Key takeaways
- We obsess over the risk of acting, but ignore the bigger risk: the cost of staying exactly as we are
- Doing nothing isn't a pause button. It's a decision with its own price, paid in quiet instalments year after year
- In one survey, 58% of workers regretted staying in a job too long. Only 38% regretted quitting. 44% regretted not making a full career change
- Mid-career professionals (Gen X especially) experience the highest career regret of any group
- You don't have to make a dramatic move. You just have to stop pretending standing still is the safe option
What if it could work and you never tried? That's the question almost nobody asks themselves, and it's the one that matters most. We treat the risk of acting like it's the only risk in the room and the risk of staying exactly as we are like it isn't a risk at all. But staying still has a price. It's just a quieter price, and it gets charged in instalments until the bill comes due.
Why do we only count the risk of acting and never the risk of standing still?
Because the risk of acting is loud and the risk of standing still is quiet. That's it.
When you think about making a change (starting the business, leaving the role, finally chasing the thing that's been bubbling away for years), your brain does exactly what brains do. It runs through every version of it going wrong. What if the money runs out? What if nobody wants what you're offering? What if you fail and have to crawl back? What if you give it your best shot and find out you weren't enough?
What if, what if, what if.
You know what we never ask?
What if it could work and I never tried?
We treat doing nothing as the neutral option. The safe option. The cost-free option. But staying exactly as you are has its own price. You just don't feel it until much, much later. That's the bill you don't see coming.
What is the cost of standing still, really?
It's the thing you didn't try. And it compounds.
Here's what blows my mind. There's a body of work, well known in coaching circles, about what people actually regret at the end of their lives. Hospice nurses have been writing about this for years. And the regrets are remarkably consistent. Nobody says "I wish I'd worked more hours." Nobody says "I wish I'd been more sensible about taking chances." Nobody says "I wish I'd played it safer."
The deepest regret, the one that comes up again and again and again, is "I wish I'd had the courage to try the thing I really wanted to try."
And it isn't just hospice anecdote. Some of the numbers are striking. A 2024 international survey found 58% of workers regret staying in a job too long, only 38% regret quitting, and 44% regret not making a full career change. Let that sit for a second. By that survey, people are roughly 1.5 times more likely to regret staying than to regret leaving. And the regret is sharpest in mid-career: by some estimates, around 69% of Gen X workers report serious career regrets, well above older generations who've largely moved past the decision point.
So here's the thing. When I work with people through this, the conversation almost always starts with their fear of doing the wrong thing. By the end, it's flipped. We're talking about the cost of doing nothing for another year, and another, and another. Because doing nothing isn't a pause button. It's a decision with its own price, and the price compounds.
What does it actually take to wake up to your one wild and precious life?
For me, it took a train. A literal train. Let me tell you what happened.
A few decades ago I was up in the Lake Tahoe area of California with my brothers Dave and Jono, and an American mate we called Fast Fred. Fred had that nickname because everything he did, he did quickly. Speed skiing, road bike racing, the lot. On this particular night, he was illegally throwing his Aussie mates off an abandoned railway bridge with a bungee cord.
He'd been doing it for years from a hot air balloon. The cord had stretched out, so he'd shortened it by about a third. He tied one end to a tree, tied the other to his car, drove the car back to maximum stretch, and pronounced it ready. We hiked through the dark forest, walked out along this rickety old bridge, and stopped where Fred declared we were over the river. About a hundred metres straight down, pitch black, valley floor.
Jono is a big bloke, well into the hundred kilo club. After watching Fred's somewhat suspect cord test, he politely suggested Fred should go first, given he was the host. Fred agreed.
Three, two, one. Yahoo.
And then a sound none of us were expecting. Crash.
For a second, none of us knew if he'd hit the valley floor or just come off. I leant carefully over the edge and yelled into the darkness. "Fast, are you okay?"
"I'm okay," he yelled back, "but this is not good."
We got the rope down to him, hauled him up, and as he came into the light of our head torches, we could see blood running down his face. He'd misjudged the new cord length and hit the bottom of the valley. "I've got a bad feeling about this," he said.
