HOW Jeff Bezos Became The World's RICHEST MAN!

need motivation watts top 10 with elimination hey it's Evan Carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something greater inside you as well you've got Michael Jordan level talent add something so get ready to have no regrets follow your heart and learn how to build a great business like Jeff Bezos in my take on his top 50 rules her success to give you the belief that you need okay let's kick it off with rule number one have no regrets I decided to do this I I first talked to my my wife who is sitting here in the audience and she had married a you know relatively stable to goofy but still relatively stable a person working at a Wall Street firm I worked at a quantitative hedge fund and this was a hard decision and I was looking for the right framework in which to make that kind of important decision and and and and and the right framework I found is a regret minimization framework and so that's just a nerdy way of saying that you want to project yourself to age 80 and then think back over your life and and if you're if you're if you're 81 or the thew want to minimize the number of regrets you have throughout that period of time I think this is something a lot of people do maybe subconsciously they probably very few people probably name it regret minimization framework because most people are healthier than that but but it was a very clear way for me to think about making that kind of life decision and the in the way it helped was I thought okay if I go do this thing and participate in this thing called the internet that I genuinely believe is gonna be a big deal and if I fail am I gonna regret having tried and failed and I knew the answer that was no but I also knew that if I didn't try that I would always regret that I would always wonder and it would haunt me and until that you know mythical day which I actually hope will come rule number two follow your heart not your head many many kids and many grown-ups do figure out over time what their passions are and sometimes we let our I don't think it's that hard I think what happens though sometimes is that we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions and so that's what needs to be guarded against rule number three invest more in the product than in marketing I'm gonna put the vast majority of my energy attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it marketing it because I know if I build a great product or service my customers will tell each other you have to mix in some patience with that rule number four pick a good name almost seven years ago now I started this most incredible journey called amazon.com actually at that time it wasn't even called amazon.com it was called Cadabra Inc as an abracadabra that was the original name of the company and I had phoned a lawyer on the way to Seattle from a cell phone and he said well what do you to incorporate the company he says what do you want the company to be called and I said dad bruh he said cadaver and I knew that was a bad name we changed it a few months later also if you want to have more confidence check out my 254 series it's free the link to join is in the description below the stress primarily comes from not taking action if you absolutely can't tolerate critics that don't do anything new or interesting if everything has to work in two to three years then that limits what you can do rule number five stain for something what we have always wanted to do is raise the standard for what it means to be customer centric to such a degree that other organizations whether they be other companies or whether they be hospitals or government agencies whatever the organization is they should look at Amazon as a role model and say how can we be as customer-centric as Amazon even competitors I imagine right hopefully competitors as well but if we could make you know if that could be our legacy that we kind of raised the general idea of what it means to be customer centric that would be a huge accomplishment it would be accomplishing a mission that's much bigger than ourselves rule number six focus on the customer we know customers like low prices we know customers like big selection and we know that customers like fast delivery and those things are going to be true ten years from now they're gonna be true twenty years from now so we can count on those things and we can put energy into them we know customers like their products fast and so we work on things that we know customers like what has worked at Amazon is focusing on the customer being very cutting the customer first which is easy to say but difficult to do if you really are customer centric it's like being the host of a party you're holding the party for your guests sometimes the host the party is holding the party for the host of the party and that's that leads to a different kind of party rule number seven focus on your passion my advice would be the same for any kind of entrepreneur and that is make sure that you are focused on something you're passionate about so if you look at the early internet companies they were started and focused on doing something that they thought was very interesting long before the internet was fashionable in anyway you know I I you know we are currently an underdog once again we've been in business for six years and there was exactly one year where we were not the underdog and that was 1999 I like the the underdog years because it makes you know I liked it when all the people we hired their parents told them they were crazy like that was the that was kind of the good era fortunately it's back in 1999 all the parents were like you know given their brothers and sisters high fives you know my son is working at Amazon komm so that's a very you can't follow the fashion when you're trying to do a startup company or I think really anything in life but you have to as an entrepreneur if you're gonna if you're gonna build a company pick something you think is interesting that has the intersection of genuinely creating real customer value and then just stay right there and let the weight of catch you rule number eight build a culture so you can hold a ballet and that can be successful and you can hold a rock concert and that can be successful just don't hold a ballet and advertise it as a rock concert and so you need to be clear with all of your stakeholders with you know are you holding a ballet or are you holding a rock concert and then people get to self-select in you know we hire people who are who are really motivated by building new customer experiences they like to pioneer they like the rate of change they they wake up in the shower motivated by thinking about customers and occasionally if somebody joins Amazon who their primary motivation comes from being thinking about competition or competitors those people can find Amazon a little Dolph you know so and again it's not about right or wrong