It's not what you do and mess up, it's what you don't do that will plague you when you are old and looking back on your life.
So says Amazon and Blue Origin boss Jeff Bezos.
"When you think about the things that you will regret when you're 80, they're almost always the things that you did not do. They're acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn't work or whatever," says Bezos in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, published by Business Insider on Saturday.
It's not only true of professional decisions, but of life too, says the 54-year-old entrepreneur, who is currently worth $130.5 billion according to Forbes.
"I'm not just talking about business things," says Bezos. "It's like, 'I love that person and I never told them,' and you know, 50 years later you're like, 'Why didn't I tell her? Why didn't I go after it?'
"So that's the kind of life regret that is very hard to be happy about when you're telling yourself in a private moment that story of your life."
Bezos is himself embodiment of that willingness to act.
He famously left a Wall Street investment banking career to start selling books online with a little website called Amazon. In hindsight it was a lucrative decision. At the time, however, Bezos, and his wife MacKenzie, were taking a risk — one that not everyone agreed with.
