By the time Edward Bell reached his deathbed, he had accumulated eighty-nine years of experience and, he felt, several important regrets.
Once, in 1987, he had received an invitation to an optional seminar on stakeholder alignment.
He hadn’t attended.
He had taken his children boating instead.
Edward closed his eyes.
There were so many meetings he could have gone to.
Meetings about meetings.
Pre-meetings.
Post-meeting debriefs.
Quarterly update meetings in which someone read aloud numbers everybody already had printed in front of them.
He wished he had spent more evenings at the office.
Instead, he had gone home.
Like a fool.
He had eaten dinner with his wife, helped his children with their homework, read stories to them, played football in the garden and sat outside on summer evenings drinking wine with neighbours.
He had met thousands of people in his life and had allowed an appalling number of them to remain merely friends.
All that time completely unmonetised.
Edward had travelled too much as well.
Small villages in France whose names he could no longer remember.
Beaches.
Mountains.
Railway stations.
Little cafés where he and Fiona had sat for hours doing absolutely nothing useful.
In Rome, they had once spent an entire morning walking without a destination.
No itinerary.
No productivity target.
No step-counting app.
Nothing.
They had simply wandered.
Edward felt ashamed.
Imagine what they might have achieved with an iPhone.
A bowl of pasta in Bologna had vanished from human civilisation without receiving a single like.
He should have spent more time looking at his phone.
He regretted all the books he had read too.
Novels especially.
Thousands of hours lost discovering what imaginary people thought and felt.
He could have been reading books with titles like Seven Habits of Highly Scalable Individuals.
Instead, he had read Dickens.
Tolstoy.
Graham Greene.
Wodehouse.
Not one of them had taught him how to optimise a sales funnel.
He had also wasted a disturbing amount of his life laughing.
Dinner tables.
Pubs.
Family holidays.
Train journeys.
Many evenings he had laughed so much that nothing whatsoever had been accomplished.
There was no deliverable.
No actionable takeaway.
He wished he had taken life more seriously.
He wished he had worried more.
There had been whole periods when things were going well and he had simply enjoyed them.
Edward had failed repeatedly in this regard.
He had gone to sleep.
He had slept astonishing amounts.
Nearly a third of his life, probably.
Eight hours at a time.
There were people sending emails at 4:17 in the morning.
Edward had been unconscious.
He should have bought more things.
Once, when a salesman explained that a newer washing machine had Wi-Fi, Edward had asked why.
He regretted that deeply.
He should have upgraded.
Everything.
Constantly.
There were enormous televisions he had never owned.
Cars with heated steering wheels.
Watches that could tell him how badly he had slept.
He had missed an entire generation of air fryers.
It was difficult to forgive himself.
He should also have spent more time comparing himself with other people.
He had known people richer than him and somehow remained cheerful.
What had he been thinking?
He should have climbed further at work.
For years he had occupied a perfectly respectable position and then, disastrously, decided it was enough.
Enough.
Imagine reaching “enough” when there were still job titles above you.
He had turned down a promotion once because it involved moving his family.
At the time he had thought his children were happy at school.
His wife loved their home.
Their friends lived nearby.
How sentimental.
He could have been Regional Deputy Vice-President.
Perhaps Senior Regional Deputy Vice-President.
He should have measured himself more.
Weight.
Steps.
Calories.
Sleep cycles.
Heart-rate variability.
Hours worked.
Books read.
Countries visited.
Wine consumed.
Minutes meditated.
Followers acquired.
Edward had merely lived through most things without scoring them.
How could he know whether he had enjoyed himself efficiently?
He regretted every hobby he had failed to monetise.
He painted watercolours for forty years.
Forty years.
Not once had he created a content strategy.
He painted because he liked painting.
It sounded pathetic now.
He could have had a newsletter.
He could have posted videos called Five Watercolour Mistakes You’re Probably Making Right Now.
He could have sold branded brushes.
He could have become the face of wet-on-wet.
Instead, he gave paintings to people.
For free.
Some of them weren’t even relatives.
He had spent evenings listening to people’s problems without charging consultancy fees.
He had helped neighbours move house.
Fed their cats.
Driven them to hospital.
Lent them tools.
Carried sofas upstairs.
Not once had he invoiced anybody.
An appalling business model.
He could have spent his whole life preparing to begin his life properly.
Instead, he often just got up and had breakfast.
He should have corrected more strangers on the internet.
He had encountered people who were wrong.
Sometimes he had begun typing a response and then thought, What’s the point?
What’s the point?
There could be people out there, even now, believing that tomatoes were vegetables.
He had spent far too much time letting things go.
Parking spaces.
Neighbourhood fences.
The pronunciation of “scone”.
Some grudges had barely lasted a day.
Others he had forgotten entirely.
Imagine forgetting an insult.
What was memory for?
He wished he had been more concerned about what strangers thought of him.
For many of his later years, Edward had gone into shops wearing comfortable shoes.
He had danced badly at weddings.
He had sung while cooking.
He had told jokes he already knew his children had heard.
He had waved at babies.
He had talked to dogs.
He had ceased, almost entirely, to appear impressive.
A catastrophic collapse in personal branding.
Edward had no personal brand.
He had a personality, but no brand.
He had opinions that could not be summarised into three content pillars.
He had never identified his niche.
He had never leveraged his authenticity.
He had never once announced that he was “excited to share” anything.
He had simply told people things.
Face to face.
He should have spent more time indoors.
Gardens had taken up an extraordinary amount of his life.
Planting things.
Pruning things.
Waiting for things to grow.
Watching birds eat things.
He had spent hours looking at trees.
Trees had never once emailed him afterwards to say thank you.
He should have been more efficient with his children.
So much duplication.
He had read the same stories dozens of times.
Pushed the same swings.
Answered the same questions.
Watched them jump into swimming pools while shouting, “Watch this!”
Again.
And again.
And again.
He could have said, “I saw it yesterday.”
Edward lay quietly for a moment.
There was one regret above all others.
He had made ordinary things feel too special.
Sunday lunch.
Walking the dog.
His wife reading beside him.
His children dropping in unexpectedly.
A friend ringing for no reason.
The smell of coffee.
Rain against the windows.
Someone laughing downstairs.
Now he could see how foolish that had been.
When Edward Bell died, he left behind a wife who loved him, three children, seven grandchildren, several close friends, a garden full of things he had planted, dozens of watercolours he had given away, hundreds of books with his notes in the margins, photographs of badly planned holidays, an elderly dog that continued waiting beside his chair, and a lifetime containing remarkably few measurable achievements.
He had lived an extremely unimpressive life.
Rob Walker 