Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve…

We live in a world of “shoulds”. And why? A “should” is something you can never do anything about now. A “should” refers to a time in the past, which we can no longer be at.

For example… “You should have bought shares in E-Bay when they went public in September 1998. Less than ten years later you would have made twenty times your original investment.”

Now, tell me… what can you do with that information now? It’s never going to be 1998 again. You’ll never be able to get in at the ground level on Ebay shares. Ebay, like Google and Microsoft will never again be small unknown start-up businesses just about to go big.

“You should have visited East Berlin before the wall came down.”

Or, take it to the extreme…

“You should have seen Elvis Presley perform live.”

“But I was born after his last concert?”

“But you could have been born earlier?”

So what’s the point of a “should” statement like that?

Actually very little. There is little that’s positive. A “should” statement gets you in regret mode. I was having lunch with someone today who was telling me how he should have bought some real estate in Calgary a couple of years ago, before the big boom. What could I say to that, other than a “Yeah. We all wish we did things we didn’t do.” But that won’t improve life today or tomorrow for anyone.

And we need to always remember that at the time, the decision we made was the best with the given information.

Rather than living in a world of “shoulds”, if we live knowing that every decision we made was the best at the time, and that we made those decisions for certain reasons then there can be no regrets. If that’s what you decided then that was best for you then.

If we do in fact look back on our life and see missed opportunities or decisions not taken, we can then look to today and tomorrow and see which decisions we need to make to prevent a recurrence of the past.

Last weekend I saw a gentleman I used to work with. We only worked together for a month or so and were never really friends . He didn’t see me in the shop and in the past I might have just left without speaking to him. I had actually grabbed the door handle and was on my way out, when I stopped myself, and thought, “I should speak with him.” The opportunity had not yet passed, so I was able to change a should into an action, and I did. We chatted briefly and I asked him what he was doing. I told him that we might have an opening at the company I worked for and that he could check it out. Whatever he does with that information is his business, but I opened the door for him if he has the desire to walk through it.

I left the situation feeling like I had done my best and that I had nothing to regret, and would never have the nagging “I should have stopped to speak with him.” Instead I did something about it and made everyone better for it.

When you have to make decisions in life, go with the one you know you’ll be glad you made. Take a little risk and see what the benefits will be. It’s easy to take the easy road that goes nowhere. It’s easy to make non-decisions, or not make decisions at all. But the people who find greater happiness, and greater success are the ones who consistently make decisions that have some risk, but a significant pay-off.