Jeff Bezos Quotes
1. I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.
2. If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.
3. If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.
4. E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.
5. I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
6. A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
7. Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.
8. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….
9. People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.
10. We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.
11. We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
12. Work Hard, have fun, make history
13. The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
14. Your margin is my opportunity
15. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.
16. If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.
17. Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.
18. In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
19. The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past — no matter how good it was.
20. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.
21. If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.
22. It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.
23. Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
24. No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.
25. One of the things that I hope will distinguish Amazon.com is that we continue to be a company that defies easy analogy. This requires a lot of innovation, and innovation requires a lot of random walk.
26. As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt.
27. Start With the Customer and Work Backward
28. If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue
29. The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. It pours energy and investment and sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free. One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can’t, it’s difficult to put the right resources behind it. … Even behind a paywall, websites can summarize your work and make it available for free. From a reader point of view, the reader has to ask, ‘Why should I pay you for all that journalistic effort when I can get it for free from another site?’
30. Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about.
31. Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
32. If you’re doing anything interesting in the world, you are going to have critics. You can’t stop it. Move forward. It’s not worth losing any sleep over.
33. Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.
34. What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
35. Complaining is not a strategy.You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.
36. im poor lol
37. We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts.
38. If you never want to be criticized,
for goodness’ sake, don’t do anything new.
39. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
40. The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.
41. You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.
42. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.
43. I’d rather interview fifty people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
44. Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be.
45. Purchase the book of Penster in the Amazon and Kindle Store and read, we hope you enjoy the benefits of the knowledge and wisdom of the Penster.
46. In the end, we are our choices.
47. What’s very dangerous is not to evolve
48. You collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data but then you make the decision with your heart.
49. Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.
50. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.
51. I think it’s true that big government institutions should be scrutinized, big non-profit institutions should be scrutinized, big universities should be scrutinized. It just makes sense.
52. my wife left
