Choices You Will Regret in 10 Years

“If only…”  These two words paired 

together create one of the saddest phrases

 in the English language. Choices that 

ultimately lead to this phrase of regret, 

and how to elude them:

1. Wearing a mask to impress others. – If the face you always show the world is a mask, someday there will be nothing beneath it.  Because when you spend too much time concentrating on everyone else’s perception of you, or who everyone else wants you to be, you eventually forget who you really are.  So don’t fear the judgments of others; you know in your heart who you are and what’s true to you.  You don’t have to be perfect to impress and inspire people. Let them be impressed and inspired by how you deal with your imperfections.

1. Letting someone else create your dreams for you. – The greatest challenge in life is discovering who you are; the second greatest is being happy with what you find.  A big part of this is your decision to stay true to your own goals and dreams.  Do you have people who disagree with you?  Good.  It means you’re standing your ground and walking your own path.  Sometimes you’ll do things considered crazy by others, but when you catch yourself excitedly losing track of time, that’s when you’ll know you’re doing the right thing. 

1. Keeping negative company. – Don’t let someone who has a bad attitude give it to you.  Don’t let them get to you.  They can’t pull the trigger if you don’t hand them the gun.  When you remember that keeping the company of negative people is a choice, instead of an obligation, you free yourself to keep the company of compassion instead of anger, generosity instead of greed, and patience instead of anxiety.

1. Being selfish and egotistical. – A life filled with loving deeds and good character is the best tombstone.  Those who you inspired and shared your love with will remember how you made them feel long after your time has expired.  So carve your name on hearts, not stone.  What you have done for yourself alone dies with you; what you have done for others and the world remains.

1. Avoiding change and growth. – If you want to know your past look into your present conditions.  If you want to know your future look into your present actions.  You must let go of the old to make way for the new; the old way is gone, never to come back.  If you acknowledge this right now and take steps to address it, you will position yourself for lasting success. 

1. Giving up when the going gets tough. – There are no failures, just results.  Even if things don’t unfold the way you had expected, don’t be disheartened or give up.  Learn what you can and move on.  The one who continues to advance one step at a time will win in the end.  Because the battle is always won far away and long before the final victory.  It’s a process that occurs with small steps, decisions, and actions that gradually build upon each other and eventually lead to that glorious moment of triumph.

1. Trying to micromanage every little thing. – Life should be touched, not strangled.  Sometimes you’ve got to relax and let life happen without incessant worry and micromanagement.  Learn to let go a little before you squeeze too tight.  Take a deep breath.  When the dust settles and you can once again see the forest for the trees, take the next step forward.  You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to be headed somewhere great.  Everything in life is in perfect order whether you understand it yet or not.  It just takes some time to connect all the dots.

1. Settling for less than you deserve. Be strong to let go and wise enough to wait for what you deserve.  Sometimes you have to get knocked down lower than you have ever been to stand up taller than you ever were before.  Sometimes your eyes need to be washed by your tears so you can see the possibilities in front of you with a clearer vision again.  Don’t settle.

1. Endlessly waiting until tomorrow. – The trouble is, you always think you have more time than you do.  But one day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to work on the things you’ve always wanted to do.  And at that point you either will have achieved the goals you set for yourself, or you will have a list of excuses for why you haven’t. 

1. Being lazy and wishy-washy. – The world doesn’t owe you anything, you owe the world something.  So stop daydreaming and start DOING.  Develop a backbone, not a wishbone.  Take full responsibility for your life – take control.  You are important and you are needed.  It’s too late to sit around and wait for somebody to do something someday.  Someday is now; the somebody the world needs is YOU. 

A Good Life 

What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through 

life? If you  were going to invest now in your future

 best self, where would  you put your time and your 

energy? There was a recent survey  of 

millennialsasking them what their most important 

life goals  were, and over 80 percent said that a 

major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 

 50 percent of those same young

 adults said that another major life goal was to 

become famous.

And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push 

harder and achieve more. We're given the impression that 

these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a 

good life. Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people 

make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures 

are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about 

human life we know from asking people to remember the 

past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We 

forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and 

sometimes memory is downright creative. 

Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all 

projects  of this kind fall apart within a 

decade because too many

 people drop out of the study, or funding for the 

research  dries up, or the researchers get 

distracted, or they die,  and nobody moves the ball 

further down the field. But  through a combination 

of luck and the persistence of

 several generations of researchers, this study has 

survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still 

alive, still participating in the study, most of them in 

their  90s. And we are now beginning to study the 

more than  2,000 children of these men. And I'm the 

fourth director  of the study.

Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of 

men. The first group started in the study when they 

were  sophomores at Harvard College. They all 

finished  college during World War II, and then most

 went off to  serve in the war. And the second group 

that we've  followed was a group of boys from 

Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were 

chosen for the study specifically because they were 

from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged 

families in the Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in 

tenements, many without hot and cold running 

water. When they entered the study, all of these 

teenagers were interviewed. They were given 

medical exams.We went to  their homes and we 

interviewed their parents. And then

 these teenagers grew up into adultswho entered all 

walks of life. They became factory workers and 

lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President 

of the United  States. Some developed alcoholism. A 

few developed  schizophrenia. Some climbed the 

social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very 

top, and some made that journey in the opposite 

direction. The founders of this study would never in 

their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be 

standing here  today, 75 years later, telling you that 

the study still continues. Every two years, our 

patient and dedicated  research staff calls up our 

men and asks them if we can send them yet one 

more  set of questions about their  lives.

Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, "Why do 

you  keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that 

interesting." The Harvard men never ask that 

question. To get the clearest picture of these 

lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. We 

interview them in their living rooms. 

We get their medical records from their 

doctors. We draw their blood, we scan their 

brains, we talk to their children. We videotape them 

talking with their wives about their deepest 

concerns.And when,  about a decade ago, we finally 

asked the wives if they  would join us as members of 

the study,many of the women said, "You know, it's 

about time."

So what have we learned? What are the lessons that 

come from the tens of thousands of pages of 

information that we've generated on these 

lives? Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame 

or working harder and harder. The clearest message 

that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good 

relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 

We've learned three big lessons about 

relationships. The first is that social connections are

 really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns 

out that people who are more socially connected to 

family, to  friends, to community, are happier, 

they're physically healthier, and they live 

longer than people who are less

 well connected. And the experience of loneliness 

turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated 

than they want to be from others find that they are 

less happy, their health declines earlier in 

midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and 

they live shorter lives  than people who are not 

lonely. And the sad fact is that 

 at any given time, more than one in five Americans 

will report that they're lonely.

And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and 

you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big 

lesson  that we learned is that it's not just the 

number of friends you have, and it's not whether or 

not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the 

quality of your close relationships that matters. It 

turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really 

bad for our health. High-conflict  marriages, for 

example, without much affection, turn out 

 to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than

 getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, 

warm relationships is protective.

Once we had followed our men all the way into their 

80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and 

to see  if we could predict who was going to grow 

into  a happy, healthy octogenarian and who 

wasn't.And when we gathered together everything 

we knew about them at age  50, it wasn't their 

middle age cholesterol levels that  predicted how 

they were going to grow old. It was how

 satisfied they were in their relationships. The 

people who were the most satisfied in their 

relationships at age  50 were the healthiest at age 

80. And good, close  relationships seem to buffer 

us from some of the slings and arrows of getting 

old. Our most happily partnered  men and 

women reported, in their 80s, that on the days 

when they had more physical pain, their mood 

stayed just as happy. But the people who were in 

unhappy relationships,on the days when they 

reported more physical pain, it was magnified by 

more emotional pain. 

And the third big lesson that we learned about 

relationships and our health is that good 

relationships don't just protect our bodies, they 

protect our brains. It turns out that being in a 

securely attached relationship to another person in 

your 80s is protective, that the people who are in 

relationships where they really feel they can count 

on the other person in times of need, those people's 

memories stay sharper longer. And the people in 

relationships where they feel they really can't count 

on  the other one,those are the people who 

experience earlier memory decline. And those good 

relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the 

time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker

with each other day in and day out, but as long as 

they felt that they could really count on the 

other when the going got tough,those arguments 

didn't take a toll on their memories.

So this message, that good, close relationships are 

good  for our health and well-being, this is wisdom 

that's as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get 

and so easy to  ignore? Well, we're human. What 

we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can 

get that'll make our lives  good and keep them that 

way.Relationships are messy and they're 

complicated and the hard work of tending to 

 family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. It's 

also lifelong. It never ends. The people in our 75-

year  study who were the happiest in etirement were 

the people who had actively worked to replace 

workmates with new  playmates. Just like the 

millennials in that recent survey, many of our men 

when they were starting out as  young adults really 

believed that fame and wealth and high 

achievement were what they needed to go after to

 have a good life. But over and over, over these 75 

years, our study has shown that the people who 

fared the best  were the people who leaned in to 

relationships, with family, with friends, with 

community. 

So what about you? Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, 

or you're 60. What might leaning in to relationships 

even look like?

Well, the possibilities are practically endless. It 

might be  something as simple as replacing screen 

time with people time or livening up a stale 

relationship by doing something new together, long 

walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family 

member who you haven't spoken to in 

years, because those all-too-common 

family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who 

hold the grudges.

 

I'd like to close with a quote

 from Mark Twain. More than 

 a century ago, he was looking back on his life,and 

he wrote this: "There isn't time, so brief is life, for 

bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to 

account. There is only time for loving, and but an 

instant, so to speak, for that."

The good life is built with good relationships. 

What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through 

life? If you  think it's fame and money, you're not 

alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert 

Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director 

 of a 75-year-old study on adult development, 

Waldinger has  unprecedented access to data on 

true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he 

shares three important lessons learned from the 

study as well as some practical, old-as-the-

hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.

But what if we could watch entire lives as they 

unfold through time? What if we could study people 

from the time that they were teenagers all the way 

into old age to see what really keeps people happy 

and healthy? We did that. The Harvard Study of 

Adult Development may be the longest study of 

adult life that's ever been done. For 75 years, we've 

tracked the  lives of 724 men, year after year, asking 

about their work, their home lives, their health, and 

of course  asking all along the way without knowing 

how their life storieswere going to turn out.