On Minimizing Regret
Regret minimization is a powerful framework. It lets you negotiate decisions from the perspective of your future self, rather than getting bogged down by indecision in the present. I have used it throughout my life to make critical decisions amidst uncertainty.
I have three rules that have helped me minimize regret:
- Write the more interesting story.
- Lean into fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
- Regret from action is less painful than regret from inaction.
Write the more interesting story
When thinking about what major to pursue, what job to take, what hobby to pick up, what skill to learn, or what place to visit, use the lens of authoring the most interesting story. Imagine life as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” game — because in many ways, it is.
Get off the default storyline and explore the unusual side quests. Make the decisions that give you “main character energy.” You are not an NPC — a non-playable character. When indecision or indifference sets in, imagine telling the more interesting story over lunch with colleagues, or to your grandkids gathered around your chair.
While living in West Lafayette, Indiana, our home was near a fire station, which I drove past often. I wondered whether there might be an opportunity to volunteer. One day I parked in the front lot and knocked on the door. A rather large and imposing firefighter answered, and I asked if there was any way I could help. I left with an application to become a volunteer firefighter. Over the next three years I became a nationally registered EMT, an Indiana state-certified firefighter, and a trained tanker-truck operator, and I responded to hundreds of fire and medical calls.
Lean into FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt can be useful signals. These feelings are a kind of information, arriving through intuition and deep neural circuitry that evades legible interpretation. Don’t write them off.
But they are not universally signs to avoid a path. Often they are credible signposts for where you ought to go next and what you ought to do. It is more comfortable to ride inertia, doing what you’ve always done; it is less risky to pursue what you know well and whose outcome is assured. But that leaves many worthwhile opportunities to go to waste, simply because they lie on the far side of a scary or uncertain decision.
Do not choose the known over the unknown. Be willing to take a chance and step into the dark. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are the emotions that accompany a call to adventure. All real adventures are uncertain, and count failure among their possible outcomes.
Where your fear is, there is your task.
— Carl Jung
When I was an engineer at ExxonMobil, I had already been granted admission to Harvard Business School on a deferred basis. When my two years were up, I got an email from the university asking whether it should expect my matriculation that fall.
I enjoyed ExxonMobil. I knew my work well. I was a good engineer. I could envision, with a fair amount of certainty, the career trajectory ahead of me if I stayed.
On the other side of Harvard Business School, I did not know what industry I would work in, what kind of job I would take, or how an MBA would benefit me. All I knew was that it was a call to adventure, and that it put me outside my comfort zone. Ambivalent and unsure, I decided that between the two I would lean into the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. That decision completely changed the trajectory of my life. I don’t have the counterfactual, but it is not the only time that doing the brave thing and stepping into the unknown has spared me regret.
Bias to action over inaction. Fight inertia.
There are two classes of decisions, and two kinds of regret that follow:
- Taking an action, seeing it turn out badly, and regretting what followed.
- Staying the course, making no new decision, and living with the lingering regret of “what if.”
Both kinds of regret can occur, but the regret of inaction — of chances not taken, opportunities not sought, words left unsaid — only grows with time, and can haunt a man for life. Regret from action, by contrast, fades. Of the two, regret from action is by far the more tolerable outcome.
You have two trajectories:
- Regret from doing, which will fade over time.
- Regret from the path not taken, which will linger, grow, and potentially haunt you.
Have a bias for action. The law of inertia says an object in motion stays in motion until a force acts on it. Don’t be an inanimate object skating along an inertial path. Make decisions. Be the force in your own life. Change your trajectory. Too often it is simply more comfortable to continue along.
Here is what Jeff Bezos said about founding Amazon:
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 company selling books online.” This was something that I had 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.” He convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision.
So I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. I had already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, “Look, you know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do.” It’s true she had married this fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100 percent supportive. So it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, 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.” 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. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision. And I think that’s very good. 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. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in 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.