Minimize Regret

For thirty-two years I did one job. When an aircraft came down, I went out with a team and a notebook and put the last ninety seconds back together — the voices in the cockpit, the numbers off the recorder, the small decisions that chained one into the next until there was nothing left to decide. It was backward-looking work, all of it. But I never looked backward to grieve, and I never looked backward to blame. I looked backward for exactly one reason: to find the single thing that would have changed it, and write it into the checklist, so the next crew lived.

You already do the first half of that job on yourself. You look backward constantly — at the choice you made or did not make, the person you let go, the years you gave to the wrong thing. What you almost never do is the second half. You reopen the same ninety seconds night after night, and it never changes a procedure, because you were never doing it to change anything. You were doing it to bleed.

That is the problem this book is about, and it is a bigger problem than it looks, because it has a twin. The same person who cannot stop replaying the past usually cannot decide anything about the future. They are haunted behind and frozen ahead — and the two are not separate troubles. They are one faculty, regret, aimed the wrong way in both directions. Aimed backward, at a past you cannot move, it becomes a wound that never closes. Aimed forward, at a future you can still shape, the very same faculty becomes a compass. Almost everyone has it pointed the wrong way, and does not know that this is a thing that can be turned.