No room for regrets

Mitika Sethi Srivastava

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on January 12, 1964, to Jacklyn Jorgensen, aged 19 and Ted Jorgensen of the same age group. Jeff’s parents got divorced in less than a year, and later when Bezos was about four years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, together they brought up Jeff as their child. Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos' home in Bellevue, Washington.

Currently, the firm commands a value of $547 billion and a recent Morgan Stanley report says that e-commerce major Amazon Inc. could top $1 trillion value in market capitalisation within the next one year.

What does your heart say?

According to Bezos, following your heart is the right way to make the personal decisions, they’re not like data-driven business decisions. When Bezos was facing the dilemma of leaving a cushy job to start his startup, amazon he was in two thoughts, and this is what he did.

“ The best way to think about it was to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Look, when I’m 80 years old, I want to have minimised the number of regrets that I have. I think that regrets, our biggest regrets, in most cases,  turn out to be acts of omission. It’s the paths not taken that haunt us. We wonder what would have happened. I didn’t do this, and so that’s the frame of mind that I put myself in and once I did that, and thought about it that way, it was immediately obvious to me. I knew that when I’m 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and it 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. And so that would be a regret, it would be 100 per cent chance of regret if I didn’t try and basically a zero per cent chance of regret if I tried and failed. So I think that’s a useful metric for any important life decision.” 

It is for sure that Jeff made the right choice for his life, its time that you too make some hard decisions.

Approach problems with “child-like curiosity.”

“People often believe you have to be a 'domain expert' to find solutions to problems. But the danger is that once you’re a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge,” says Bezos.

What is evident can be superficial, to get to the real crux of matter Jeff recommends using a data-centric approach. Asking five times like children “Why,” eventually leads you to the real problem, which needs an urgent resolution.

Be resourceful & resilient

“There are a lot of entrepreneurs, and people pursuing dreams and passions know — the whole point of moving things forward is you run into problems, you run into failures, things don’t work, you have to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have to step back, back up and try again. You’re using resourcefulness, and you’re using self-reliance. You’re trying to invent your way out of a box, and we have tons of examples at Amazon where we have had to do this. We failed so many times. I always think of us as a great place to fail because we’re good at it. We have so much practice. And, to give you one example, we, many years ago now, we started a third-party selling business because we knew it could add selection to the store that way, and we started Amazon Auctions. Nobody came; I think maybe our mother was the only one who purchased something,” says Bezos.

— The writer is a start-up expert with experience in leading and setting up HR practices for Fortune 500 firms.