Recently, the Harvard Business Review blog posted blurbs from five professionals - an investment banker, a photographer, a millionaire entrepreneur and a Fortune 500 CEO - about their biggest professional regrets.
This is what they said:
REGRET NO. 1: “I wish I hadn’t taken the job for the money.”
REGRET NO. 2: “I wish I had quit earlier."
REGRET NO. 3: “I wish I had the confidence to start my own business.”
REGRET NO. 4: "I wish I had used my time at school more productively.”
REGRET NO. 5: "I wish I had acted on my career hunches.”
The great thing about hearing stories like this from other people is that many of us can spot a seedling of the same feeling in ourselves and hopefully start to do something to make a change.
If we have or are thinking of taking a job just for the money, there is time to reconsider or set out a strategy to leverage the higher salary to finance a new job search. I am guilty of being scared to give up the security of a job, but if you're wanting to quit but don't because you don't yet have something else lined up, consider whether removing the safety net of the old job will give you the motivation you need to try something new.
For all the benefits we get from learning from other people's advice, dwelling on certain of their/our regrets is not altogether productive. Wishing we had done something differently in school, for instance, is a bit of a fool's errand because we paid our money and spent our time. Often we don't have enough of either to go back for a second round. The alternative is to try to look at what we did in school from a different angle and try to reinvent that experience in a way that helps us tell the story of the professional we are now.
For example, I can describe my college experience as having gotten a liberal arts degree at a state school and worked as an intern at a publishing house. Or, I can tell a narrative of persistence and creativity by explaining how I paid my way through school by talking people into giving me jobs they either didn't want to hire me to do, or weren't even hiring at all for, then excelling once I was there.
This isn't to say you can't have regrets. There are things that we all wish would have gone differently. It's just that the key to success isn't making a wrong move. It is knowing how to avoid letting that wrong move become an excuse to stop moving forward.
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