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.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”

A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences.

People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.

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 constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.”

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?

we’ll start with the customer and work backward. In our judgment, that is the best way to create shareholder value.

we take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.

most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.

“disagree and commit.”

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?

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

That judgment is super valuable, and that’s why sometimes you should overrule subordinates even when they have better ground truth.

“What’s not going to change over the next ten years?”

big things start small.