Jeff Bezoss Life Advice Will Change Your Future MUST WATCH
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i’ve made
billions of dollars of failures at
amazon.com
literally billions of dollars of
failures it’s
easy to have ideas it’s very hard to
turn an idea into a successful product
do something you’re very passionate
about and
don’t try to chase what is kind of the
hot passion of the day
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my job one of my jobs as the leader of
amazon
is to encourage people to be bold
and people love to focus on things that
aren’t yet working
and that’s good it’s human nature that
kind of divine discontent can be very
helpful
but you really you know it’s incredibly
hard to get
people to take bold bets and you need to
encourage that and if you’re going to
take bold bets
they’re going to be experiments and if
they’re experiments you don’t know ahead
of time whether they’re going to work
experiments are by their very nature
prone to failure but big successes a few
big successes
compensate for dozens and dozens of
things that didn’t work
so you know bold bets aws kindle
amazon prime our third-party seller
business
all of those things are examples of bold
bets that
that did work and they pay for a lot of
experiments
i’ve made billions of dollars of
failures
at amazon.com literally billions of
dollars of failures
and you know you might remember
pets.com or cosmo or
you know give myself a root canal with
no anesthesia very easily
none of those things are fun but but
they also
they don’t matter what really matters is
companies that don’t
continue to experiment companies that
don’t embrace
failure they eventually get in a
desperate position
where they the only thing they can do is
make a kind of hail mary bet at the very
end of their corporate existence
whereas companies that are you know
making bets all along even you know big
bets but not bet the company bets
i don’t i don’t believe in bet the
company bets that’s when you’re
desperate
that’s that’s the last thing you can do
i think stress you can be
one of the things that’s very important
to note about stress
is that stress primarily comes from not
taking action over something that you
can
have some control over so if i find that
some particular thing is causing me to
have stress
that’s a a a a warning flag for me what
it means is
there’s something that i haven’t
completely identified perhaps in my
conscious mind
that is bothering me and i haven’t yet
taken any action on it i find
as soon as i identify it and make the
first phone call or send off the first
email message or whatever it is that
we’re going to do to start to address
that situation
even if it’s not solved the mere fact
that we’re addressing it
dramatically reduces any stress that
might come from it so stress
comes from ignoring things that you
shouldn’t be ignoring
i think in large part so stress doesn’t
come people get
stressed wrong all the time in my
opinion
stress doesn’t come from hard work for
example you know you can be working
incredibly hard and loving it
and likewise you can be out of work and
incredibly stressed
over that so and likewise if you kind of
use the you know use that as an analogy
for what i was just talking about
if you’re out of work but you’re going
through you know
a disciplined approach of you know a
series of job interviews and so on and
working to remedy that situation
you’re going to be a lot less stressed
than if you’re just worrying about it
and doing nothing
it’s easy to have ideas it’s very hard
to turn an idea into a successful
product
there are a lot of steps in between it
takes persistence
relentlessness so i always tell people
who
are you know who think they want to be
entrepreneurs it’s
you need a combination of
stubborn relentlessness and
flexibility and you have to know when to
be which
and basically you need to be stubborn on
your vision
because otherwise it’ll be too easy to
give up but
you need to be very flexible on the
details
because as you go along pursuing your
vision you’ll find that some of your
preconceptions were wrong
and you’re going to need to be able to
change those things
so i think taking an idea successfully
all the way
to the market and turning it into a real
product that people care about
that really improves people’s lives is a
lot of hard work
i don’t really remember the exact day or
anything but when i was in college is
when i started thinking about
wanting to be an entrepreneur someday so
it was
i was not the kid with the lemonade
stand you know i didn’t i wasn’t one of
these
kids who was always trying to raise me i
always wanted to be a scientist when i
was little
but i’d also always loved computers i
like i was lucky because at my age this
is unusual to have
access to a mainframe computer from my
elementary school when i was in fourth
grade
and uh quickly learned that there was a
pre-programmed star trek game
on that computer and then i never did
anything except play star trek with the
computer so
i don’t know how formative that was
certainly led it certainly helped my
star trek knowledge considerably
and and but i’ve always loved computers
somewhere in college i started watching
some of the people who were
like setting up you know college pizza
delivery services
and you know the kind of the core
entrepreneurs and thinking you know this
looks like a really fun thing to do
do something you’re very passionate
about
and don’t try to chase
what is kind of the hot passion of the
day
i think we actually saw this i think you
see it all over the place in many
different contexts but i think we saw it
uh in the internet world quite a bit
where you know at the sort of peak of
the
sort of internet uh you know mania and
say 1999
you found people who were uh
you know very passionate and they kind
of left that job
and decided i’m gonna you know do
something in the internet because it’s
you know it was almost like the
you know the 1849 gold rush in a way i
mean you find that people
uh if you go back and study the history
of the 1849 gold rush you find that
you know at that time everybody who was
in was within the shouting distance of
california
was you know they might have been a
doctor but they quit being a doctor and
they started panning for gold
and that that almost never works
and even if it does work you know
according to some metric financial
success or whatever it might be
i suspect it leaves you ultimately
unsatisfied
so you really need to be very
clear with yourself and i think one of
the best ways to do that
is this notion of projecting yourself
forward to age 80
looking back on your life and trying to
make sure you’ve minimized the number of
regrets you have that works for
that works for career decisions it works
for family decisions
you know do you want i have a 14 month
old son
and it’s very easy for me to if i think
about myself when i’m 80
i know i want to watch that little guy
grow up
and so it’s i don’t want to be 80 and
think shoot you know i miss that whole
thing and i don’t have the kind of
relationship with my son that i wished i
had and so on and so on
so if you think about that so i guess
another thing that i would
recommend to people is that they always
take a long-term point of view
and i think this is something about
which there’s a lot of
controversy you know there’s a there’s a
you know some
a lot of people and i’m just not one of
them believe that you should live for
the now
i think what you do is you think about
the the the great expanse of time ahead
of you and try to make sure that you’re
planning for that in a way that’s going
to leave you ultimately satisfied
so this is just my this is the way it
works for me and i mean this is
everybody needs to find that for
themself
so there are a lot of paths to
satisfaction and you need to find one
that works
works for you
the best defense to uh to speech that
you don’t like
about yourself as a public figure is to
develop a thick skin
it it it’s really the only effective
defense
because you can’t stop it and you know
you are going to be misunderstood
if you’re doing anything interesting in
the world you’re going to have critics
the only way if you absolutely can’t
tolerate critics then don’t do anything
new
or interesting and then you can insulate
yourself then think how wonderful your
life will be
at the bezos yeah usually people when
you if you see something i don’t know
you’re kind of a public figure and
you’ve probably
things have probably been written about
you that you didn’t think were nice
that’s true
and um and and my my advice if you came
to me and said jeff this you know
somebody wrote this and it really hurt
my feelings
what should i do i would say go stand on
a street corner
and watch in a crowded urban area and
watch all the people walk by
and think about what they’re thinking
about i bet you none of those people are
thinking about you
if you’re staring that street corner and
really in your mind you can do this
thought experiment like
okay there’s a woman who just walked by
what’s she actually thinking about
probably
but maybe what she’s going to cook for
dinner that night or
that um the argument that she had with
one of her employees
or whatever it is like it’s not about us
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