A personal life philosophy in my more seasoned days is to focus on making happy choices.
It follows naturally from a core piece of counsel I have always given young people, which is to make the big decisions with your heart, the little ones with your head. You might call it the ‘joy maximization framework,’ given how the man who made Amazon looks at it.
Jeff Bezos shares a smart approach. In the zone of what I would call ‘making happy choices’ is what Jeff calls a ‘regret minimisation framework.’ In a 1999 interview in which he spoke about his decision to leave his well-paid Wall Street job to start Amazon, he said he wanted to live his life in a way that minimized the number of regrets he would hold when he’s older.
Not doing something because of fear of regret or failure is kind of ironic considering that it’s the things we haven’t done that we usually regret. Overthinking, and worrying, just uses up your bandwidth for happiness and getting ahead in life quicker. Stop thinking, start doing, and make stuff happen. Take a chance, run some risks. Be excessive in a good way. Be active, and when you try and fail as all do, fail fast, learn fast and fix fast.
In 2018, make happy choices, the ones that feel right in the core of your gut, true at the time in your heart. They are the ones that you will always smile about.
Happy New Year.
KR.
