Bezos’ “Golden Question”
Before building what would become the largest online retailer in the world, Jeff Bezos was a vice president at a fledgling hedge fund. Despite being very good at his job, Bezos couldn’t shake the idea of building a startup that would leverage this rapidly growing thing known as the internet as a way to sell books online.
So, Bezos went to his boss to let him know his plans, and that he would be leaving the company. … The boss then persuaded Bezos to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. …
To help him decide whether or not to leave his very stable, very financially rewarding job to pursue a crazy dream, Bezos projected himself forward to age 80 and looked back on his life with the goal of minimizing regrets. …
This regret minimization framework can be useful when you’re trying to manage emotions, cut through the noise, and make difficult decisions. …
Here’s how it works. When navigating your emotions as you attempt to make a major decision, ask yourself the following:
How will I feel about this in:
- a day?
- a week?
- a month?
- a year?
- Five, 15, or 20 years? …
By asking yourself the golden question, you use your brain as a whole, balancing rational thought and emotions. Yes, you have the ability now to carefully and thoughtfully imagine how things will play out in the years to come, but you also keep emotions as part of the equation.
Question: What do you think about this “golden question” method?
Answer: It is not bad.
Question: Tell me, in your opinion, what question should a person ask himself at the moment when he has to make a fateful decision?
Answer: What result do I want my life to end with? What do I want in the end?
Question: If I sit down, think about it, and a feeling comes to me that I will take off, then do I have to make this decision or not?
Answer: Here is the problem. You do not know if you will fail or not. Maybe you will spend years gnawing at yourself every day: Why did I not choose another solution; I do not know if it is worth it.
Question: In principle, are you in favor of revolutions in a person’s life?
Answer: Somewhere once or twice in a lifetime a person has to make a turn.
Question: What turn do you think is truly fateful for a person?
Answer: Like in the song:
The right to forget the years,
The right to remember the hours,
The right to choose how to live,
Throwing life on the scales.
You have to worry and cry, but eventually throw your life on the scales and decide. Otherwise, you will be gnawing at yourself all the time, you will be in doubt all the time, and you will not achieve anything.
Question: Please tell me, remembering your life, what was your fateful decision?
Answer: I left my business practically for free. It was in Israel. I left it and did not worry for a minute. I did not look back. Because I still had something in my hands that I really wanted all my life.
Question: Are you talking about how you came to your teacher and the science of Kabbalah?
Answer: Yes, and that is why it all paid off. It paid off in the fact that if this is the most important thing for me, then I do not need gold, money, cars, and so on.
Question: Please teach me, because it does not work like that. You regret something all the time, you constantly think: “What if I did that? What if I did this?” It says in the Torah about this: do not look back. But how? How to cut it off just like that?
Answer: I don’t know. I think about what will happen on the last day of my life and not about what happened. That is the main thing for me. The result.
Question: So, we are coming back to this “golden question.” There is still a seed in it, after all?
Answer: Of course!
Question: So, at this moment I have to understand, accept my life, and calmly leave?
Answer: Yes. I did everything I could. It worked, it did not work, with mistakes, without mistakes—I did it.
Question: You keep coming back to the fact that, one way or another, a person must find the meaning of his life. That is what he lives for.
All our sharp turns and sharp decisions, is this the way? Is this exactly probing? Does it sit internally in a person?
Answer: I do not think these are sharp turns. I think it is being prepared within the person constantly and then it just rises and spills over the edge.
Question: The exact thing that he wants?
Answer: Yes.
Question: So, all these decisions that he talks about are searching for oneself, for the meaning of life?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Does a person have to finally find the true meaning of life or will everyone have their own?
Answer: To the extent that he can. But, in principle, you should be ready to “throw yourself off a cliff.”
Question: This means giving up everything and running to find the meaning of life.
Answer: Yes.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 9/1/22
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