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Question
Bronnie Ware is a nurse in Australia. She has spent more than a decade of counselling dying people. Over that time span, she began recording the top regrets that people have on their death bed. After 12 years, she concluded that the most common regret of all was this: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Why is this such a common dying regret at the end of our lives? And how can you make sure that you don't end up feeling the same way? If you're reading this, then you probably have the power to make decisions in your daily life. It's rare that we are actually forced to live in a way that we don't want to live (thankfully). But somehow, many of us still end up wishing we had lived in a way that was more true to ourselves. Here's why I believe this happens: Anytime I find myself feeling stuck in neutral, it's usually the result of not having a clear target. I find myself doing work without defining what the work should actually be or hoping for a change without determining the underlying actions that would lead to it. In other words, I'm not being clear about what I care about and how I can get there. More on this in a moment. Here's the result: If you never draw a line in the sand and clarify what is really important to you, then you'll end up doing what's expected of you. When you don't have a clear purpose driving you forward, you default to doing what other people approve of. We're not sure what we really want, and so we do what we think other people want. The grey areas in life usually arise when we haven't decided what we believe. This is the position I think we all find ourselves in from time to time. And it's one reason why I think many of us end up living the life others expect us to live instead of a life that is true to ourselves. I think often about how I can get better at living with purpose and how I can live an important life instead of an urgent one. When it comes to being clear about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, I like to use a technique that I call the Bullseye Method. "If you didn't know where the target was located, you would never fire an arrow and expect to hit the bullseye." And yet, we often live our lives this way. We wake up and face the world day after day (we keep firing arrows), but we are focused on everything except the bullseye. |
What is the result given by the author in the passage?
Options
We should draw in the sands
We should never approve of what others say or recommend.
We should never follow the path that is followed most by others.
We should always prioritise the things which we want for ourselves and what others want.
Solution
We should always prioritise the things which we want for ourselves and what others want.
Explanation:
According to the author's conclusion in the paragraph, if you never draw a line in the sand and clarify what is important to you, you will wind up doing what is required of you. We don't know what we want, so we try to figure out what other people want. We can deduce that the author's unambiguous recommendation is to prioritize things that we want for ourselves.