it's just that different people are motivated by different things and what happens with corporate cultures is that over time that you people collect themselves and you know in a way where they like that culture and then it becomes self-sustaining rule number nine sell premium products at non premium prices one of the things you've done so well at Amazon is you've undercut all of your rivals by keeping the prices low does that same strategy apply to tablets yes our approach is premium products at non premium prices so we saw the hardware at break-even so we don't try to make any money when we saw this hardware and we hope to make money when people use the devices not when they buy the devices and so that's a very different approach from most companies most companies are building quite a bit of profit into the sale of these devices rule number ten take risk whatever it is that you want to do you there's gonna be risk in your life and risk is a necessary component of progress you can make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind whether they be the geographical physical exploration that I've just been talking about whether it be you know a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field or I bet you could ask that question of every speaker here and I bet that every speaker here has taken substantial risks whether it be intellectual or otherwise to achieve what they're you know what they've done rule number 11 take bold bets my job one of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold and people love to focus on things that aren't yet working and that's good it's human nature that kind of divine discontent can be very helpful but you really you know it's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets and you need to encourage that and if you're gonna take bold bets they're gonna be experiments and if their experiments you don't know ahead of time go they're gonna work experiments are by their very nature prone to failure but big success is a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn't work so you know bold bets AWS Kindle Amazon Prime our 3rd party seller business all of those things are examples of bold bets that that did work and they pay for a lot of experiments I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon com literally billions of dollars of failures and you know you might remember pets.com or cosmo or you know give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily none of those things are fun but but they also they don't matter what really matters is companies that don't continue to experiment companies that don't embrace failure they eventually get in the desperate position where they only thing they can do is make a kind of Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence where as companies that are you know making bets all along even you know big bets but not bet the company bets I don't I don't believe in bet the company bets that's when you're desperate that's that's the last thing you can do rule number 12 step ferociously we know from our past experiences that big things start small you know the biggest oak starts from an acorn and you've got to recognize you you've got to be willing to let that acorn grow into a little sapling and then finally into a small tree and maybe one day it'll be a big business on its own in fact that's one of the mottos for one of your initiatives and forgive my pronunciation of the Latin but Greta team for octa what does that mean to you well it means step by step ferociously and it's the motto for Blue Origin and basically you can't skip steps you have to put one foot in front of the other things take time you there are no shortcuts and but but you want to do those steps with you know passion and ferocity rule number 13 earn a good reputation I think prior most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name and I think people and and I think this is very important for anybody who's gonna start a company or market an invention to understand is that brands for companies are like reputations for people and reputations are hard-earned and easily lost so the most important intellectual property that a company can have is for us it's that it's it's it's Amazon it's that name but what it stands for we've worked very hard to earn trust you can't ask for trust you just have to do it the hard way one step at a time you make a promise and then fulfill the promise you say we'll deliver this to you you know tomorrow and then you actually deliver it tomorrow and if you do that over and over again then ultimately you can instill your company's name with a reputation and that's I think you know sometimes people talk about brands in this very amorphous way but for me I like to think of it as a person and what is the reputation that that person has and how have they earned that reputation number fourteen take action I think stress you can be one of the things that's very important to note about stress is the stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over so if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress that's a a warning flag for me what it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me and I haven't yet taken any action on I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message or whatever it is that we're gonna do to start to address that situation even if it's not solved the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it so stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring I think in large part so stress doesn't come people get stress wrong all the time my opinion stress doesn't come from hard work for example you know you can be working incredibly hard and loving it and likewise you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that so and likewise if you kind of use the you know use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about if you're out of work but you're going through you know a disciplined approach of you know series of job interviews and so on and working to remedy that situation you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing rule number fifteen find work life harmony if you're giving great customer experience there's the only way to do that is with happy people you can't do it with a set of miserable people you know watching the clock all day so does that include work-life balance and all those things yes but I would I use I teach three leadership classes a year at Amazon I'm a part of it they're bigger classes but I come in and teach a session and I always talk about work-life balance except I like to use the phrase work life harmony rather than balance because to me balance implies a strict trade whereas I find that when I am happy at work I come home more energized I'm a better husband better dad and when I'm happy at home I come in and a better boss and better colleague and so that that it's not you could be out of work and we have