“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Soren Kierkegaard
In Directional Correctness, I shared a better way to think about the future. Today, I want to share a decision-making framework that I have found incredibly useful: the Jeff Bezos Regret Minimization Framework.
This framework says to make decisions that will ultimately minimize the amount of regret you have when it’s all said and done.
Project yourself out to the age of 80 and look back on your life. You will inevitably have regrets, but the amount of aggregate regret is determined by the decisions that you made during your life.
Knowing this, you can start making decisions today that will minimize that amount of unwanted regret.
Projecting yourself out to 80 gets you away from the short-term pieces of confusion that might cloud your judgement; it lowers your time-preference and encourages you to think about the long-term.
For me, this framework immediately provides clarity to big “life decisions”.
Nuance is always needed, but I’m shocked how this mental model can so effectively simplify what I once thought to be daunting and complex decisions. I hope it does the same for you.
Recommendations:
Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (book)
Founders #155 Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (podcast episode on the book mentioned above, hosted by David Senra)
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone (book)