Chapter 7
Regret Minimization
Recently one of Nathan’s former students lamented, “I spent all summer coming up with business ideas, but in the end, I couldn’t make the decision to go for it.” This indecision highlights a predicament we all face: How do you make the decision to do something uncertain? How do you know whether an opportunity is real or imagined, and if it is real, whether it’s worth the risk? The truth is, you can’t know in advance of trying. That’s part of the uncertainty. But you can figure out if you should try.
When Jeff Bezos came up with his idea to sell books online, it wasn’t obvious that it would work. The year was 1994, long before the dot-com boom of 1999, and most people didn’t even know about the internet—there were ...
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