My father Yuki had a phrase he repeated so often it became the background music of my childhood: "In pursuit of the impossible, zero regrets."
I heard it before competitions. I heard it when things were going badly. I heard it when I was 14 and didn't want to hear anything from anybody. It sounded like a motivational poster for a long time, and I treated it like one - half-listened, nodded, moved on.
It wasn't until years into my career that I started to understand what he meant. It ended up becoming the title of my first book, Zero Regrets, which hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it's still the question I get asked about most. Usually some version of: how do you actually live without regrets? Is that even possible?
Short answer: not the way most people mean it. But there's a version of it that's real, trainable, and worth building your life around. That's what this post is about.
Zero regrets doesn't mean zero mistakes. Doesn't mean zero bad decisions, zero failures, or zero things you wish you'd done differently. I've made plenty of all of those.
Entire seasons of my career were defined by poor choices, poor preparation, poor discipline. I wrote about some of that in the book - the summers I coasted, the relationships I neglected, the training I skipped because I thought I was talented enough to get away with it. At the 1998 Olympic Trials I finished dead last, 16th out of 16, at fifteen years old, because I'd spent the run-up eating pizza instead of training. Nobody writes "zero regrets" on a poster about that kid.
My dad's version of "zero regrets" was never about being perfect. It was about arrival. Arriving at the moment - the race, the conversation, the decision, whatever it is - and knowing you didn't hold back.
That you showed up as fully as you were capable of showing up, even when full wasn't enough.
The distinction matters. Perfection is a fantasy. Full effort is a choice.
Here's where the research caught up to what my dad understood intuitively.
Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec spent years studying how regret actually behaves over a lifetime, and their findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, are remarkably consistent: actions you regret sting hard in the short term, but over the long run it's the inactions that haunt people. In their surveys, roughly 75% of people said their biggest regrets were things they did not do. When they asked people about lifetime regrets specifically, 84% pointed to inactions. The risk you didn't take. The conversation you never had. The thing you wanted to build and kept postponing.
Read that against my dad's phrase. "In pursuit of the impossible, zero regrets" isn't a promise that pursuing big things spares you pain. It's a bet about which pain you can live with. The pain of trying fully and coming up short fades. The pain of holding back compounds with interest for decades.
That's why zero regrets is not about eliminating mistakes. Mistakes are mostly actions, and time is kind to those. Holding back is an inaction, and time is merciless about it.
Short track speed skating is chaotic in a way most sports aren't. Five or six skaters on a 111-meter oval at 30+ mph, and the race can change in the last turn. Equipment breaks. People fall. Strategy goes out the window. You can train perfectly for months and lose in two seconds because someone clips your blade.
I learned early that the outcome is never entirely in your hands. You can control your preparation, your mental state, your positioning, your conditioning. But you can't control what the skater behind you does on the last corner. So if you tie your sense of fulfillment to the medal, you're handing your emotional well-being to variables you can't influence.
What you can tie it to is the preparation. Did I do everything I could with the time I had? Did I arrive at that starting line with nothing left behind? If the answer is yes, the outcome can still hurt - and it does hurt, trust me - but it doesn't destroy you. Because you know you held up your end.
That's what my dad was trying to teach me all those years. Not how to win. How to show up so fully you can live with whatever happens next.
A couple years ago I was at the Great Sports Legends Dinner in New York. Annual event that raises money for paralysis research and spinal cord injury treatment. The room was full of athletes and scientists and philanthropists and doctors, and the whole night was organized around one question: how do we help people who've been told their situation is impossible?
I sat at a table with people who'd spent their entire careers working on problems that might not be solved in their lifetimes. And none of them seemed frustrated by that.
They were energized by it. Because their relationship with the work wasn't contingent on winning. It was contingent on showing up fully.
That's zero regrets in practice - not the outcome, the showing up.
There's hard evidence that this orientation isn't just emotionally healthier, it's physically protective. A study of nearly 7,000 American adults over 50, published in JAMA Network Open, found that people with the weakest sense of life purpose were more than twice as likely to die during the follow-up period as those with the strongest sense of purpose, even after accounting for health and psychological factors. It's an association, not a guarantee. But the direction is clear: purpose isn't decoration. It's load-bearing.
What I've found since retiring - through speaking, through advisory work, through a lot of trial and error building a post-athletic life - is the people who sustain excellence over long periods almost always have something pulling them forward that's bigger than their own success.
Persistence over perfection, community over competition, purpose over prestige. These aren't slogans to me, they're patterns I've watched play out across hundreds of conversations with leaders and teams.
Executives who burn out fastest are the ones chasing metrics for metrics' sake. The ones who sustain their energy and creativity over decades are the ones who've attached their work to something they care about beyond their own career arc. That's not soft advice. It's a structural observation about what makes people durable under pressure.
Most goal setting fails the zero regrets test because it's built entirely on outcomes: hit the number, get the title, win the thing. Outcomes are where regret hides, because outcomes are partly out of your hands. Here's how I'd restructure it, and what I'd actually do this week:
Do that for a week and you'll feel the shift: the scoreboard still matters, but it stops owning you.
This past February I was at the Winter Olympics in Italy, covering Milan Cortina for Yahoo Sports. It was my first Games with a full correspondent's view of the finish area, watching athletes come off the ice seconds after the biggest moment of their lives.
You can see the difference immediately. Some athletes who missed the podium walked off devastated but intact - you could tell the loss hurt without it hollowing them out. Others, sometimes with medals around their necks, looked strangely unfinished. I don't know their inner lives and I won't pretend to. But I know what I was looking at because I've been both athletes. In 2002 and 2006 and 2010 I stood on podiums and I also went home empty-handed in races I was supposed to win, and the thing that decided how those nights landed was never the result. It was whether I'd arrived at the line with nothing left behind.
Watching it from the boards instead of the ice, my dad's phrase kept playing in my head. The impossible is the pursuit. Zero regrets is the standard you carry into it. The medal never settles the question. Only the showing up does.
No. And you shouldn't want to. Regret is information - it tells you what you value. What you can do is make sure your regrets are the small, survivable kind that come from trying, instead of the compounding kind that come from holding back.
Zero regrets - not zero mistakes, not zero pain, just zero holding back.
I got it from watching my father - a hair stylist from Seattle who raised me alone and drove me to ice rinks at 4am because he believed process mattered more than the prize. It's the backbone of the peak performance work I do with organizations now: building teams that measure themselves on full effort and purpose, not just the quarter's scoreboard.
I wrote the book about this (literally - Zero Regrets), and the weekly version lives in the Hard Pivot newsletter. That's where the stories land that are too long or too raw for anywhere else.
--AAO
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