Latest / Motivation Mindset Podcast / Jeff Bezos’ Success Secrets: Unlock the Wisdom Behind His Billion-Dollar Journey

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Jeff Bezos’ Success Secrets: Unlock the Wisdom Behind His Billion-Dollar Journey · Motivation Mindset Podcast

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon dot Com,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: literally billions of dollars of failures. It's easy to have ideas,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: My job, one of my jobs as the leader of Amazon,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: is to encourage people to be bold. And people love
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: to focus on things that aren't yet working, and that's good,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: it's human nature. That kind of divine discontent can be
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: very helpful. But you really, you know, it's incredibly hard
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: to get people to take bold bets, and you need
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: to encourage that. And if you're going to take bold bets,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: they're going to be experiments. And if they're experiments, you
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: don't know ahead of time whether they're going to work.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: big successes, a few big successes compensate for dozens and
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: dozens of things that didn't work. So, you know, bold bets, Aws, Kindle,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Amazon Prime, our third party seller business, all of those
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: things are examples of buld bets that that did work,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and they pay for a lot of experiments. I've made
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: billions of dollars of failures at Amazon dot com, literally
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: billions of dollars of failures. And you know, you might
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: remember pets dot Com or Cosmo or you know, give
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily. None
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: of those things are fun, but they also they don't matter.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: What really matters is companies that don't continue to experiment,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get in a
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: desperate position where they the only thing they can do
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: is make a kind of hail Mary bet at the
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: you know, making bets all along, even you know, big bets,
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: but not bet the company bets. I don't believe in
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: bet the company bets. That's when you're desperate, that's the
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: last thing you can do. I think stress, you can be.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: One of the things that's very important to note about
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: stress is that stress primarily comes from not taking action
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: over something that you can have some control over. So
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: if I find that some particular thing is causing me
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: to have stress, that's a warning flag for me. What
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me, and
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: as soon as I identify it and make the first
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: phone call or send off the first email message or
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: whatever it is that we're going to do to start
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: to address that situation, even if it's not solved, the
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: things that you shouldn't be ignoring, I think, in large part.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: So stress doesn't come people get stress wrong all the time.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: In my opinion, stress doesn't come from hard work. For example,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: you know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: and likewise you can be out of work and incredibly
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: stressed over that. So and likewise, if you kind of
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: use the you know, use that as an analogy for
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: what I was just talking about. If you're out of
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: work but you're going through, you know, a disciplined approach
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: of you know, a series of job interviews and so on,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: and working to remedy that situation, you're going to be
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: And doing nothing. It's easy to have ideas, it's very
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: are a lot of steps in between. It takes persistence, relentlessness.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: So I always tell people who are you know who
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: think they want to be entrepreneurs, it's you need a
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: combination of stubborn, relentlessness and flexibility, and you have to
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: know when to be witch. And basically, you need to
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it'll be too
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: easy to give up. But you need to be very
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: your vision, you'll find that some of your preconceptions were
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: wrong and you're going to need to be able to
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: change those things. So I think taking an idea successfully
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: all the way to the market and turning it into
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: a real product that people care about and that really
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: improves people's lives is a lot of hard work. I
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: don't really remember the exact day or anything, but when
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: I was in college is when I started thinking about
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: wanting to be an entrepreneur someday. So it was I
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: was not the kid with the lemonade stand, you know.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: I wasn't one of these kids who was always trying
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: to raise when I always wanted to be a scientist
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: when I was little, But I'd also always loved computers.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: I was lucky, because at my age this as unusual
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: to have access to a maintream computer from my elementary
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: school when I was in fourth grade, and quickly learned
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: that there was a pre programmed Star Trek game on
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: that computer. And then I never did anything except play
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Star Trek with the computer. So I don't know how
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: formative that was. It certainly led its certally helped my
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Star Trek knowledge considerably, but I've always loved computers. Somewhere
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: in college, I started watching some of the people who
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: were like setting up you know, college pizza delivery services
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: and you know, the kind of the core entrepreneurs, and thinking,
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: you know, this looks like a really fun thing to do.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: I think we actually saw this. I think you see
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: it all over the place in many different contexts, but
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: I think we saw it in the Internet world quite
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: a bit, where you know, at the sort of peak
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: of the sort of Internet you know mania and say
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, you found people who were, you know,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: very passionate of something. They kind of left that job
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: and decided, I'm going to do something in the internet
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: because it's you know, it was almost like the you know,
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: the eighteen forty nine gold Rush in a way. I mean,
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: you find that people if you go back and study
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: the history of the eighteen forty one gold rush, you
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: find that, you know, at that time, everybody who was
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: in within the shouting distance of California was you know,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: they might have been a doctor, but they quit being
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: a doctor and they started panning for gold. And that
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: that almost never works. And even if it does work,
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: you know, according to some metric financial success or whatever
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: it might be, I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: So you really need to be very clear with yourself.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: And I think one of the best ways to do
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age eighty,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: looking back on your life and trying to make sure
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: you've minimized the number of regrets. You have. That works
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: for That works for career decisions, it works for family decisions.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: You know, do you want I have a fourteen month
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: old son and it's very easy for me to if
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: I think about myself when I'm eighty, I know, I
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: want to watch that little guy grow up, and so
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: it's I don't want to be eighty and things. Shoot,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: I missed that whole thing, and I don't have the
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: and so on and so on. So if you think
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: about that, So I guess another thing that I would
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: recommend to people is that they always take a long
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: term point of view. And I think this is something
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: about which there's a lot of controversy. You know, there's
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: a there's a you know, a lot of people and
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: I'm just not one of them, believe that you should
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: live for the now. I think what you do is
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: you think about the great expanse of time ahead of
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: you and try to make sure that you're planning for
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: that in a way that's going to lead you ultimately satisfied.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: So this is just my This is the way it
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: works for me, and I mean this is everybody needs
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: to find that for themselves. So I think there are
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: a lot of paths to satisfaction, and you need to
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: find one that works works for you. The best defense
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: to uh. To speech that you don't like about yourself
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: as a public figure is to develop a thick skin.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: It's really the only effective defense because you can't stop it.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: You know you are going to be misunderstood. If you're
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: doing anything interesting in the world, you're going to have critics.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: The only way. If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: don't do anything new or interesting, and then you can
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: insulate yourself. Then think how wonderful your life will be
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: at the bezos. Yeah, Usually people when you if you
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: see something I don't know. You're kind of a public figure,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: and you've probably things have probably been written about you
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: that you didn't think were nice. That's true. And and
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: my advice if you came to me and said, jeffs,
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: you know somebody wrote this and really hurt my feelings,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: what should I do? I would say, go stand on
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: a street corner and watch in a crowded urban area
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: and watch all the people walk by, and think about
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: what they're thinking about. I bet you none of those
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: people are thinking about you. If you're standing on that
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: street corner and really in your mind, you can this
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: thought experiment like, Okay, there's a woman who just walked
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: by what she actually thinking about, probably what might maybe
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: what she's going to cook for dinner that night, or
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: that the argument that she had with one of her
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: employees or whatever. It is like, it's not about us,