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Leaving the bellman job
At 19, Dana White walked out of a hotel bellman job that checked every box: cash every day, a paycheck every week, a 401(k), and full dental and medical. He did not yet know what the fight business meant or at what level he would work in it, but that was the goal.
The 45-year-old coworker
A coworker there was 45 years old, with the same money, the same benefits, and the same schedule. If the leap failed and he went back to work, the worst case was being 45 and doing the same job. That was an outcome he could live with, since he had tried.
The worst case
The worst case that mattered was never trying: waking up at 45, with no kids and nobody depending on him, and wondering what would have happened. Money could not have been the deciding factor, because if it had been, he would still be standing in the lobby of that hotel.
Why do people stick with a safe default?
Economists William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser named this pattern status quo bias in a 1988 paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. In their experiments, people disproportionately chose whichever option was labeled as their current one. They also examined real choices at Harvard, where employees who joined before a new health plan became available mostly stayed with their older plans. New hires, with no existing plan to keep, picked the new option far more often.
Which regrets last longer, actions or inactions?
Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec reviewed the evidence in a 1995 paper in Psychological Review. They found that in the short term, people regret actions that turned out badly more than things they skipped. Over the long term the pattern reverses, and people more often name what they did not do.
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