Favorite Principles from Jeff Bezos [2]

“Regret minimization.”

Mr. Bezos has a great principle to deal with hard, important decisions.

In his words:

“When I’m eighty, I want to have as few regrets as possible, and most regrets usually come from things we haven’t tried, paths we haven’t explored. Those are the things that haunt us obsessively.”

Keeping this in mind while evaluating important decisions is what he calls “regret minimization.”

In practical terms, this is best applied by asking ourselves one of the following two questions: 

1- Look at all of the options in front of you and think “which one of these would make me feel the LEAST regret when I’m older?”

2- Conversely, ask yourself “which one of these options would I totally regret if I did NOT try it when younger?”

The regret minimization principle is a powerful tool to bring clarity to the present moment. 

When confronted with what might be important for us 20, 30 or 40 years into the future, the irrelevant issues of the present become easier to spot.

I find this principle especially useful for those life-changing decisions that we all encounter at some point.

• What career to choose.
• Joining a risky project.
• Whether to move to another country/city with more opportunities.

What will matter to you the most when you’re old and look back at the big decisions you made?

The story goes that Bezos asked himself this exact question when he was younger, and that’s how he decided to build Amazon.

He had a highly paying job in finance, but he intuitively knew that he could come back to finance whenever he wanted. 

Building Amazon, in contrast, was a very timely endeavor.

He needed to decide, and this is how he convinced himself to make this amazingly hard decision:

“I knew that at 80 years old I would not regret participating in this thing called ‘the internet.’”

And boy, was he right that it was worth it to participate in “this thing called the internet”…

In the present, when facing a life-changing situation, we will never know what the “correct” decision is. We will actually have no idea of how the future will turn out.

But interestingly, we always have a pretty clear idea of what we will regret when we’re older.

Think of this next time you’re facing a big decision.