Minimizing Regrets.. The Jeff Bezos way.
Reading about Bezos’s life, I feel tired on his behalf.
Aside from fighting with other companies, Bezos is often solo against his own executives.
He was alone in favor of super saver shipping.
Alone insisting on launching Prime — a paid membership service that gives you two-day shipping free.
He alone was trying to get his managers to stock every book ever published on Amazon — that never happened because the execs refused to do it.
The execs dubbed this and other similarly ambitious campaigns “fever dreams”.
Bezos even came up with the fever dream of stocking every possible toy for the upcoming Christmas season. His executives, as always, resist. As he is yelling the orders to buy $250 million worth of toys he adds,
“If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!”
One of the executives points out that it would take a lot of trips in his Honda Accord, LOL.
How does he deal with these resistance?
If you didn’t start succeeding in life early, by now the feeling of regret has crept in. At 29, while debating whether to start his “everything store”, a prescient Bezos was already keenly aware of how terrible it would feel to regret not having tried when he was old. So he came up with the Regret Minimization Framework. He used it to decide whether to walk away from a well-paying job on Wall Street in the middle of the year, which would mean passing up on that year’s bonus.
The framework works like this:
- Project your life out to when you are 80 years old.
- Ask your 80-year old self if you regret now that you didn’t try starting that business you thought could be a big deal.
- Then ask yourself if you’d regret your job. How about your unpaid bonus? Your stability? Feeling of “having made it”?
This long-term perspective cleared his short-term confusion. For Bezos, the decision became obvious — he should go.
These methods were borrowed from books — reading books and literally applying them to optimize his life is a method in itself.
Recommended Book: The everything store, Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon by Brad Stone.