A way to make hard choices: picture yourself at eighty and ask which option you would regret skipping more.
Example
You are deciding whether to enter a school art contest. Picture yourself at eighty looking back. The version that entered and lost is fine. The version that never entered keeps wondering. The regret-minimization pick is usually the one your eighty-year-old self prefers.
How it fits in
Bezos used this exact tool to leave his Wall Street job and start Amazon. The trick is not predicting the right answer. It is changing your time horizon. Choices that feel terrifying in the present often look obvious from forty years out, because the long view filters out the things you only feared because they were new.
Where this is taught
Entrepreneurs who exemplify this
Related terms
Whether the same action helps or hurts depends on the situation around it.
Make decisions inside what you actually understand. The aim is not the biggest circle, but knowing where its edge is.
Judge a choice by the information you had at the time, not by how it turned out. The result and the choice are separate things.