Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

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

“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.”

Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field, a phrase that was used about Steve Jobs and comes from a Star Trek episode in which aliens create an entire new world through sheer mental force. When his colleagues protested that one of Jobs’s ideas or proposals would be impossible to implement, he would use a trick he learned from a guru in India: he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid.

Bezos then consulted his wife, MacKenzie, whom he had met at the hedge fund and married the year before. “You know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do,” she said.

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.”

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?