Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself Every Morning

I recently spoke at a conference in SiliconValley and I was pleased to stay for the rest of the event afterwards. Thefinal speaker, Connie Podesta, said something which struck my curiosity. Shesaid, "I am going to share the two most important questions you will everanswer. If you answer no to either of them I will know some things about you. Iwill know you are more stressed than you need to be. I will know you are unhappierthan you need to be." She had my attention.

Here are the two questions:

#1 Are you proud of the choices you aremaking at home?

#2 Are you proud of the choices you aremaking at work?

We might feel tempted to push thesequestions aside as being overly simplistic. Yet, as Oliver Wendell Holmes iscredited with saying, "I wouldn't give a fig for simplicity on this sideof complexity but I'd give my right arm for simplicity on the other side ofcomplexity."

One reason these questions strike me assimplicity on the other side of complexity is they remind us to pay attentionto our current choices rather than our current results. Our results, whether weare currently experiencing success or failure, can be misleading because theyhappen after the fact. They are lag indicators. Consider how these questionscan help:

In Times of Failure. There are clearlytimes when things are not going as we want them at work or at home. We couldcomplain about this. We could make a fuss. We could become discouraged. Yet, ifwe ask these two questions every morning we can focus our energy on the choiceswe can make. Messed up something? Fine. We can get back on track. We can askwhether we are proud of the choices we are making now.

In Times of Success. Success can be a poorteacher. It can teach us to underinvest in the things which generated thesuccess in the first place. I have argued this more fully in a piece forHarvard Business Review where I intentionally overstate the case in order tomake it:success can be a catalyst for failure. We can begin to coast along andin the very moment of our greatest outward achievements we can make choiceswhich undermine our future success.

In Rudyard Kipling's beautiful poem"If" he brings together both of these scenarios when he penned counselto his son:

"If you can meet with Triumph andDisaster

And treat those two impostors just thesame..."

Kipling cautions his son to distrust bothsuccess (triumph) and failure (disaster) as imposters. He warns him both aredeceptive.

Asking these two questions and becomingmore deliberate in our choices can seem like a small thing in the moment.Sometimes we feel we are too busy living to really think about life. Yetfailure to reflect on these questions could contribute to a life of regrets.Indeed, an Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware, cared for people in the last 12weeks of their lives and she recorded the most often-discussed regrets. At thetop of the list: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true tomyself, not the life others expected of me." Next on the list: "Iwish I hadn't worked so hard" and "I wish I'd had the courage toexpress my feelings."

I am not sure these are the most importanttwo questions we will ever ask, but surely we will have fewer regrets if wespend a moment every morning asking them.