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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