Minimize regrets
An amazing framework for making decisions
The UCLA co-op is a wonderful place — it is tremendously social, full of interesting people, cheap, and home to some very delicious food. I’ve been living there for the past two quarters, loving everything about it.
And so when the opportunity came to apply to its Board of Directors, I was intrigued. I had previously lived in a co-op in Seattle during my summer internship, and was curious to see how the much larger one at UCLA worked. How does it govern? What does its Board actually do?
So I found myself in the quite unexpected predicament of considering whether or not I should apply to the Board.
On the one hand, it seemed like a great way to get more involved in the co-op, make some extra money, and acquire another funny story to tell: “Back in my day, I was a Board Director at the UCLA Co-op, lol”
Yet being on the Board would mean committing some of my precious, last-quarter-at-UCLA-before-I-graduate time and mental energy to this endeavor. Was that trade-off worth it?
Naturally, I consulted my roommate Finlay on this decision, a common occurrence. We chatted about it for a bit, and I found myself considering what I’d regret more: Applying for a Board position, getting it, and locking in some of my precious senior year time? Or not applying at all and wishing that I had?
When I looked at it like that way, it was clear to me that I should apply. I did, and ended up getting the role.
Hooray!
This experience reinforced an idea I’d been thinking about for quite some time: Regret is a tremendously interesting thing, and often, our regrets are misinformed.
Let me explain.
Regret involves looking back at our past selves, and wishing that the course of action we took was different. Here are a few personal examples:
“Damn, I really should’ve asked that girl for her number”
“I should’ve called my grandma more before she passed”
“Eating that prickly pear cactus at Morro Bay was a terrible idea, why didn’t I see those tiny spikes on it” —> I subsequently spent the next 4 hours picking these tiny spikes out of my fingers, lips, and tongue 🙃
Interestingly, we regret inaction more than action, meaning that we regret not doing something more than doing something. Failed attempts are usually considered learning experiences (so-called “taking an L”), whereas failing to attempt causes much regret after the fact. In these cases, you realize that you undersold yourself, that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.
But we are often too hard on our past ourselves. We judge retroactively with the information we presently have, and hindsight is always 20/20.
With the benefit of this hindsight, of course, there are likely many things that you’d change if you could go back, but that’s usually because you now have some information that you didn’t have then. This new information, subsequently, makes the past decision clearly a wrong one.
At the end of the day, this is unfair to your past self. If you make the best decision you can at the time with the information you have, you can’t regret that action — you did the best you could. Plus, if you’re happy with where you are in life now, you can’t regret any past decisions.
All of them, the good and the bad, led right to where you are now.
This naturally begs the question, how can you make the best decisions? For that, let’s look at Jeff Bezos.
Before he founded Amazon, Bezos was working at a top hedge fund in New York City. At the time, he was curious about this new thing called the Internet, and was considering leaving his cushy job in New York to move across the country selling books online.
He wasn’t sure what to do, so he imagined that he was 80 years old and looking back on his life. What would he regret more? Leaving his nice job to take a big risk, or never making that risk at all?
For Bezos, it was clear to him that he’d much more regret never trying, so he packed up his things, drove to Seattle, and the rest is history. He remarks, “If you can project yourself to age 80 and think, ‘What will I think at that time’, it helps you get away from the daily pieces of confusion.”
Thus, the “regret minimization framework” is born! To help make the best decisions, look at each option and think about how much you’d regret not doing it in the future. Pick the one that minimizes the regret, and you’re all set.
This is surprisingly easy, and helps makes these difficult questions seem much simpler.
When I looked at applying for the Co-op’s Board of Directors, it was clear to me that I’d much more regret not doing so. When I was thinking about whether or to study abroad, it was clear that I’d much more regret not going to Paris than missing a quarter of social life at UCLA. There are so many more examples, and this strategy of minimizing regrets has served me tremendously well.
So what’s the point of all this?
First, to make the best decisions, think about to your future self and look back on what you’d regret more. Then, pick the option that minimizes your regrets the most.
Remember that regrets from inaction are much stronger than those from action. Doing something risky and failing is much better than never taking the risk and wishing you had afterward. The risk of failure is often much worse than it seems. If you sit down and really think about how bad the outcome of a decision can be, you realize that it’s not actually that catastrophic.
Yet we often sell ourselves short. As Judy-Maie Zhu writes,
The majority of people do not follow up after a failed interview, the majority of people can not handle beyond a few failures, a few cold shoulders. And the majority of people are willing to accept the world as it is presented to us; neatly wrapped with a big bow and unable to be tampered with. “That’s just how the world works”, we begin to say as we sound more and more like the adults we so wondered about as children. The moment you start poking and prodding, however, the bow unravels and the pristine wrapping paper is realized to have a gaps and flaws and room for you to poke your finger in. What you may find inside said box, Schrödinger may argue, is a world of infinite possibilities — only given to those who have the courage to poke at things.
So keep poking, and go take those risks. You have some regrets to minimize!
Best,
Dennis :)
P.S. After all this, I’ve realized that I don’t regret eating that cactus in Morro Bay. Now I know not to do that again!
Dennis’s Picks:
The article Mechanisms too simple for humans to design. The idea is that humans have an extremely hard time replicating nature not because it’s so complex, but because it’s so simple. A tremendously interesting read!
This piece about the pleasure of the journey of creation. A tremendously helpful reminder, especially when I feel like banging my head against the wall when my writing doesn’t seem to be coming together.
Happy 1-year anniversary, Brooke! Going on that backpacking trip to Santa Barbara is something I’ll never regret ❤️