Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

“I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid,”

I own 16 percent of Amazon. Amazon’s worth roughly $1 trillion.* That means that over twenty years we have built $840 billion of wealth for other people, and that’s really what we’ve done from a financial point of view.

somebody has an idea, other people improve the idea, other people come up with objections for why it can never work, and then we solve those objections.

Amazon’s not a start-up company, and all of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future. They live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter.

You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today?

Two years later is very typical if you invent something new.

When you pioneer, if you’re lucky, you get a two-year head start.

The AlphaGo program that recently just beat the world Go champion played millions of games of Go. The human champion has played thousands of games of Go, not millions. And they’re almost at the same level, the human champion and the computer program. Plus, the human is doing something fundamentally different—we know because we are so power efficient. I don’t remember the exact figure, but AlphaGo is one example that uses thousands and thousands of watts of power.

There’s one gift the internet brings newspapers. It destroys almost everything, but it brings one gift, and that is free global distribution.

“The administration may be at war with us. We are not at war with the administration. Just do the work. Just do the work.”

THE WAY YOU earn trust, the way you develop a reputation is by doing hard things well over and over and over.

It is also helpful to have clarity. If we are clear that we are going to do this and we aren’t going to do that, then people can opt in or opt out.

Controversial decisions need to be escalated quickly. You can’t let two junior people argue for a year and exhaust themselves.

there are two different kinds of failure. There’s experimental failure—that’s the kind of failure you should be happy with. And there’s operational failure.

This scrutiny is just normal. It’s actually healthy and good. We want to live in a society where people are worried about big institutions.

we’ve built five models based on an academic technique called environmental life-cycle assessment.

Same-day shipping is actually our lowest carbon ship option. This is because getting inventory local to customers is almost always a sustainability win.

We have some very specific ideas about what we want to do, but I believe in the power of wandering. All my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis.

Why do we need to go to space? My answer is different from the common “plan B” argument: the Earth gets destroyed and you want to be somewhere else. It’s unmotivating and doesn’t work for me.

The question “What’s the best planet in this solar system” is easy to answer because we have sent robotic probes to all the other ones.

My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, “Do me a favor. Go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it—because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars.”

As animals, humans use ninety-seven watts of power—that’s our metabolic rate as animals—but as members of the developed world, we use ten thousand watts of power.

Two hundred years ago you had to work eighty-four hours to afford one hour of artificial light. Today you have to work 1.5 seconds to afford an hour of artificial light.

We could have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Asimov had a very good answer: “Nobody did, really, because we’ve all been planet chauvinists. We’ve all believed people should live on the surface of a planet, of a world.

Those O’Neill colonies will be built by today’s kids and their children and grandchildren. The job of building the infrastructure so these colonies can be created will start with my generation.

One reason aviation is so safe today is because we do have so much practice.

It’s very counterintuitive, but the bigger the vehicle, the easier vertical landing gets. Vertical landing is like balancing a broom on your fingertip. You can balance a broom, but try balancing a pencil.

I almost never get asked: “What’s not going to change over the next ten years?” And that question is so important because you can build your plans around

We must have a future of dynamism for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We cannot let them fall prey to stasis and rationing,