Phrases
01. Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room
02. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
03. We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.
04. Everything you are comes from your choices.
05. The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.
06. Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
07. One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.
08. Work hard, have fun and make history.
09. Obsess about customers, not competitors.
10. People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often
11. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
12. We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
13. If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don’t do anything new.
14. Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.
15. If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
16. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
17. If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
18. The common question that gets asked in business is, why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?
19. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
20. If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.
21. If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish.
22. Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.
23. Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.
24. I try to spend my time on areas that I think are important for the future, and where I think I can add value.
25. Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It’s lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.
26. Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.
27. Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.
28. If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
29. The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
30. Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process. Jeff Bezos
31. What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
32. A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
33. Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.
34. The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.
35. It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.
36. We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and thy’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
37. In the end, we are our choices.
38. A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.
39. Do something you’re very passionate about, and don’t try to chase what is kind of the “hot passion” of the day.
40. I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
41. 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.
42. Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.
43. One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.
44. If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.
45. If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
46. Things never go smoothly.
47. I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.
48. Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.
49. What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.