#psychology #self-organization #mindfulness #principles #habit-1
idea
Doing all the things that will prevent you from having regrets later, genuinely trying to do something about your current situation ; so that even if that doesn't work out, later I'll be able to tell myself "at least I tried".
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[[proactivity]]
references
Jeff Bezos:
I want to have lived my life in such a way that when I’m 80 years old I’ve minimized the number of regrets that I have
I don’t go in for Carpe Diem, I go in for regret minimization framework!
I went to my boss and said to him you know I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this this company selling books online and this is something that I’d already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context.
But then he said “let’s go on a walk” and we went on a two-hour walk in Central Park in New York City. And the conclusion of that was this he said “you know this actually sounds like a really good idea to me but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.”
And he convinced me to about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. And so I went away and and and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. And you know I already talked to my wife about this and she was very supportive. And said “look you know you can count me in 100% whatever you want to do.”
And the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called – which only a nerd would call – a regret minimization framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say okay now I’m looking back on my life I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.
And you know what I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret having wanted 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 and I knew that that would hunted me every day. And so when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision. And I think that’s a very good. It’s if you can project yourself out to age 80 and think what will I think.
At that time it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year when you do that you walk away from your annual bonus. And that’s the kind of thing then the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.