Bezos’s Life Changing Framework

Yes, you can do it without any of his money (or brains).

Yes, you can do it without any of his money (or brains).

We all have regrets.

And while it’s impossible to go back in time, the ever wise, king of business Mr. Jeff Bezos, has a solution.

Just kidding, this is definitely not a thread worshiping ‘bathroom break Bezos’, I know there’s mixed opinions about how he runs his businesses, but this particular framework is strong, so bear with me.

Bezos coined the term “Regret Minimization Framework” as a tool that helps us make decisions by taking into account both the positive and negative outcomes of our choices.

The idea is that you should ask yourself this question when thinking about something yoteu want to do: In X years, will I regret not doing this?

To quote Mr. Bezos on starting Amazon:

“I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate 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 ever having tried.”

Regardless of what you think about Jeff, he lived by this mantra.

You may not have heard of his failures (for obvious reasons), but here’s a (short) list of some of the things that didn’t work out so well.

• Pets.com and Kozmo.com

• Amazon Fire Phone

• LivingSocial

• Haven

• Crucible

• Amazon Wallet

• Amazon Destinations

• My Habit

• Askville.com

• WebPay

• Amazon TestDrive

• Amazon Auctions and zShops

• Amazon Local Register

To put it bluntly, he was very familiar with trying, and failing.

“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle”

Most of these failures resulted in millions, if not billions in lost revenue, but many of these failures paved the way for billion dollar business ideas like Amazon Web Services.

The basic idea behind the regret minimization framework is simple:

Instead of trying to choose the absolute best option, choose the option that will give us the least amount of regret if it turns out to be the wrong choice.

When faced with a difficult decision:

(1) Imagine yourself in the future.

(2) Look back at the decision (as your future self).

(3) Ask “will I regret not doing this?”

If the answer is yes, then do it.

The goal is to make sure that our future selves don’t look back at our decisions with regret.

What this model forces you to do is to reframe how to view decisions (technically this is what all mental models do), but it forces us to think beyond our fears and doubts.

It forces you review decisions from a more thoughtful and insightful mental state.

By retroactively gauging the effect the decision may have had (or not had) on your life, you remove the emotion and human fallacy from the decision, which will ultimately leave you with the ability to make a more well thought out, and better decision.