terrible work-life balance you know even though you've got all the time in the world right you could just feel like oh my god you know I'm miserable and you would be draining energy and so you have to find that harmony it's a much better word and I think for most people it's about meaning people want to know that they're doing something interesting and useful and for us you know because of the challenges that we have chosen for ourselves we get to work in the future and it's super fun to work in the future for the right kind of person rule number 16 execute your idea it's easy to have ideas it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product there are a lot of steps in between it takes persistence relentlessness so I always tell people who are you know who think they want to be entrepreneurs it's you need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility and you have to know when to bewitch and basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it'll be too easy to give up but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision you find that some of your preconceptions were wrong and you're gonna need to be able to change those things so I think taking an idea successfully all the way to the market and turning it into a real product that people care about and that really improves people's lives it's a lot of hard work me number seventeen have role models I had some family role models and I had some other people you know some sort of historical role models that I looked at too so certainly my my grandfather was a serious role model for me I just said fit so much time right you learn different things from grandparents and you learn from parents it's a it's a great I would encourage anybody to try to spend time not only with their parents but with their grandparents and but I and I also had I to people I always would read about and we're Thomas Edison and Walt Disney those were sort of my - you know biographical heroes I always been interested in in inventors and invention and Edison of course just you know for for a little kid is the and probably for adults too I still feel this way at least is that not only the symbol of that but the actual fact of that they just incredible inventor and and I've always felt that there's a certain kind of important pioneering that goes on from an inventor like Thomas Edison and then Disney was a different sort of thing he also you know a real pioneer and an inventor and doing new things but 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 because the the things that Disney invented like Disneyland you know the theme parks are so and they were such big visions that no single individual unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on no single individual could ever pull them off and and Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction rule number 18 do what you love I don't really remember the exact day or anything but when I was in college is when I started to think about wanting to be an entrepreneur someday so it was I was not the kid with the lemonade stand you know I didn't I wasn't one of these kids who was always trying to race but I always wanted to be a scientist when I was little yeah but I'd also always loved computers I like I was lucky because at my age this is unusual to have access to a mainframe computer from my elementary school and I was in fourth grade and quickly learned that there was a pre-programmed Star Trek game on that computer and then I never did anything except play Star Trek with the computer so I don't know how formative that was certainly led it's really helped my Star Trek knowledge considerably and and but I've always loved computers somewhere in college I started watching some of the people who are like setting up you know college pizza delivery services and you know the kind of the core entrepreneurs and thinking you know this looks like a really fun thing to do rule number 19 be a team player I ain't some very rare idea that can be done by a single individual almost everything that is going to change the world solve a problem improve something these are usually big efforts and they require you know teams a team working together to really get something important done and that has been the story of amazon.com every step along the way we've had a team here that is is making this work I mean I don't know even even at the smallest scale you have to figure out how to get help from your friends from your family members from people that you can hire in those early days I think without that it would never work number 20 think long term do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day I think we actually saw this I think you see it all over the place in many different context but I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where you know it's sort of peak of the sort of internet you know mania and say 1999 you found people who were you know very passion or something they kind of left that job and decided I'm gonna you know do something in the internet because it's you know it was almost like the you know the 18-49 Gold Rush in a way I mean you find that people if you go back and study the history of the 18-49 Gold Rush you find that you know at that time everybody who was in was within the shouting distance of California was you know they might have been a doctor but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold and that that almost never works and even if it does work you know according to some metric financial success or whatever might be I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied so you really need to be very clear with yourself and I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80 looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have that works for that works for career decisions it works for family decisions you know do want I have a 14 month old son and it's very easy for me to if I think about myself when I'm 80 I know I want to watch that little guy grow up and so it it's I don't want to be 80 and think shoot you know I missed that whole thing and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had and so on and so on so if you think about that so I I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long term point of view and I think this is something about which there's a lot of controversy you know there's a there's a you know something a lot of people and I'm just not one of them believe that you should live for the now I think what you do is you think about the the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's going to leave you ultimately satisfied so this is just my this is the way it works for me and I mean this is everybody needs to find that for themself so there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works works for you rule number 21 experiment more you cannot invent and pioneer if you cannot accept failure its you to invent you