"regret minimization framework".....................

      To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process.  He called it a "regret minimization framework."  He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision.  "I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have," he explains.  "I knew that when I was eighty, 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.  I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.  I knew that that would haunt me every day.

-Walter Isaacson, from the Introduction to Invent & Wander:  The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos