How to minimise regrets
Newsletter
Hey friends,
I got an email a few days ago from a high school student in the Philippines (letβs call him Matt) considering applying to medical school. He was worried because itβs such a competitive process – what if he spends years trying and failing to get in? If that were to happen, he would have βwastedβ those years of his life.
Jeff Bezos (the founder of Amazon) has a system for decision-making that he calls hisΒ Regret Minimisation FrameworkΒ (yep, seriously). He wants to make decisions in such a way that when heβs 80 years old and looking back on his life, he has as few regrets as possible.
In Jeffβs case, this framework told him that he should probably leave his job at a well-paying hedge fund and start a book store on this thing calledΒ The Internet. Had he not done so, he would have regretted not trying.
I like to have this in the back of my mind when making decisions, but thereβs another important aspect of minimising regret that I like to call theΒ Win-Win Principle.
The Win-Win Principle
TheΒ Win-Win PrincipleΒ states that whenever weβre trying something new or risky, we should design it so that we win even if we lose. Tim Ferriss did this when setting up his podcast. Even if the podcast flopped, he would have still βwonβ, because heβd have learned audio production and how to be be a better interviewer. His podcast, incidentally, is now one of the most popular in the world (and one of my all-time favourites).
Matt can apply theΒ Win-Win PrincipleΒ to his conundrum of applying to medical school. Firstly, of course, he should do everything he can to maximise his chances (good grades, reading around the subject, work experience, extra-curricular activities etc). Then even if he doesnβt get in and has to take a gap year, he can use that year to work on his own projects, try out new hobbies, read more books, level-up skills. Thatβs a year of growth that everyone who got in to medical school that year will be missing out on, because theyβll be spending that time memorising pointless things like the Krebβs cycle.
So to answer Mattβs question in a roundabout way, he should definitely apply to medical school if thatβs what he wants to do, because if he didnβt, he would regret it later in life. And he should work on other stuff alongside his application so that even if he misses out on a place, heβll still have βwonβ in his own way.
This way of thinking makes most risky decisions a lot less risky. We can always find a way to turn a loss into a learning experience. We can choose to build systems that mean we win, even if we lose. And if we do this consistently, we might even find that our apparent βfailuresβ set us up for even bigger successes later in life.
Have a great week!
Ali
PS: Iβm going to do a 100k subscribers Q&A video soon. Normally I ask for questions via Instagram and YouTube but this time Iβll put it to this email list – do you have any questions youβd like to ask?
PPS: As much as I LOVE getting questions about specific grade requirements to study Medicine at Cambridge, or what scholarships are available for international students to study Medicine at Cambridge, Iβll probably prioritise questions where the answer would benefit a broader audience π
Stuff Iβve been enjoying this week
(1) A great video about jealousy – Anna Akana
I was going to write an email about this at some point, but this video says everything I wouldβve wanted in a wonderfully entertaining way.
(2) My new favourite YouTube channel – Becki and Chris
The branding + personality + amount of effort that goes into each video is incredible. These guys are legit YouTube + couple goals. Also, their interior design is to die for.