I yelled out, "A bad feeling?! We thought you were dead."
We started packing up to leave. We were maybe halfway back across that long bridge when we heard it. A train horn, deep and far away. So much for an abandoned railway line.
Then around the corner came the brightest spotlight you've ever seen. The driver hit the brakes. The horn screamed. There was no way it was stopping in time. Not even close.
So we ran. Toward the train. We had no choice. The bridge was so narrow there was no room for us and the train, we had to get off the bridge before the train was on it.
Somehow, in pitch black, our feet just knew where the sleepers were. Closer. Closer. And just before the train hit us, the three of us threw ourselves off the side of the bridge into the bushes on the embankment. The train roared past inches from where we'd been standing.
I lay there in the dirt. Heart pounding. Hands shaking. And a wave of deep appreciation just rolled over me. Appreciation for being alive. For my brothers, even for Fast Fred and his ridiculous cord. For the river below, for the moonlight on the granite cliffs, for the messy beautiful fact of still being here.
I'm not telling you that story so you go and find a bridge to run across. I'm telling it because I want you to feel what it took me, in one stupid moment, to finally appreciate the time I had. A train. A literal train. A second more on that bridge and I wouldn't have had the next forty years. The kids. The work. None of it.
How do you feel that appreciation without nearly dying first?
You stop and notice you're alive.
That's it. You can feel it right now, sitting wherever you're sitting, reading this. You can stop and notice that you're alive, that you have this day, that you have a stretch of time in front of you that hasn't been spent yet. The only question is what you're going to do with it.
This is the thing nobody tells you. You don't need a train. You don't need a near-miss. You don't need a brutal alarm clock to make you pay attention. You can wake up now. Today. Inside the day you're already living.
For the women I work with at Dream Lab, this is usually the turning point. They've spent years quietly tolerating something that isn't quite right. The Sunday night feeling. The "is this it?" The dream that's been bubbling away for ten, fifteen, twenty years. They keep waiting for permission. They keep waiting for the right moment. They keep waiting for the kids to be older, the mortgage to be smaller, the company to make the decision for them.
And here's the truth. The right moment never arrives. It gets manufactured. By you. By starting.
Why is the "test while employed" approach the answer for most people?
Because you don't actually have to bet everything to start.
This is the bit I get most fired up about. So many people I talk to think they have to choose between security and exploring their dreams. Quit the job or stay stuck. Bet everything or bet nothing. That's a false choice. It's also why most people stay stuck for years.
At Dream Lab, we teach a different approach. You stay employed. You keep the income. You keep the security. And in the margins of your week (a lunch break, a Wednesday evening, a Saturday morning) you start running small experiments. Test the idea. Talk to a few people. See if it has legs. Plant the seed.
Look at Nikki. She was locked into corporate real estate, classic golden handcuffs. Her lifestyle needed the income. But gradually, she started training in hypnotherapy while still working. Took a few clients on the side. Realised how much need there was. Now she's running her own practice from a beautiful home near the water. As she put it, "He keeps everything really simple and just gets you back on track." She didn't run toward a train. She just stopped pretending standing still was safe.
Or Cassie, who carried her adventure tourism dream around for years before she finally started running whale swimming experiences. "People really need this," she told me. "People want this." She tested it small. She proved it. Then she built it.
These women didn't fail because they didn't bet everything on day one. They succeeded because they didn't. That's the whole point. The risk of acting feels real because we feel it every day. The risk of not acting is quieter, and we don't feel it until it's much too late to do anything about it. The "test while employed" approach exists to flip that math.
What questions should you sit with right now?
Three. Just three. Don't rush them.
- What's the dream that you've been carrying so long it's nearly worn smooth?
- If you stayed exactly as you are for another five years, what would you have missed?
- If you weren't afraid of looking foolish, what's the one small thing you'd start exploring this week?
If those questions land hard, that's the signal. That's information. Sit with it.
You don't have to run toward a train. You just have to stop pretending standing still is the safe option. It isn't. It never was.
You have this one wild and precious life right now. Today. Inside the day you're already living. The whole point of Dream Lab is to help you stop spending it on autopilot.
The lab is open.