Are You A Don’ter or a Doer?

The secret to living a great life is to do more than you don’t.

For many years, Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care. Her patients were those who had gone home to die in the comfort of their familiar surroundings. Some incredibly special times were shared as she was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. She ended up writing an insightful book about her experiences called, The 5 Regrets of the Dying. Here are the top 5 regrets as explained in her book…

#5 – “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

#4 – “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

#3 – “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”

#2 – “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

#1 – “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

What a powerful statement: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. These insights remind me of what Mark Twain once said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

There are two kinds of people in life: Doers & Don’ters. Doers are people of action, Don’ters are people of apathy. It’s the Doers that truly experience life to the fullest, while the Don’ters experience life to the emptiest.

To live a life of intentionality you must have an extreme bias to action; a drive to make your life count. The good thing is, I believe everyone has this desire, it’s just a matter of putting it into action. The goal of life is not to arrive safely at death, but to arrive sparingly at death. By sparingly, I mean to live full but die empty. Pour out so much of yourself that you have virtually nothing left to give. Life is too short to live with a could of, should of, would of regret. Doers hold nothing back. They live out of their faith, rather than living from their fears.

To live life with intentionality you must be decisive. Indecision to action kills opportunity. Analyzing every detail stalls forward progress. Many people are stuck in the paralysis of analysis. They are paralyzed by distractions. But it is very difficult to be decisive when we are distracted by trying to figure out every reaction to our actions before we just do it. I am not saying we should make decisions without patience at times, but most of us make that argument an everyday excuse, not an exception.

The word distraction means to be pulled apart. The word depicts a medieval type of torture method that would pull someone apart at the seams of their limbs by being tied to four horses going in opposite directions. This became known as Death by Dis-traction. Everyone faces distraction in life, but the key is to identify them and to keep moving beyond them.