Sometimes you have to make long term decisions which are hard to make. Maybe you have to decide whether you should quit your day job and start your own business, choose a relationship, change your house and move to another city or even a country. Hard decisions like these can completely change the course of your life. They have a long-term impact on you and potentially your family.
As humans our brain is not wired to prioritize our future self, so we need a framework to make the best long-term decision. We need a framework to motivate ourselves to overcome future self-continuity, the phenomenon where, by default, we see our future selves as someone else.
We need a framework that compel us to see our future selves as fulfilled. This is where the regret minimization framework can guide you in the right direction. The basic idea being the regret minimization framework is, to maximize your long-term happiness, prioritize projects which you will most regret if not pursued by the time you are old enough to look back at your life.
The idea behind the framework is simple.
Project yourself forward to the age of 80. Looking back on your life, you want to minimize the number of regrets.
If you project yourself in future to the age of 80 and think about your potential regrets, you will get a lot clearer picture. It will also help you to clear your confusions in the present caused by alternate paths and make the right decision. If your decision is a yes, then make sure you have a superior strategy to execute and have evaluated your risks.
When Bezos had to make the decision of quitting a stable job to a start-up, he used the regret minimization framework.
When you are in the thick of things you can get confused by small stuff, I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of think just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way … it was incredibly easy to make the decision.
But beware, to not use the framework as an excuse to do something stupid. Create a vision list that includes all the things that you would regret if you haven’t at least tried them. Don’t let fear and self-doubt stop you from what you really want to achieve. When you find the right opportunity, use the regret minimization framework to make the right decision.