need to experiment and if it's if you know in advance that it's going to work it is not an experiment and so that's a very important thing you know it's these they're inseparable twins failure and invention it's so you have to be willing to do that it's embarrassing to fail you know it's always embarrassing to fail but you have to say no that's not how this works if I said to you you have a 10% chance of a with a particular decision a 10% chance of a 100x return you should take that bet every time but you're still going to be wrong nine out of ten times and it's gonna feel bad nine out of ten times and in in in with technology the outcomes the results can be very long tailed they it's very the payoff is can be very asymmetric which is why you should do so much experimentation you know everybody knows that if you swing for the fences you hit more home runs but you also strike out more but with the baseball that analogy doesn't go far enough because with baseball no matter how well you connect with the ball you can only get four runs the success is capped at four runs but in business every once in a while you step up to the plate you hit the ball so hard you get a thousand runs and so when that when you have that kind of asymmetric payoff and you know one at one at back and get you a thousand runs it encourages you to experiment more it's the right business decision to experiment more it's also better for your customers customers like the successful experiments rule number 22 choose to do hard things we all have adversity in our lives you I I would I would I doubt if you really you know if you know somebody any friend or anybody that you talk to there's no lack of adversity and the and by the way that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up you fall down you get back up it always happens and you know you get certain gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those but you like it's my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud not of your gifts but of your hard work and your choices so you know you may be the kinds of gifts you get like you know you might be really good at math it might be really easy for you that's a kind of gift but practicing that math and taking it to the next step that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat that's a choice you can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you you can be grateful for them and thankful for them and but your choices you choose to work hard you choose to do hard things those are choices that you can be proud of rule number 23 be an inventor if you want to be an inventor of any kind inventing a new you know a new service offering for customers or a new product or anything the being an inventor requires because the world is so complicated you have to be a domain expert I mean in a way even if even if you're not at the beginning you have to learn learn learn learn learn enough so to become a domain expert but the danger is once you've become a domain expert you can be trapped by that knowledge and so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that you know ten thousand hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind have that that look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain and that's the key to inventing you have to have both and I think that is intentional I think all of us have that inside of us and we can all do it but you have to be intentional about it you have to say yeah I am going to become an expert and I'm gonna keep my beginner's mind rule number 24 go step by step so your question is you know did I kind of anticipate what would happen over the last 22 years at Amazon and the answer is god no so you know Amazon started as a very small company it was me and a few other people I was driving all the packages to the post office myself in my 1987 Chevy Blazer and do it when I raised money for Amazon I had to raise a million dollars which I raised from 22 different investors $50,000 each they got 20% of the company for for the million dollars and it was a 40 people told me no so I did take 60 meetings to get 20 yeses the first question was always what's the internet and I had to walk through that and this was 1994 early 95 and so did I anticipate you know fast forward to today and and the current version of it no it has been one foot in front of the other and I think that that is true for most businesses where you kind of proceed adaptively its step by step you figure it out you have a success and then you kind of double down on that success and you figure out what what else you can do what customers want rule number 25 find your calling ever since I was five years old that's when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the Moon I've been kind of passionate about space rockets rocket engines space travel I became a science fiction reader and I've always known that I wanted to you know do something having to do with space and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it for really almost my whole life and that's one of the things you guys will find that you have passions and having a passion is a gift I think we all have passions and you don't get to choose them they pick you but you have to be alert to them you have to be looking for them and when you find your passion it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction it gives you purpose you could have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling and the best thing is to have a calling and if you find your passion you'll have that and all your work won't feel work to you rule number 26 be nimble and robust the thing for companies is you need to be if you nibble and robust so you need to be able to take a punch and you also need to be quick and and and and innovative and and doing new things at a high speed that's that's the best defense against the future and you have to always be leaning in to the future if you're if you're leaning away from the future the future is gonna win every time never ever ever lean away from the future rule number 27 be long-term oriented I ask everybody to not think in two to three-year timeframes but to think in five to seven-year timeframes to not think about when somebody says to me congratulate Sam azan on a good quarter which is a very common thing to say you meet somebody there being nice they looked at your financial results for the quarter that good quarter I say thank you but what I'm thinking to myself is that quarter all that those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about three years ago and so like today I'm working on you know a quarter that is going to happen in 2020 not next quarter next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and it's probably been done for a couple of years and so if you start to think that way it changes how you spend your time how you plan where you put your energy and and your ability look around corners gets