about something that’s going to happen tomorrow that I’m not having fun with my granddaughter now.
PW: I was reading the paper this morning, and this person with The Wall Street Journal was saying, “Here’s what’s going to cause the next market crash. This is overvalued, this is overvalued.”
And you think, Yeah, go ahead. Not make my day, like Clint Eastwood would say. Ruin my day and go out and say stuff like that, and get me thinking into the future instead of living for right now.
What’s going on right now and being present is so huge.
When I sit here and I talk with you here on the radio, Jim, I am right here. I’m not sitting there worried about what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m not worried about the past. I’m sitting right here.
I think that is a key to really being a lot more grounded and a lot more happy in the present. But a lot of people don’t allow themselves that pleasure.
JW: It’s hard to do whenever you have the 24/7 apocalypse du jour yelling in your face all the time about the next scary thing. People can’t pull themselves away sometimes.
PW: So true.
Advisory services offered through Paul Winkler, Inc an SEC registered investment advisor. The opinions voiced and information provided in this material are for general informational purposes only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine what investments are appropriate for you, please consult with a financial advisor. PWI does not provide tax or legal advice. Please consult your tax or legal advisor regarding your particular situation.
