Conversation between Ben Casnocha and Ramit Sethi (recorded April 2, 2013) about choosing career paths. They discuss Jeff Bezos' "regret minimization framework" as a decision heuristic, emphasize daily behaviors (habitual actions matter more than rare events), and explore serendipity—creating positive randomness by biasing toward action and experimentation. Ben emphasizes surrounding yourself with people who exemplify the person you want to become and learning by osmosis/curiosity.
Chapters
I am Ben Kaznoca, an entrepreneur and author from San Francisco. Thanks for being here. My pleasure.
One thing that we both watched, and I think it affected us, was this video from Jeff Bezos on what he called his regret minimization framework.
Yes. Right.
Where he said, I'm going to look at things as if I'm 10, 20, 30 years in the future and say, did I would making this decision make me regret it or would not making this decision make me regret it? That really affected me totally.
And so the funny thing is, this is a great example of kind of nifty, like, it's very important to brand ideas. You're a master at this, obviously, but regret minimization framework's much stickier. I've been blogging about this concept. I think prior to seeing that speech and then seeing the speech from Bezos was like, it's the same idea, but obviously he's like a thousand times more credible but also better framed and packaged beautifully. But on the grip point. Yeah. I mean, I used to. Back when I. My early set of talks, when I was doing my startup life talks, I had a big Mark Twain. A big slide of the Mark Twain quote, which was, we regret the things we don't do more than the things we do. And it's the. If you talk to folks and ask them to reflect on their life, you know, older people, it's always the kind of itch of, I wonder what would have happened if. And that is a much more damning question than the, oh, I went to Brazil and it was a shit show and I got robbed. Then I wonder what would have happened if I'd walked the beaches of Ipanema and experienced the Brazil that I dreamed about for so long. So when in doubt, this is kind of, when in doubt, say yes, because better to try and know what it is than to forever live in wonderment about what could have been.
Yes, let's talk about these daily behaviors that we can do instead of just planning 20 years ahead of time.
Yeah, well, so I think there's. You know, it's often said that it's the things that you do every day that matter more than the things you do once in a while. I think Gretchen Rubin, my mutual friend of ours, says that a lot. I think the. You know, I've been thinking a lot about serendipity recently because we have a whole chapter in our book on kind of opportunity, how to find killer career opportunities and how to generate killer career opportunities and kind of putting yourself in situations where you're exposed to positive randomness. And serendipity is a key part of that. And a friend of Chris's, Franz Johansson, recently wrote a book called the Click Moment about serendipity. Serendipity is kind of hot. And the things you do to induce serendipity tend to be a strong bias towards action and experimentation. It's a. It's doing stuff even if the outcome is unknown or unclear, and not being dissuaded by small micro failures. So it's showing up at the dinner and actually having it not be very worthwhile, but then showing up the very next night to another dinner.
Yes, such a profound point.
The most highlighted sentence of our book on the Amazon Kindle is the fastest way to become the person you want to be is to hang out with people who are already that way. The way you start thinking more creative is like study the ordinary things. We just take totally for granted, like why this table has four legs and is built this way and start to appreciate ordinariness. And that's what young kids do because they don't know any better. And so what I hear from young parents is when they start looking at the world through that, they get to appreciate it more. So it's that osmosis curiosity. And that's what you want to do. Figure out how you can surround yourself with people who think that way and you'll catch the instinct.