better so many things improve if you can take a long term by the way it's not natural for humans so it's a it's a discipline that you have to build the the kind of you know get rich slowly schemes are not big sellers on infomercials you know it's and so that's something that you have to sort of steel yourself for discipline and teach over time rule number 28 choose a life of adventure you can choose we all get to choose our life stories and it's the choices that define us not our gifts everybody in this room has many gifts I have many gifts you can never be proud of your gifts because their gifts they were given to you you might be you know tall or you might be really good at math or you might be extremely beautiful or handsome or you know there are there are many gifts and you can only be proudly of your choices because those are the things that you are that you're that you are acting on and one of the most important choices that each of us has and you know this just as well as I do is you can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure and when you're 80 which one of those things you think you're going to be more proud of you're gonna be more proud of having chosen a life of service of adventure rule number 29 find allies what motivates me when times are rough you know I find if I'm stressed about something it's usually because I'm not doing anything about it and so if I'm stressed about something I'm trying to trip why am i stressed I'm listening to my body as a signal that I'm that something is awry and then I find that the stress goes away the second I take the first step of you identify the source of the stress why am i stressed about this what's going on and then you know talk to somebody about it find in order to find allies you know I would say that if you can find friends who are interested in similar things or want to help you solve a problem problem solving is is inspiring for me all by itself I have as long as I have allies there's nothing more fun than getting in a room with a group of the inventors and saying look here's the problem let's invent a solution to it and as soon as you start doing that I find that it turns from something that might create stress into something that creates fun rule number 30 empower people on the internet today you know two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry that's how how high it could because you don't you the heavy lifting infrastructures in place for that today two kids their dorm room can't do anything interesting in space you know you could build a CubeSat there's not that much interesting about cube chess and the that may change but right now there's just you need there are certain laws of physics and certain things you need size for and things need to be big we need to be able to put big things in space at low cost and so if I'm 80 years old and I can say to myself that Blue Origin did the heavy lifting you know come are using my Amazon winnings to do a new piece of heavy lifting infrastructure which is low-cost access to space vehicles have to be reusable you can't throw them away throw away space vehicles every time you're never gonna lower the cost so we're trying to lower the price of admission into space so that thousands of entrepreneurs can then do amazing surprising things nobody and they tell you I've that much just nobody in 95 predicted snapchat you know it's like I can't predict for you what amazing entrepreneurs brilliant amazing entrepreneurs will do in space but I know if I give them low-cost access to space some brilliant you know 22 year old is gonna figure it out it's one of those things about what companies get sustainable it's those that provide platforms on upon which others can build if you Amazon's power others empower others to do things so AWS is like that Kindle direct publishing is like that our third-party selling businesses like that fulfill up by Amazon is like that every time you figure out some way of providing tools and services that empower other people to deploy their creativity you're really onto something rule number 31 focused on your customers the secret sauce of Amazon with their several principles at Amazon but the number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over the competitor and I talk so often to other CEOs and some of their CEOs and also founders and entrepreneurs and I can tell that even though they're talking about customers they're really focusing on competitors and it is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitor rule number 32 be resourceful I spent an unusual amount of time with my grandparents and especially with my grandfather on the ranch so he had a ranch in South Texas and I would spend my summers there from age 4 to 16 and the when I was 4 they were taking me for the summer to kind of give my parents a break you know that's sort of because they were so young and it was useful and I was a handful I'm sure and anyway he he he created the illusion for me when I was 4 years old that I was helping him on the ranch which of course could not have been true but I believed it and and then as by the time I was 16 of course I was actually helping on the ranch I you know I can fix prolapsed cattle I can you know we did all of our own veterinary work some of the cattle even survived and we fixed windmills and laid you know water pipelines and built fences and barns and fixed the bulldozer that you guys talked about and so one of the things that's so interesting about that lifestyle and about my grandfather is he did everything himself you know he didn't call of that if one of the annals was sick he figured out what to do himself and so what does it mean no delegation being resourceful I think is the you know that you can always you can't if there's a problem there's a solution and of course issue is you mature and and get into the business world and anything you do on a team you very quickly realize that it's not about just your own resourcefulness it's about team resourcefulness and how does that work and rule number 33 love what you do I have this great luxury I love my job I tap dance into work even I get that I just got back for an amazing vacation in Norway I got to go dog sledding and go to a wolf preserve and all this really cool stuff but I couldn't wait to get back to work because it's so fun and the reason weather is this fun for me is I get to work in the future so my job I have very limited kind of day-to-day operational needs that you know I've constructed my job so that I don't have to be pulled into the present I can stay 2 or 3 years in the future rule number 34 start small everything I've ever done has started small Amazon started with a couple of people and Blue Origin started with five people and the budget at Blue Origin was very very small now the budget at virgin has approaches a billion dollars a year the next year would be more than a billion dollars in Amazon who literally