Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on his decision to start an online bookstore in the 1990s:
The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called the regret minimization framework. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and look back on my life and I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. And I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. And I knew that that would haunt me every day. So when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.
With unavoidable uncertainty and wild problems, sometimes regret minimization is the best paradigm we have.