JULY 23, 2026

The things that don’t grow back

One of my coaching clients is a senior executive with a realistic shot at becoming CEO. He's on the short list of internal candidates, has genuine followership across his team, and carries real sponsorship from the board and the leadership above him.

If it happens, it won't happen tomorrow. It might take another decade. But the door is open.

And so is the cost.

The path ahead means more relocations, more travel, more evenings spent hosting the people he needs to keep close. And more weekends interrupted by things that feel reasonable one at a time, yet add up to something that doesn't.

His kids are older now; young enough that missing time still costs something and old enough that he can count, almost to the year, how much time is left before they build lives of their own.

Recently he told me something had shifted for him. For most of his career, he wondered whether he could actually become CEO. That question used to occupy most of his mental space.

Now he'd stopped asking it because what replaced that thought was something harder: the question of what he would never get back if he stayed on this path.

Two kinds of resources

There's a moment on the way to any big achievement when the question changes. It stops being "what do I need to do to get there?" and becomes "what do I need to give up, and is it worth it?"

Some things you give up will come back. Money leaves and returns, especially with effort and a little luck. Skills compound, in that you can get rusty, but you can always find the learning curve again.

Careers have second and third acts and sometimes chapters you didn't expect after the story looked finished. Even professional and personal reputations recover, if you own what went wrong.

But other things don't work that way. A particular season of your child's life happens exactly once.

The years when your parents can still travel, still hear you clearly, still remember your name will pass and there’s no version where you get them back.

And a healthy body carries you without complaint, until the day it doesn't. You can recover from a health setback. But there's a reason people say “you can have a hundred problems until you have a health problem, and then it's the only one.”

For my client, the things that wouldn't come back weren't money, skill, or reputation; they were summers, Christmases and the years his kids still wanted him around.

Most days we don't notice the difference between what regenerates and what doesn't, because most decisions don't force us to look. For instance, you might skip your workouts this month but you can catch up next year. Or if you miss a summer with friends, you’ll regroup in the fall.

But every so often a decision arrives that asks you to sort your life into these two piles correctly. And if you get it wrong by spending something non-renewable as if it were renewable, there's no next year where it comes back.

The math nobody wants to do

My client ran certain numbers in his head while the company kept adding to his plate, dangling a potential promotion in front of him as long as he said yes to what they asked.

He counted the summers and holidays left with his kids while they still would be in the house. And he weighed that time against tuition, savings targets, and the income jump that patience and persistence at work might eventually buy him.

Putting a number on time with the people you love is a strange kind of math.

When you're young, time feels infinite. So does your earning power, your growth and your options. But as you get older, that math gets harder to accept and foolish to avoid. The numbers start to reveal the difficult truth about what's actually yours to keep and what isn't.

Once you spend time, it's spent. If you put it toward work or if you commit it to family, there’s honor in either choice. But you don’t get to run both experiments and compare notes. You get the one you picked.

Behavioral economists call this opportunity cost neglect: we underweight what we're giving up when the cost is paid in time instead of money.

Spending a dollar registers as a loss immediately. An evening spent somewhere doesn’t, at least not until years of evenings have quietly become the thing you can't get back.

The CEO role, if it comes, won't feel like it cost my client anything on the day he accepts it. The cost will already have been paid, one evening at a time, in the years he was neglecting the opportunity to spend it elsewhere.

A better question

If you're weighing a decision like my client’s, there's no objectively right answer. Maybe the role or goal is worth it, and maybe it isn't. Only you know which costs you can live with, and which ones you can't undo.

But notice what it means that you're even asking the question. My client had stopped wondering whether he was capable of the job. That question was settled. What he was really asking was different, and harder: what am I willing to spend, and will it grow back?

If there's a version of this decision sitting in front of you right now, it's worth naming it plainly. Go deeper than just the goal that you’ll gain and look at the specific thing you’d be spending to get it. And ask yourself whether that is a thing that comes back or not.

This might be the question underneath most big decisions, at any age, in any life. We don’t ask ourselves anymore, can I do this, but is what I'm about to spend, the kind of thing that comes back around, or the kind I only get once?

Bottom line: some things regenerate. Some things don't. Perhaps the most important job in our lives, is to keep observing which is which, and acting accordingly.

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If you've faced a version of this (a decision where you had to sort out what would come back, from what wouldn't), I’d love to hear about it!

Send me a note and tell me what it was, and how you knew.

Until next week,

Nihar