was ten people today it's half a million people but you it's hard to remember for you guys but for me it's like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift and so so for me I've seen small things get big and it's part of this day one mentality I like treating things as if if they're small you know Amazon even though it is a large company I wanted to have the heart and spirit of a small one rule number 35 learn how to deal with critics my approach to criticism and what I teach and preach inside Amazon is when you're criticized first look in a mirror and decide are your critics right if they're right change there are two kinds of critics there are well-meaning critics who you know they they're worried it's not going to work but they do want it to work and so it could be I could give you example customer reviews and be one of those when I first did customer reviews 20 years ago publishers were some book publishers we're not happy about it because some of them are negative and so it was very controversial practice at that time but we thought was right and so we stuck to our guns and and and and had a deep key on that and didn't didn't didn't change but there's a second kind of critic which is the self-interested critic and they come in all shapes and sizes you know they're so they can be any kind of institution competitors of course and so when you are doing some in a new way and if customers embrace the new way what's going to happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not going to like you and they're gonna be self-interested critics and so you do need as you're looking yourself in the mirror to try and tease those two things apart rule number 36 be effective we try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed with two pizzas we call that the two pizza team rule no powerpoints are used inside of Amazon so every meeting we have that when we hire a new executive from the outside this is the weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter and new executives have a little bit of you know culture shock and their first Amazon meeting because what we do is somebody for the meeting has prepared a six page memo a narrative Lee structured memo that is got you know real sentences and topic sentences and verbs and now it's not just bullet points and it lays out and supposed to create the context for what will then be a good discussion so and then we read those memos silently in the meeting so it's like a study hall and we do that everybody sits around the table and we read silently for usually about half an hour however long it takes us to read the document and then we discuss it and it's so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons I definitely recommend the memo over the PowerPoint and the reason we read them in the room by the way is because just like you know high school kids executives will Bluff their way through the meeting as if they've read the memo because we're busy and so you've got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read and that's what the first half hour of the meeting is for and then everybody's actually read the memo they're not just pretending to have read rule number 37 follow your intuition I believe in the power of wandering all of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart intuition guts you know not not an analysis when you can make a decision with analysis you should do so but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct intuition taste heart rule number 38 act on your great ideas I picked books because there were more items in the book category than any other category and so you could build Universal selection there were three million in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together the the the three million different books active and in print in any given time in the largest physical bookstore has only had about a hundred and fifty thousand different titles and so I could see how you could make a bookstore online with Universal selection every book ever printed even out of print ones was the original vision for the company and so that's why books when did you know that Amazon is gonna be teased up going to be something way bigger than just a bookstore well I knew that the books strangely because I was very prepared for this to take a really long time I knew that the books business was gonna be successful in the first thirty days I was shocked at how many books we sold we were ill-prepared you know I had we had all the beds only ten people in the company at that time and most of them were software engineers and so everybody including me and thus offers were all like packing boxes we didn't even have packing tables and down we were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes and about you know 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning I said to one of my software engineering colleagues I said you know Paul we this is killing my knees we need to get knee pads and Paul looked at me and he's like Jeff we need to get packing tables I was like oh my god that is such a good idea the next day I bought packing tables and it doubled our productivity and probably saved our backs and our knees to rule number 39 be a visionary my greatest I would have such a good feeling if I could be an 80 year old guy and laying there thinking about my life if I could say look there is now a bunch of entrepreneurs in space because I took my amazon lottery winnings and built the heavy lifting infrastructure that does take billions of dollars in capex to lower the cost of access to space that's how you get millions of people living and working and by the way we need that for those of you who like to think about the future at all you can do a simple calculation you know we can argue about you know what limited resources on earth and so on and so on but here's the calculation that you cannot argue with which is you take current baseline energy usage on earth compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years and you have to cover the entire surface of the earth and solar cells so you have to we're gonna have to decide do we want a society of pioneering invention expansion growth or do we want a society of stasis and personally I believe because the earth is finite and if you want a society of stasis I think it's good first of all I don't personally believe the stasis is even compatible with freedom so I think for me that's a big problem second of all it's gonna be dull stasis is gonna be very dull you don't want to live in the stasis world and so of course we're gonna continue get more efficient too we have been for hundreds of years we've been getting more productive more efficient that's that trend is going to continue but even so we're gonna want to use more energy more energy per capita and also I don't want to stabilize population I would love for the vea trillion humans in the source system with a trillion