Jeff Bezos explains how he decided to quit his job and start Amazon

I really liked my job and I told my boss I was going to go do this thing, start an Internet bookstore. He said, I think this is a good idea, but it would be an even better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job. And that sort of made some logical sense to me. And he convinced me to think about it for a couple of days. So I went away and I was really trying to get my head around how to think about this. And I think for me, the right way to make that kind of very personal decision, because those decisions are personal. They're not like data driven business decisions. They are, you know, what does your heart say? And for me, the best way to think about it was to project myself Forward to age 80 and say, look, when I'm 80 years old, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have. I don't want to be 80 years old. In a quiet moment of reflection, thinking back over my life and cataloging a bunch of major regrets. And I think our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission. It's paths not taken and they haunt us. We wonder what would have happened. I loved that person and I never told them. And then they married somebody else. And so that's the frame of mind that I put myself in. And I. And once I did that, once I thought about it that way, it was immediately obvious to me. I knew that when I'm 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and failing. If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I'm 80 that I tried. And I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn't try. And so that would be a regret. It would be 100% chance of a regret if I didn't try and basically a zero percent chance of regret if I tried and failed. So I think that's a useful metric for any important life decision.