I like to reflect on notes I have written in my diaries since past few years. I am habitual to keep notes about anything I found interesting from anywhere.

Today morning, I found one note about an insight which I have learned from one interview. The insight is very simple and straight forward. Most of us might look at it with typical notion as, “Yeah I know it”.

And then we literally find reason to justify and defend what we believe. Anyways, the insight goes like this.

“Nothing is more painful in life than realising the fact that you have optimised your life for wrong thing”

Here are few phrases I have created to relate this sentence. Unhealthy Millionaires, Lonely Professionals, Stressed CEOs, Depressed billionaires etc.

There is nothing wrong in being millionaires, billionaire or any position. The problem is why we are aspire to get that title. Which element of human behaviour made you optimise your life towards anything you are aspire to?

It’s very complex and boring subject for young people to understand. The reason is very simple. Energy.

Majority from young generation don’t consider the fact that whatever their ambitions are, it’s mostly because of the energy levels they have right now. But it will surely going to fade away with time. After few years, the reason which are governing their behaviours will become meaningless because the energy levels will go down with age. All the excitement which allure us at this age will gradually drop down as certain reality creeps in.

What can be the solution then? Don’t we have to be ambitious and aspiring for future? That’s not the point. In fact my approach is very fierce to deal with society when they try to promote the idea of “Getting settle in life” as soon as possible. Automation and AI will anyway going to puncture their ideology.

Anyways, The point here is, Optimising life for the Right thing.

In my journey of reading hundreds of books in past few years, I have realised that there is many different definition of what is right and wrong.

But my consideration is this, “Whether that sounds fundamentally right?” Anything which is arbitrarily lucrative is not worth our life pursuit.

To learn more about it, I have read one book which is written by a Nurse whose duty was in such department where patience are in last stage of their life. They will die in a matter of weeks. The range of patients were from wood cutter to CEOs. She asked all of them same questions.

What are your regrets about life at the time of facing death? She compiled all those answers & derived the top five reasons of dying. This will help anyone understand what I means by fundamentally sound vs arbitrarily lucrative.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so much.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

We should optimise our life with certain intangibles rather tangibles. So that at the end of our life, none of this should be in our list of regrets. There will be some regrets, but at least those regrets should be different than this list.

P.S- Name of book i mention here is, Top five regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware.