Minimize Regret

Anyone out there considering quitting their job and starting a company? Here’s a great video clip of Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) explaining his decision to leave a great job on Wall Street and place a bet on “this new internet thing”. He describes creating a “Regret Minimization Framework” which sounds a lot like this quote from President Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910