Story: The Ultimate Driving Force in All My Career Decisions: Regret
My name is Josiah Merta, and I’m the owner/founder of the digital media agency, Flo Media, based out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I don’t want to so spend too much time on talking about myself, so you can read my entire story of becoming a business owner here, but today I want to touch on something that I hope will bring value to you, the reader, and get you thinking about your career path and how you approach life in general. And that thing today is: regret.
Regret is the driving force of all of my decisions, whether that be in business or my day-to-day life. Whenever I’m faced with an important decision, I always ask myself the same question: “Will I regret not doing this later on in life?” If the answer is “yes”, then I will execute on that choice without any hesitation.
The reason why regret scares me so much is that you can’t change your choice in the future. It’s the worst feeling to regret something and realize you can’t go back in time and alter that event. So even though I’m extremely young, I’m trying to do everything I can to avoid that feeling when I’m 50 and 60 years old and minimize the number of regrets I have in life.
This is one of the reasons why I started my company. I realized that if I didn’t try now and work my ass off, I would regret not knowing the end result in the future. I would rather fail at starting a business and learn from all my mistakes, than never attempting it and always have that question in the back of my head, “Could I have actually done it?” The thought of that is terrifying to me.
I’m not going to lie, I don’t feel comfortable giving career advice because I’m just starting my career myself, but I do know one thing, and that is: no one wants to feel regret. So if you think you’d like to be a graphic designer or maybe an accountant, then go for it! Especially if you’re young, you have so much time to figure out what you’re wanting to do for a career. Once you’ve achieved becoming a graphic designer and tasted exactly what it’s like, maybe you’ll discover that you actually don’t enjoy it as much as you thought you would. If that’s the case, then you can always change your career path and you’ll still have plenty of time to live! Why would you want to do that though? Because now you finally know that you didn’t like graphic design, and you won’t have to worry about having the regret of not knowing.
If there’s one thing I could ask you to do, it would be to highly consider asking yourself the same question I do whenever you make an important decision, and that’s, “Will I regret not doing this later on in life?” Once you know the answer, act on your decision immediately without thinking about it any further. Don’t overthink it and follow the Nike slogan: Just do it. You won’t regret it.
I really appreciate you taking the time to read this article, and I hope I was able to get you thinking more about this topic and accomplish my goal of delivering value to you.
Also Read: How I get my first job in the USA at 55 years age by creating a balance sheet resume