humans we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozart's it'd be an incredible symbols don't you want that dynamism it'd be so much mercy my this is for your great-great-great grandchildren but what kind of world do you want them to live in I want them to live in that expansive world that is you know learning more about the universe and moving out throughout the source system rule number 40 be willing to be misunderstood if you're gonna do anything new or innovative you have to be willing to be misunderstood and if you can't tolerate that and for God's sake don't do anything new or innovative every important thing we've done has been misunderstood often by well-meaning sincere critics sometimes of course by self-interested insincere critics rule number 41 act on your ideas I came across the fact so this is 1994 nobody has heard of the internet very very few people and I came across the fact that the web World Wide Web was growing at something like twenty-three hundred percent a year this is an i-94 and anything growing that fast is even if it's baseline usage today is tiny it's growing so fast it's gonna be big and so I looked at that and I was like there's got to be I should come up with a business idea then they get you know on the internet and then let the internet go around this and we can keep working on it and so I made a list of products that I might saw my and I started forced ranking them and I picked books because books is super unusual in one respect which is that there are more book items in the book category than there are items in the other category the three million different books active and in print around the world in a given time so my my the founding idea of Amazon was to build Universal selection of books the biggest bookstores only had 150,000 titles and so that's what I did and I you know I hired a small team and we built we built the software I moved to Seattle and when you told your parents you're gonna equip de sha where you're successful making presumably a fair amount of money yeah and you told your wife McKenzie that you're gonna move across the country what did they all say they were immediately and reflexively supportive right after they asked the question what's the internet room number 42 delight the customers we haven't had any existential crises knock on wood if I don't want to jinx anything but we've had a lot of kind of dramatic events I remember there early on we only had a hundred and 25 employees when Barnes and Noble who the big you at United States bookseller opened their online website to compete against us Barnes and noble.com we'd had about a two year window we opened in 95 they opened in 97 and at that time all of the headlines and the funniest were about how we were about to be destroyed by this much larger company we had 125 employees and 60 million dollars a year in annual sales 60 million with an M and that and Barnes and Noble at the time had 30,000 employees and about three billion dollars in sales so if they were giant we were tiny and we had limited resources and the the headlines were very negative about Amazon and the one that's most minimal our memorable was just Amazon tossed and and so I called it All Hands meeting which was not hard to do with just 125 people we got in a room and because it was so scary for all of us this idea that now we finally had a big competitor that literally everybody's parents were calling and saying you know are you ok is if it's usually the mom's calling and asking their children are you gonna be ok so and I said look you know it it's ok to be afraid but don't be afraid of our competitors because they're never gonna send us any money be afraid of our customers and if we just stay focused on them and instead of obsessing over this big competitor that we just got that will be fine and I really do believe that I think that if you stay focused then the more drama there is and everything else no matter what the drama is whatever the external distraction is the what's your response to it should be to double down on the customer satisfying they're not just satisfying they're delighting them rule number 43 follow your calling you don't choose your passions your passions choose you and all of us are gifted with certain passions and the people who are lucky are the ones who get to follow those things and the i/os advise our young employees or meet with interns as well and you can have and my kids too you can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling and if you can somehow figure out how to have a calling you have hit the jackpot because that's the big deal rule number 44 grow your vision what propel you to sell things more than books after books we surged slam music and then we started selling videos and then I got smart and I I emailed a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them besides the things we felt today what would you like to see a cell and that answer came back incredibly long-tailed the way they answered the question was with whatever they were looking for at that moment so like ever one of the answers was I wish you've sold windshield wiper blades because I really need windshield wiper blades and I thought to myself we can sell anything this way and and then so then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time and the vision became because you read the original business plan it's just books rule number 45 have good role models we all get gifts and we get certain things our life that are that we're very lucky about and one of the most powerful one is who your early role models are you know you could think it was your grandfather it was in a big sense my mom and dad but my grandfather too and you know I had my mom had me when she was 17 years old and she was still in high school in Albuquerque New Mexico and this is in 1964 I can assure you that being a pregnant teenager in high school was not cool in Albuquerque New Mexico at that time and so it's in so it was a very it was difficult for her my grandfather went to bat for her they tried to kick her out of school and you know he there incredible I had so the gift I had is I had this incredible family rule number 46 maintain a day one culture now that you have about 600,000 employees I calculated you're adding about 250 people a day you've mentioned that you're trying to fend off de - yeah and you've said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance followed by excruciating ly painful decline followed by death yeah that's why it is always day one yeah yeah how's that work well so day one and this is a phrase that we use at Amazon all the time I've been using its in my first annual shareholder letter from 20 years ago and we stay it's always day one and it needs to be day one for the reason that you just mentioned and how do you 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 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 pop the