Jeff Bezos Advice For young Entrepreneurs

you can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure which one of those when you're 90 years old are you going to be more proud of good a guy like you no matter how good we are we can still be better you can always be better customers have a divine discontent and they teach you if you listen to customers so we watch for that and you see pattern so we can find places where it's not working something's going wrong and that's really how I get the feedback

is from customer input and often you know on all caps angry you ruined my child's birthday because the gif didn't show up on time and we take that and what you really want to do is you take that it's an anecdote it's a single example but you need to find the root cause what went wrong deep inside the system how did this happen because then you can fix it for everyone so that that particular problem will never happen again you don't just fix the symptom you have to fix the root cause and that's been the

secret to our operational success for 20 years a guy like you there are a lot of things that are a waste of time you know and you think about your life I think I often tell people that I work with if you can get because people people have very high standards for how they want their work life to be and and I said look if you can get your work life to be where you enjoy half of it that is a home that is amazing because very few people ever achieve that because the truth is

everything comes with overhead that's reality everything comes with pieces that you don't like you could be a Supreme Court justice and there's still gonna be pieces of your job you don't like you can be a university professor and it's still going to be Peter if to go to committee meetings and you have to do thing you know there every job comes with pieces you don't like and we need to say that's just how that's part of it and and and not resent those pieces or try not to but also try to minimize them I tell

senior executives you should have the least stress you know there's this weird I think false idea that CEOs I'm a CEO there's this false idea that CEOs are under the most stress well I look at like why you're in charge why don't you delegate the stress it's your choice and so it's you have to figure out how to set up your life in such a way that you can minimize the things and I find people don't dislike hard work but people dislike and what is being out of control like they can't control their life they

can't control their environment this happens to me when I get over scheduled I hate being over scheduled I want some time to be able to think and free myself we all have the same amount of time in the world nobody has more time than anybody else and when you become a very successful person one of the things you start to get over scheduled you have this event you had to agree to do this and maybe last night you were like why didn't I agree to do this I have to go on stage tomorrow I wish

I were really with my family and you know or I hope maybe not this case let's say that you like this one but in general that kind of thing happens and so you have to guard your time and and try to save a little bit flexible so that's for me it's not a waste of time but I like to have some freedom of movement rather than having every minute of every day scheduled a guy like you so a young person starting their career I think they're probably a lot of things that some of them are

very well known and people have heard that many times they're still true one of those that you should always focus on a young person should find something that they're passionate about to do and that's not gonna surprise anyone it's a clear thing to do it's very hard if you don't love your work you're never going to be great at it I think the other thing I would suggest too any young person even before they start their career is to really think about their choices because I find young people and I when I was young I

had I made this mistake too you can get very fixed on your gifts so everybody has gifts you know you you have gifts and you have things that you didn't get gifted maybe you're extremely beautiful maybe you're extremely good at mathematics maybe you there are a lot of things that you can be given but those things can confuse you because they're not the things that construct your life it's your choices that construct your life not your guests you can celebrate your gifts be proud of them be happy of them actually don't be proud of them

be be celebratory of them but you can't be proud because they're gifts they were given to you you didn't earn them you can only be proud of the things you earn and so as I got older I started to realize I wasn't proud of my gifts I was always good at school school is always easy for me and I was always proud that I was a great student I got aids in all my classes I was good at math all of that and I thought I thought that's who I was but it's not true those

are the things that are gifts what was hard for me is deciding to work hard deciding to use my gifts in certain ways to challenge myself to do things that I didn't think I could do to put myself in uncomfortable situations we all get I would say to a young person you can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure which one of those when you're 90 years old are you gonna be more proud of okay we only have a few principles of the Amazon kind of

core values that we go back to over and over again and if you looked at each of the things that we do you would see those run straight through everything so the first one and by far the most important one is customer obsession and we talk about it as customer obsession as opposed to competitor obsession and I have seen over and over again companies talk about that their customer focused but really when I pay close attention to them I believe they are competitor focused and that's just a completely different mentality by the way competitor focus

can work but I don't think it works in the long run as well as customer focus for one thing once you're the leader if your whole culture is competitor obsessed it's kind of hard to stay energized and motivated if you're out in front whereas customers are always unsatisfied they're always discontent they always want more and so no matter how far you get out there in front of your competitors you're still behind your customers so they're always pulling you along so customer obsession is a deep principle that underlies everything we do and how do you it

so the real question for me is how do you go about maintaining a day one culture you know it's great to have the scale of Amazon we have financial resources we have lots of brilliant people we can accomplish great things we have global scope we have operations all over the world but the downside of that is that you can lose your nimbleness you can lose your entrepreneurial spirit you can lose your that kind of heart that the that small companies often have and so if you could have the best of both worlds if you can

have that entrepreneurial spirit and heart while at the same time having all the advantages that come with scale and scope I think think of the things that you could do and and so the question is how do you achieve that the scale is good because it makes you robust you know a big boxer can take a punch to the head the question is you also want to dodge those punches so you'd like to be nimble you want to be big and nimble and I find there are a lot of things that are protective of the

day one mentality I already spent some time on one of them which is customer obsession I think that's the most important thing if you can and it it's harder as you get bigger when you're a little tiny company figure ten person startup company every single person the company is focused on the customer when you get to be a bigger company you've got all the middle you've got middle managers and you've got all these layers and the those people aren't on the front lines they're not interacting with customers every day they're insulated from customers and they

start to manage not the customer happiness directly but they start to manage through proxies like metrics and processes and some of those things can become bureaucratic so it's very challenging but one of the things that happens is the decision-making velocity slows down and I think the reason one of the reasons that that happens is that people all say junior executives inside the big company start to model all decisions as if they are heavyweight irreversible highly consequential decisions and so even to a doors you could make you make a decision it's the wrong decision you can

just back up back through the door and try again even those reversible decisions start to be made with heavyweight processes and so you can teach people that these pitfalls and and and traps and then teach them to avoid those traps and that's what we're trying to do at Amazon so that we can maintain our inventiveness and our hearts and our kind of small companies spirit even as we have the scale and scope of a larger company if the stock is up 10% this month don't feel 10% smarter because when the stock is down 10% some

month you're gonna have to fill up 10% dumber and it's not going to feel as good and so it's you know ownership is we give most of our compensation is is done in terms of stock compensation and in part and parcel with ownership is a mentality of long term thinking you know you owners think longer term than renters do so I have a friend who rented his house to some tenants and instead of getting a Christmas tree stand at Christmas they just nailed the Christmas into the hardwood floors of the house no owner would ever

do that and but sometimes there that's a bad tenant you know they're a good good tenants but that's a bad tenant and it's because you know it's the same old thing about you know nobody ever washed a rental car and you you take better care of the things that you own and and but but one of the responsibilities of ownership and definitely deep inside the Amazon culture is to think about the fundamentals of the business and not the daily fluctuations in the stock price it's not there's no information in it what are you really focusing

on so you know I'm focusing on those things that I think make Amazon unusual genuine customer obsession so like every single thing you just mentioned when you know when our senior executives sit down and review those programs they're looking for customer obsession where how is second one that we're focused on is invention we don't like to do me two offerings we want to take will be inspired by something we've seen the world we're not hermetically sealed but we want to put our own twist on it we want to try to do something better for customers

that's pioneering so where is the invention you know why is this going to be better for customers than the already whatever is serving that need in the world today and and then a willingness to think long term so I'm very focused on those things and also the operational excellence is reducing defects at their root those are the things that's the culture of Amazon it's the habits that we have those are the things I'm focused on and those are the things that all of our senior people are focused on [Music]