It’s ALWAYS obvious in hindsight.
With perfect 20/20 backward vision you could easily make your absolute best decisions.
And if you could turn back time, you might make plenty of different choices.
But foresight is entirely different, isn’t it?
Here you have less than perfect information.
You’re in the realm of uncertainty, risk, downside, fear, failure, loss, etc.
But also excitement, possibility, adventure, and potentially HUGE opportunity.
“It was going to be huge”
This is one of my favorite clips of Jeff Bezos:
It’s short yet it takes you back to where all this started for him.
Back to the mid-90s where he’s at MIT describing the exciting growth he was seeing online, Jeff says—
“If it was growing at 2,300% a year, pretty soon it was going to be huge.”
Of course in hindsight leaving his job to go after this opportunity seems a no-brainer, but keep in mind that the first question Jeff says he got from the 60 investors he first met was—
“What’s the Internet?”
Since he was a kid Jeff had imagined building things, he was drawn to the adventure and rewards of being an entrepreneur.
Yet it still could have been an extremely hard decision for him.
Plenty reasons NOT to
Some people might think that Jeff made his money on Wall Street, or had otherwise ascended in his career to the point where leaving to start Amazon was a natural next step.
But that was far from the case.
Jeff was still relatively junior in his career, at a level where there was great career risk and opportunity cost in leaving, including the bonus he would leave on the table.
He hadn’t yet created wealth.
To start Amazon he borrowed $300,000 from his parents, telling them there was a 70% chance of losing it all.
So it wasn’t like Jeff had this lined up, de-risked, and it was just a matter of execution.
Still, this framework made the decision easy for him.
Minimize your regrets
Leaving any job can be hard, and it’s especially hard to leave a great job like Jeff’s.
He was recently married and had moved into a new apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
And as Jeff says, his wife had married this “stable guy” who was now risking it all to go for this moonshot.
So you see for Jeff thinking about leaving his job, just like for the rest of us, wasn’t an easy decision, yet as he describes here he had a framework that made it easy:
Referring to this as his Regret Minimization Framework, projecting himself forward to age 80 he says:
I’m looking back on my life, I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret participating in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not having ever tried. And I knew that would haunt me every day.
You might recall that I’ve shared this framework with you before but I wanted to come back to it differently because of how valuable this framework can be.
How is this most valuable for you?
Having made these types of decisions myself and worked with clients on this, I see so much value in this framework from Jeff.
It can be incredibly difficult to make life-changing choices, yet here you see how with the right framework, it can be easy.
And also keep in mind the point here.
As I wrote in the previous letter, and I’ll keep coming back to this as I share more on Jeff and Elon, I’m “trying” to convey that this ISN’T about them.
It’s about what you can learn from them that might be most valuable for you.
To be specific, here I’m NOT suggesting that Jeff’s framework is right for you in making your life decisions, or even that Jeff made the “right” decision for him.
The point is that the right framework made this decision easy for him, and the same can be true for making your most difficult decisions too.