Avoiding regrets

When my daughter was at nursery I missed a show she was in. Unknown to me, she had the leading role and I missed it because of a work meeting.

It is something that happens multiple times every day all over the world. It is my main regret that I missed that performance.

It changed me. It highlighted to me what are my priorities in life and since then I have been to every performance she has done; and that includes sitting through some fairly “painful” experiences. I have seen her perform violin and piano, I have seen her act and been to more dance shows than I can count. I don’t regret going to any of them but I do regret missing that one show.

This morning we had a whole bunch of problems with some of our infrastructure. One of our engineers was tasked with sorting them out. They were not production issues but they were blocking the developers on both teams. He had previously messaged that at 10am he was going to watch his son’s show.

When 10am rolled around he decided he was going to focus on the issues as it was blocking so many people and he would miss the show. I explained to him that he would only get one chance to see the show and the engineers could wait. I told him about my regret.

He went to the show.

This was the response I got when he got back:

Thank you very very much for that. It really meant a lot to my son to be there and see him, and his band, tackle a song in their own individual times. Genuinely, thank you from the bottom of my heart - I would have regretted missing that.

Did the developers complain? No. Did they find other things to do in the meantime? Yes. Was it inconvenient to them? Yes - but they all understand the culture we have worked hard to create.

It was one of the moments I am most proud of what we have created - it is not always about the product, sometimes it is about the people.