100 FASCINATING PEOPLE I (DIDN'T) MEET IN AIRPORTS

Traveling across America and Asia in the past decade, I’ve invariably met interesting people on planes. OJ’s lawyer Johnny Cochrane was incredibly short. Management guru Jim Collins was incredibly quiet. Actress Lisa Kudrow was incredibly nothing like Phoebe. However, some of the most fascinating people are actually the people who work in airports. Not the people at the ticket counters or running the security (if you can call it that) checkpoints. No, it’s the cashiers at the shops, the janitors in the bathrooms, the van drivers of the shuttles.

By and large, in the US in particular, these folks are immigrants. I determined one day a number of years ago that I would meet 100 of these people, talk to them for a while, and put together a compilation of their stories. (When you fly 150,000 miles a year trust me, it’s wouldn’t take that long to talk to that many people!) Part of it is realizing that many immigrants come here to the US who were doctors, engineers, etc in their homelands, yet cannot be professionals here without starting all over again with their education…a pricey proposition at best.

The spark that stands out in my mind is a woman in her sixties who was an immigrant from Africa according to her nametag that I saw in the Oakland airport manning one of the gift shop registers. Her manner with people, her professionalism, her sheer charisma made me want to know more about her story. That feeling repeated itself numerous times in numerous airports in numerous cities. Yet, I never pulled the trigger. There was always an email to answer, a call to make, a magazine to read.

Now, with the global economic meltdown, business travel for me, as with thousands of others, has slammed to a near halt. Even when it comes back, I am not in a place where I intend to log that many miles or see that many people in airports. While that means good things for my family and for my lower back, it also means that I can pretty much add that book, and the engagements that I could have had, to the list of things that I could have done.

Now as regrets in life go, it’s fairly lightweight, I know. Yet, a regret it is. What’s your book you might be missing the chance to write? Is it a class you aren’t taking? Is it a sport you aren’t taking up? Things may change before you know it that make it a book you’ll never get to write. Make sure you take the time to make sure which regrets you want to have.