a quick minipost
Or after THE fall..
The Olympics can brings years of effort into very sharp focus for some of the best athletes in the world. A decade or more of hard work and sacrifice can fall one way or another in under a second. By any rational measure they're all amazing to get as far as they have. And of course the athletes don't buy that - at least not initially.
A few people have recommended a new book on regret. I haven't read it, but getting the recommendations while the Olympics are underway seems natural. I don't consider the phrase no regrets to be useful. Regret can be a powerful motivator, teacher and catalyst for self-reflection.
Every successful group and organization I've been around holds postmortems for projects independent of outcome. In large particle physics experiments it's common to hold internal and external postmortems. These are particularly important where the culture and institutional memory are long term goals. External postmortems are held for other experts - often competitors - and are important for ferreting out and fixing issues that hadn't been considered. (Feynman frequently said ~ The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool...) Of course there are regrets and people can feel a bit stupid, but you learn and grow.
At a personal level regret can be a highly motivating teacher. With enough reflection you become much better at making decisions and you get better at what you're doing. And sometimes life's big decisions come into clearer focus. Are you really doing what you like? Are you doing what you should be doing? Should you change your goals or invent completely new ones? A life with a singular focus can lead you down a path that you realize all too late was the wrong one. The self reflection of regret seems like a mechanism to make midcourse corrections, learning and growing as you travel.
I've had wonderful failures and mostly useful regrets. To some I may seem like a failure, to others a success, but to myself I'm lucky enough to still be learning - plus - all of my fingers and eyelashes are still intact.
Comments