* No tombstone ever said, "He wrote great code." Ponder the implications of that.

* Don't let anybody else define success. You are not in high school anymore--chart your own path.

* Count your blessings. Be grateful, if not to God then to your parents or somebody besides yourself.

Plenty of tombstones and plaques highlight a person's career accomplishments and the impact those had on humanity, e.g., http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Sackville...

Nobody on their deathbed ever says, "I wish I had worked more instead of spending time with my family."

I was just thinking about this yesterday, and I disagree. I think it's something that people repeat without really thinking about it.

Sure, if you hate your job, or it's meaningless. But let's turn this around. Do great painters wish they had spent less time painting? Or do they wish they could finish their last project. Do writers wish they had written less, or do they wish they could live long enough to finish that last book?

I do what I do because I enjoy doing it more than spending time with my family. For better or for worse, it is a compulsion, a calling, not a job.

I agree.

The way most people seem to mean this is one in which it's trivially true, since work is unpleasant but necessary and family is pleasant but scarce.

There is work out there that people love and not only activities that you get compensated for qualify as "work". Similarly there's relatives out there that people do wish they'd spend less time with.

While that's not strictly true. It's also worth considering that working more means nothing to someone on their death bed. What does money do for a dying man? Of course people ask for family and friends when they are dying because there is no longer any value in the products of work.

With that said, there are plenty of people who believe their job does the world good and wish they could do more good before they are taken away from this life. I hope to be one of them.

That's missing the point, though. It's about regret—what people feel they didn't pay attention to when they were younger and healthy, not what is going on at the moment of death.

To say such a thing also isn't necessarily opposed to belief that hard work is good, or that it is valuable to one's self and society. It simply means that if you work too much, you can miss out on life.

Or that death is a very emotional time which increases our desire for people/things that play on that emotion - such as family. But even if this is the case that does not mean that the person did not get more enjoyment from what they actually did than to what was thought on the deathbed.