Zero Regrets Isn't What You Think

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 & 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 yrs into my career that I started to understand what he meant.

What does "zero regrets" actually mean?

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 my book Zero Regrets — the summers I coasted, the relationships I neglected, the training I skipped bc I thought I was talented enough to get away w/ it.

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.

A couple yrs ago I was at the Great Sports Legends Awards in New York. Annual event that raises money for paralysis research & spinal cord injury treatment. The room was full of athletes and scientists & 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 w/ 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. Bc their relationship w/ 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.

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 & lose in two seconds bc 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 w/ the time I had?

Did I arrive at that starting line w/ 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. Bc you know you held up your end.

That's what my dad was trying to teach me all those yrs. Not how to win. How to show up so fully you can live w/ whatever happens next.

What I've found since retiring — through speaking, through advisory work, through a lot of trial & 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 w/ leaders & teams.

Executives who burn out fastest are the ones chasing metrics for metrics' sake. The ones who sustain their energy & 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.

I got it from watching my father — a hair stylist from Seattle who raised me alone & drove me to ice rinks at 4am in a broken-down Volkswagen Rabbit bc he believed process mattered more than the prize.

Zero regrets. Not zero mistakes. Not zero pain. Just zero holding back.

I wrote the book about this (literally — Zero Regrets), and the weekly version lives in Hard Pivot. That's where the stories land that are too long or too raw for anywhere else.

--AAO