question is how do you achieve that the scale is good because it makes you robust you know a big box or 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 gets harder as you get bigger when you're a little tiny company so you're a 10 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 frontlines 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 also junior executives inside the big company start to model all decisions as if they are heavyweight irreversible highly consequential decisions and so even two-way 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 we number 47 be a good leader I'm actually a big fan of anecdotes in business not building a narrative structure around them necessarily but I still have an email address that customers can write to I see most of those emails and I don't answer very many of them anymore but but I see them and I and I forward them some of them the ones that catch my curiosity I forward them to the executives in charges that area but with a question mark and that question mark is just a shorthand for can you look into this why is this happening what does what's going on and what I find is strange because we have tons of metrics we have you know weekly business reviews with these metric decks and we look at our we know so many things about customers and they're there you know whether we're delivering on time what you know whether the packages have too much air in them and you know wasteful of packaging and so we have so many metrics that we monitor and the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree the anecdotes are usually right there's something wrong with the way you're measuring it and that's why it's so important to to keep your you need the to run it's something that you were you're doing you know shipping billions of packages a year for sure you need good data and metrics and are you delivering on time you deliver on time in every city are you delivering on time to apartment complexes are you delivering on time in certain countries you do need the data but then you need to check that data with your intuition and your instincts and you need to teach that to the all the senior executives and and junior executives to rule number 48 never be satisfied the great thing about humans in general is we're always improving things and so entrepreneurs and inventors and you know if they follow their curiosity and they follow their passions and they figure something out and then they figure out how to make it better and they're never satisfied and and you need to harness that in my view you need to harness that energy primarily on your customers instead of on your competitors and so where I see I sometimes see companies and even young small start-up companies entrepreneurs go awry is they start to pay more attention to their competition than they do to their customers and I think that that I think that in big mature industries that can be that might be a winning approach in some cases kind of close following let other people be the pioneers and you know and go down the blind alleys there's many things that a new inventive company tries won't work and so those mistakes and errors and failures do cost real money and and and so maybe in a mature industry that we're growth rates are slow and change is very slow but as see in the world more and more there aren't very many mature industries change is happening everywhere you know we see it in the automobile industry with self-driving cars and but you could go right down the line of every industry and you would see it rule number 49 make it happen what was your moment you thought I might not make it the riskiest moment for Amazon charlie was at the very very beginning I needed to raise a million dollars at a certain point and I ended up giving away 20% of the company for a million dollar hell of a deal for somebody a lot of people did very well in that deal but they but they also took a risk so they deserve to do very well on that deal but I I had to take 60 meetings to raise a million dollars and I raised it from 22 people at approximately fifty thousand dollars a person and it was nip and tuck whether I was could go raise that money so the whole thing could have ended before he even started that was 1995 you know and the first question every investor asked me was what's the internet and rule number 50 the last one before a very special bonus clip is laughs I loved high school I had so much fun we had I lost my library privileges because I laughed too loudly in the library and that laughs where did you get that laughter um you know it is distinctive I've had that laugh all my life there was a short not that short there was a multi-year period where my brother and sister would not see a movie with me because they thought it was too embarrassing and my but I don't know why I have this laugh it's just it's just and I laugh easily and often the people who know me you know yes my mom or anybody who knows me well and they'll say if Jeff's unhappy wait five minutes now I have a special bonus gift from Jeff on how to be focused that I think you're gonna enjoy but before that it's time for the three point landing questions let's go from just watching a video to taking action here we go question number one what is your intuition telling you to do number two what does choosing a life of adventure sure mean to you and number three who are to role models that you're going to study and learn from and if you liked this video and you're gonna take immediate action give me a hashtag belive down in the comments as well I've always been focused when I was in Montessori School the Montessori School teacher told my mom that I wouldn't switch tasks and they were and they got me to switch tasks by picking me up including my chair and just moving me to the new task station I've gotten a little better about that over the years but it's still task switching is still a problem for me if you want to learn more about Jeff and Amazon's journey check out the video right there next to me I think you'll enjoy it continue to believe and I'll see you there the web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2,300 percent a year you know things just don't grow that fast it's highly unusual

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 79,714

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Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, jeff bezos top 10 rules for success, jeff bezos success, jeff bezos motivation, jeff bezos advice, success advice, success motivation, billionaire, world richest man, advice from a billionaire, jeff bezos interview, jeff bezos speech, inspiring speech from jeff bezos, best of jeff bezos, how billionaires think, richest man alive, richest man on the planet gives advice, amazon founder, how jeff bezos became the world's richest man

Id: ET77VmiEk_E

Length: 65min 27sec (3927 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019