Tag: jeff bezos

Focus on What Won’t Change

Post author By jrlsage
Post date September 19, 2017

Old things are new sooner than you think

I love this quote from Jeff Bezos:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Sometimes the old school rules.

Tags jeff bezos, What Wont Change

Blog Post

Keep Swinging If You Can

Post author By jrlsage
Post date July 28, 2016

Home runs come from the same place as a single

There is a great quote from Jeff Bezos, CEO, and Founder of Amazon about baseball and business:

“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs… baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

I think this applies to life as well.

Our opportunities in life happen by chance, circumstance, and want of trying. In this quote, opportunities are “swings.”

Chance and circumstance rely on nature or other people, but our want is internal. We have some control over it. >We can take as many “want” swings as, well, we want.

The best part of the quote to me is in bold.

Life has no truncated outcome distribution, meaning that there is no artificial cap on what a swing can do. A home run clears the bases. In life, there are an unlimited amount of bases.

So, keep swinging.

Tags amazon, baseball, jeff bezos, swinging, work

Blog Post

Experiments are Investments

Post author By jrlsage
Post date January 8, 2016

Experimentation is great, once you do it

We avoid failure. Most of my life, I spent time avoiding my urge to try things because of risk aversion. If I wasn’t good at it, I didn’t need to do it.

I missed out on a lot because of that, so imagine my joy when I recognized how much I learned from trying it, and why I plan on investing in heavily.

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

That quote is from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. I find it truthful. Some of my biggest personal development jumps happened when I asked the question, “what can happen if I?”

It isn’t easy

Experimenting isn’t easy by any means, and it runs against the grain for most people. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is an easier way to live your life, considering if the job gets done, no one finds you.

It forces you to put a light on yourself, both internally and externally. You deal with the idea of being wrong. You go in blind, because even if you have a hypothesis, chances are it isn’t right.

Nor is it free, because they cost time, money, or productivity. It is a learning process and it gets stressful. If someone wants to win now, nothing seems worse.

But the win isn’t for now, it’s for later

The most successful companies today invest in experimentation. They know that it isn’t an investment just on the product, but it’s people.

I don’t know of a single experiment that didn’t help me down the line. Experimentation is an investment, more than anything else. Not only is there a chance to learn something about the product, idea, or process but the person working with you on the experiments (or yourself).

Tags amazon, east, experiments, famous, investment, jeff bezos, strong