Yesterday, an email landed in my inbox.

The email was about a palliative care nurse who spent years in end-of-life care and started keeping mental notes on what dying people regret.

I've seen this research before. Maybe you have too. The patterns are well documented. A nurse named Bronnie Ware published the whole thing after years of working with patients in their final weeks.

The top five regrets of the dying looked something like this:

• "I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself."
• "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."
• "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings."
• "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends."
• "I wish I had let myself be happier."

I've read that list before. More than once.
And every time I do the same thing: I nod, feel vaguely uncomfortable… and then go right back to checking email like nothing just happened.

This time I didn't move on.

I sat with it for a minute. And I started thinking about the people I see trying to start an online business. The ones who've been "almost ready" for six months. Watching tutorials, building out their offer, telling themselves they just need one more thing figured out before they pull the trigger.

And I thought: some of them are going to end up with that second regret on the list.

Not because they worked too much. Because they worked too much on the wrong things.

Here's the distinction that matters.

"I wish I hadn't worked so hard" doesn't come from people who built something meaningful and loved what they were doing. It comes from people who spent years grinding away at something that didn't fit. Something they never stopped to question. Something they kept doing because stopping felt like admitting they'd gotten it wrong.

...and admitting you're wrong is surprisingly difficult once you've bought the domain name.

The regret isn't the work. The regret is the wrong work, done the wrong way, for too long.

Which means the goal isn't to work less. The goal is to build something that does the compounding for you, so the work you put in now doesn't have to be the same work you're still doing five years from now.

The people I see actually getting there share one thing in common. They stopped trying to scale themselves and started building systems that scale without them.

Not because they're working less. Because the work they're doing builds something that runs on its own. Leads come in. Follow-ups go out. Appointments get booked. Reviews get requested. All while they're doing the parts of the business only they can do.

That's not passive income. That's a machine. And building it isn't fast, but it's also not as complicated as most people make it.

That's the whole premise behind the training I put together. It walks through exactly how to build that system, step by step, whether you're doing it for your own business or you're planning to set it up for other businesses and charge a monthly retainer for it.

If you haven't watched it yet, here's the link:

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It won't fix all five regrets on that list. I'm a marketing guy, not a therapist.

But the one about working too hard? That one is very much in my department.

Talk soon,

Adam

P.S.

I spent a long time doing the right work the wrong way. Building everything on effort instead of systems. The video above is basically everything I wish I'd known sooner.