Jeff Bezos 5 Minutes for the NEXT 50 Years of Your LIFE

people have very high standards

how they want their work life to be

and i said look

if you can get your work life

to be where you enjoy half of it

that is amazing because very few people

ever achieve

that because the truth is everything

comes with overhead that’s reality

everything comes with pieces that you

don’t like you could be a supreme court

justice and there’s still going to be

pieces of your job you don’t like

every job comes with pieces you don’t

like and we need to say

that’s part of it

you have to figure out how to set up

your life in such a way that you can

minimize the things and i find people

don’t dislike hard work

what people dislike and what is being

out of control

like they can’t control their life they

can’t control their environment this

happens to me

when i get over scheduled

i hate being over scheduled i want some

time to be able to think and free myself

we all have the same amount of time in

the world

nobody has more time than anybody else

and when you become a very successful

person

one of the things you start to get over

scheduled

so a young person starting their career

i think

there are probably a lot of things some

of them are very well known and people

have heard them many times they’re still

true one of those that you should always

focus on

a young person should find something

that they’re passionate about to do

and that’s not going to surprise anyone

it’s a clear thing to do it’s very hard

if you don’t love your work you’re never

going to be great at it

the other thing i would suggest to

any young person

even before they start their career

is to really think about their choices

because

i find young people and i i when i was

young i had i made this mistake too

you can get

very fixed on your gifts so everybody

has gifts you know you you have gifts

and you have things that you didn’t get

gifted maybe you’re extremely beautiful

maybe you’re extremely good at

mathematics maybe you there are a lot of

things that you can be given

but those things can confuse you because

they’re not the things that construct

your life it’s your choices

that construct your life not your gifts

you can celebrate your gifts be proud of

them be happy of them actually don’t be

proud of them and be celebratory of them

but you can’t be proud because they’re

gifts they were given to you you didn’t

earn them you can only be proud of the

things you earn

and so

as i got older i started to realize i

wasn’t proud of my gifts i was always

good at school school was always easy

for me and i was always proud that i was

a great student i got a’s in all my

classes i was good at math all of that

and i thought

i thought that’s who i was but it’s not

true

those are the things that are gifts what

was hard for me is deciding to work hard

deciding to

use my gifts in certain ways to

challenge myself to

do things that i didn’t think i could do

to put myself in uncomfortable

situations

we all get i would say to a young person

you can choose

a life

of ease and comfort or you can choose a

life of service and adventure which one

of those when you’re 90 years old are

you going to be more proud of

my advice would be the same for

any kind of entrepreneur

and that is make sure

that you are

focused on something you’re passionate

about so if you look at the early

internet companies

they were

started and focused on doing something

that they thought was very interesting

long before the internet was fashionable

in any way um you know i i you know we

are currently an underdog once again

we’ve been in business for six years and

there was exactly one year where we were

not the underdog and that was 1999.

i like the the underdog years because it

makes uh you know i liked it when all

the people we hired their parents told

them they were crazy like that was the

that was kind of the good era

fortunately it’s back

in 1999 all the parents were like you

know

giving their brothers and sisters high

fives you know my son is working at

amazon.com

so that’s a very uh

you can’t follow the fashion when you’re

trying to do a startup company or i

think really anything in life but you

have to as an entrepreneur if you’re

gonna if you’re gonna build a company

pick something you think is interesting

that has the intersection of genuinely

creating real customer value

and then just stay right there and let

the wave catch you

whatever it is that you want to do

there’s going to be risk in your life

and risk is a necessary component of

progress

you can make any pioneering

movements in the world of any kind

whether they be the

geographical physical exploration that

i’ve just been talking about or whether

it be

you know a more cerebral exploration of

a scientific field

or i bet you could ask that question of

every speaker here and i bet that every

speaker here has taken substantial risks

uh whether it be intellectual or

otherwise

to achieve what their you know what

they’ve done

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