Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”

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.”

“I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he

“A free market economy, which by necessity involves a lot of liberty, just happens to work well in terms of allocating resources,” he

I think the American Dream is about liberty.

We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied.

You cannot rest on your laurels in this world.

Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice.

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

most of our regrets are acts of omission, things we didn’t try, the path untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us.

Is your work depriving you of energy, or is your work generating energy for you?

You have to be willing to take risks. You have to be willing to fail, and people don’t like failure.

most of our regrets are acts of omission—the things we didn’t try, the paths untraveled.

It’s not a coincidence that Amazon was born in this country. More than any other place on Earth, new companies can start, grow, and thrive here in the US. Our country embraces resourcefulness and self-reliance,