Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

 

Introduction by Walter Isaacson

The first is to be curious, passionately curious.

• Leonardo did not need to know these things to paint the Mona Lisa (though it helped); he needed to know them because he was Leonardo, always obsessively curious. “I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”

A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences.

• People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.
• Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field,

One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder.

That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators.

• Jeff was a voracious reader with an adventurous mind.
• His self-reliance and adventurous spirit were also instilled by Jeff’s mother, Jackie, who was just as tenacious and sharp as her father and son. She became pregnant with Jeff when she was only seventeen.
• ” What was the main lesson Jeff learned from her? “You grow up with a mother like that and you have unbelievable grit,” he says.
• At his Montessori preschool Bezos was already fanatically focused. “The teacher complained to my mother that I was too task focused and that she couldn’t get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me,” he recalls. “And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that’s still probably true today.”
• His childhood business heroes were Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. “I’ve always been interested in inventors and invention,”
• Even though Edison was the more prolific inventor, Bezos came to admire Disney more because of the audacity of his vision. “It seemed to me that he had this incredible capability to create a vision that he could get a large number of people to share,” he says. “Things that Disney invented, like Disneyland, the theme parks, they were such big visions that no single individual could ever pull them off, unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on. Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction.”

Decision Making

• To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” 
  • He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision. “I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, 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.”

 

Importance of Writing for Clarity of Thought 

• “You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”

His parents invested their life savings into him. He told them there was a 70% chance it would fail. 

• Jackie, later said, “We didn’t invest in Amazon, we invested in Jeff.”

Vision

• Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. 
  • Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. 
  • Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. 
  • Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.
  • “And I would like to see us not have a population cap. I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system; then there would be a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.”

 

Missionary vs Mercenary

• “I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?” Bezos says. “The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money.”

 

Here are the five that I think are most important: 

1. Focus on the long term. 

• “It’s All About the Long Term,”
• Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who want a return on investment, to come into alignment.
• In addition, long-term thinking permits innovation. “We like to invent and do new things,” he says, “and I know for sure that long-term orientation is essential for invention because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way.”
• Blue Origin’s company shield has a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter: “Step by Step, Ferociously.”
• Among Bezos’s many strengths is his ability to follow this motto by being exuberantly patient and patiently exuberant.

2. Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer. 

• As he put it in his 1997 letter, “Obsess over Customers.”
• But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.”
• “The core of the company is customer obsession as opposed to competitor obsession,” he said. “The advantage of being customer focused is that customers are always dissatisfied. They always want more, and so they pull you along. Whereas if you’re competitor obsessed, if you’re a leader, you can look around and you see everybody running behind you, maybe you slow down a little.”
• “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things,” Bezos says. “We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”

3. Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations. 

• This is a maxim that Steve Jobs also followed. Bezos’s belief in the power of storytelling means that he thinks that his colleagues should be able to create a readable narrative when they pitch an idea.
• “Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of study hall.”
• The memos, which are limited to six pages, are supposed to be written with clarity, which Bezos believes (correctly) forces a clarity of thinking. They are often collaborative efforts, but they can have a personal style.

4. Focus on the big decisions.

• “As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?” he asks. “You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.”
• He divides the decisions that have to be made into those that can be walked back and those that are irrevocable. The latter require a lot more caution. In the case of the former, he tries to decentralize the process. 
• At Amazon he created what he calls “multiple paths to yes.” In other organizations, he points out, a proposal can be killed by supervisors at many levels, and it needs to pass through all those gates in order to be approved. At Amazon, employees can shop their ideas around to any of the hundreds of executives who are empowered to get to yes.

5. Hire the right people. 

• “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” he wrote in an early shareholder letter. Compensation, especially early on, was heavily weighted to stock options rather than cash.
• There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
• It’s never been easy to work at Amazon. When Bezos interviews people, he warns them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.”

 

These lessons remind me of the way Steve Jobs operated. Sometimes such a style can be crushing, and to some people it may feel tough or even cruel. But it also can lead to the creation of grand, new innovations and companies that change the way we live.

 

I am also confident that he has at least one more major leap to make. I suspect that he will be—and is, indeed, eager to be—one of the first private citizens to blast himself into space. As he told his high school graduating class back in 1982, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!”

Part 1: The Shareholder Letters

• This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders.
• We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position.
• Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh trade-offs differently than some companies.
• We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
• We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.
• We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture.
• We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management.
• We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash.

Part 2: Life & Work

• “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” Advice from his grandfather after telling his grandmother how many days she had left to live that he calculated because she was a smoker.

 

“We Are What We Choose”: Address to the Princeton Graduating Class of 2010 

• What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
• But ultimately I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life—the life you author from scratch on your own—begins.
• I will hazard a prediction. When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you, and good luck!
• The whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, failures, things that don’t work. You need to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have a setback, you get back up and try again. You’re using resourcefulness; you’re using self-reliance; you’re trying to invent your way out of a box.

His mom’s response to Jeff trying things that could be dangerous 

“I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid,” which is a great attitude about life.