Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

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.”

one product, he chose books—partly because he liked them and also because they were not perishable, were a commodity, and could be bought from two big wholesale distributors.

“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”

An employee looked at Bezos as if he were the stupidest person he’d ever seen. “What we need are packing tables,” he said.

Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business.

“The only reason I’m interested in space is because [NASA] inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five-year-olds? The work NASA does is technically super-demanding and inherently risky, and they continue to do an outstanding job. The ONLY reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing ANYTHING is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity.”

“The advantage of being customer focused is that customers are always dissatisfied. They always want more, and so they pull you along. Whereas if you’re competitor obsessed, if you’re a leader, you can look around and you see everybody running behind you, maybe you slow down a little.”

There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?

“Still, with all of our faults and problems, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the US … It’s still Day One for this country.”

Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us—right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.

As the famed investor Benjamin Graham said, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.”

We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, like any sufficiently advanced technology, it’s indistinguishable from magic.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

“Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

I will hazard a prediction. When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

I want to live in a place where people can disagree. What I want, too, is to live in a place where people can disagree and still work together.