Jeff Bezos on the mental model that got him to quit a good job:
Bezos had already told his wife he was leaving to start an internet bookstore. Her reaction: "Great, let's go."
His boss was less enthusiastic.
"He's like, 'This is a good idea. I think this is a good idea, but it would be an even better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job.'"
That landed. Bezos admits it "sort of made some logical sense to me," and his boss talked him into taking a couple of days to think it over.
The problem was that logic wasn't the right tool for the job. As Bezos frames it, "those decisions are personal, they're not like data-driven business decisions, they are, you know, what does your heart say."
So instead of building a case, he changed his vantage point, projecting himself forward to age 80:
"Look, when I'm 80 years old, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have. I don't want to be 80 years old in a quiet moment of reflection thinking back over my life and cataloging a bunch of major regrets."
The key move is what he noticed about the shape of regret. It isn't usually the thing you did:
"I think that regrets, our biggest regrets in most cases... you can murder somebody, okay, you'd regret that. But in most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission. It's paths not taken, and they haunt us. We wonder what would have happened. 'I loved that person and I never told them and then they married somebody else,' 'I didn't do this.'"
Once he ran the decision through that filter, the answer stopped being close:
"I knew that when I'm 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and failing. If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I'm 80 that I tried. And I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn't try."
Which collapses into a single line of arithmetic:
"So that would be a regret. It would be a 100% chance of a regret if I didn't try, and basically a 0% chance of regret if I tried and failed. So I think that's a useful metric for any important life decision."
Note what the framework actually does. It doesn't estimate the odds of success. Bezos never claims the bookstore would work. It reprices failure, which turns out to cost almost nothing in the only currency that matters at 80, while inaction costs the full amount with certainty. His boss was optimising the next two years. Bezos was optimising the last one.
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She must know which of the six tastes — sweet, salty, sour, pungent, bitter, astringent — her husband prefers. Which food aids his digestion. What is healthy for the season. She does not just cook. She studies her husband's body the way a physician studies a patient.
If women are not controlled, it is their natural inclination and purpose to destroy, shame, and damage whatever they belong to, a person, a place, a religion, a race, or a country. enemies are always welcome in their homes.