Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

I AM OFTEN ASKED who, of the people living today, I would consider to be in the same league as those I have written about as a biographer: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, and Albert Einstein.

Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.

Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful.

Jeff Bezos embodies these traits.

poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries.

until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model,

Over the summers Jeff worked his way through the shelves,

She even indulged his penchant for creating ingenious booby traps to frighten his younger brother and sister.

unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on. Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction.”

Bezos took to the work with a disciplined zeal.

he wanted to get aboard that rocket,

Realizing that it was prudent to start with one product,

they were not perishable, were a commodity, and could be bought from two big wholesale distributors.

And there were more than three million titles in print—far more than a bricks-and-mortar store co...

“You know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do,” she said.

febrile

Totally unimpressed, Stoltz blew him off and declined to write a story about the idea. Years later, long after Stoltz left the paper, Bezos would end up buying it.

Bezos told Time. “It was obvious that we were onto something much bigger than we ever dared to hope.”

and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year,

Amazon.com has made a number of strides forward in the past year, but there is still an enormous amount to learn and to do.