Jeff Bezos is a renowned American media proprietor, internet entrepreneur, industrialist, and investor. Mostly, all of us know him as the founder of Amazon, a multinational Company. He also maintains the responsibility as the president and the Chief Executive Officer. The original name of this legend is Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.
We find Jeff Bezos as the first centi-billionaire. He has achieved this honor and position by culminating his business policies with hard work. Jeff Bezos’ proficiency in business reflects on his words. You may acquaint with his thinking by going through Jeff Bezos quotes. Jeff Bezos’ thinking and business policies are worthy to be followed.
50 Jeff Bezos Quotes:
Jeff Bezos on life and your career:
1. “If 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 and intuition, taste, heart.”―Jeff Bezos
2. “Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.”―Jeff Bezos
3. “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.”―Jeff Bezos
4. “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. People who are right a lot change their mind without a lot of new data. They wake up and reanalyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases. “―Jeff Bezos
5. “When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever.”―Jeff Bezos
6. “You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.”―Jeff Bezos
7. “If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.”―Jeff Bezos
8. “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”―Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos on business:
9. “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”―Jeff Bezos
10. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”―Jeff Bezos
11. “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.”―Jeff Bezos
12. “We’ve done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don’t do that, because we believe — and we have to take this as an article of faith — that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.”―Jeff Bezos
13. “If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.”―Jeff Bezos
14. “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.”―Jeff Bezos
15. “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”―Jeff Bezos
16. “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.”―Jeff Bezos
16. “You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter. Nobody will watch.”―Jeff Bezos
18. “Your margin is my opportunity.”―Jeff Bezos
19. “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.”―Jeff Bezos
20. “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.”―Jeff Bezos
21. “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”―Jeff Bezos
22. “There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you are good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backwards, even if it requires learning new skills.”―Jeff Bezos
23. “Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, ‘Good job, great quarter.'” “And I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.'”―Jeff Bezos
24. “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis.”―Jeff Bezos
25. “Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.”―Jeff Bezos
26. “We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.”―Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos on taking risks:
27. “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.”―Jeff Bezos
28. “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.”―Jeff Bezos
29. “Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at.”―Jeff Bezos
30. “We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.”―Jeff Bezos
31. “When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.”―Jeff Bezos
32. “We take risks all the time, we talk about failure.” “We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don’t, we’re not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that’s okay.”―Jeff Bezos
33. “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.”―Jeff Bezos
34. “The difference between 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.”―Jeff Bezos
35. “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon.”―Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos on innovation:
36. “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”―Jeff Bezos
37. “I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”―Jeff Bezos
38. “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”―Jeff Bezos
39. “You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”―Jeff Bezos
40. “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”―Jeff Bezos
41. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.”―Jeff Bezos
42. “One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is ‘one-size-fits-all’ decision making…The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”―Jeff Bezos
43. “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.”―Jeff Bezos
44. “When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they’re thinking about how they’re going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we’re thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.”―Jeff Bezos
45. “Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said, ‘No, thank you.'”―Jeff Bezos
46. “I do get asked, quite frequently ‘What’s gonna change in the next 10 years?’ I’m rarely get asked, and it’s probably more important — and I encourage you to think about this — is the question what’s not going to change? The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come.”―Jeff Bezos
47. “To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.”―Jeff Bezos
48. “If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”―Jeff Bezos
49. “If you’re watching your competitors, you’re unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.”―Jeff Bezos
50. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time.”―Jeff Bezos
“In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”―Jeff Bezos
“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.”―Jeff Bezos
“If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough,” he said. “They should just be as high quality as I can make them”―Jeff Bezos
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”―Jeff Bezos
“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”―Jeff Bezos
“The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.”―Jeff Bezos
“We don’t focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers.”―Jeff Bezos
We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience – importantly – even in those areas where we are already the leader.”―Jeff Bezos
“One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to.”―Jeff Bezos
Biography of Jeff Bezos :
Early life:
The birth year of Jeff Bezos is 1964. He was born in New Mexico of the United States. His biological fathers’ name is Ted Jorgensen, and he was a bike shop owner. Jeffrey’s mother’s name is Jacklyn. Jeff Bezos’ parents separated from each other.
Later, his mother married to Miguel Mike Bezos. He adopted little Jeffrey. Jeffrey got his surname ‘Bezos’ from his stepfather, Miguel Mike Bezos. Later, Jeff Bezos’ shifted to Houston, Texas.
Education:
Jeff Bezos admitted to the River Oaks Elementary School. When he was a school student, he showed scientific interest. At this time, Bezos had proficiency in the technological aspect. Later, he had to admit to the Miami Palmetto High School as his family moved to Miami.
At the University of Florida, Jeff Bezos attended a Science related training program. He graduated from Princeton University. He also completed his B.S.E ( Bachelor of Science in Engineering) in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
Career story:
At the beginning of the career, Jeff Bezos worked at Fitel. We also find him working in the banking industry. In Bankers Trust Bank, he worked as a product manager. Later, he joined the D.E. Shaw & Co. In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded ‘Amazon’. The first office of ‘Amazon’ is his garage. The primary name of ‘Amazon’ is ‘Cadabra’. Later, Jeff Bezos changed his company’s name to ‘Amazon’. At first, it was a bookstore. Then he added other consumer goods, music, and videos. In2000, Jeff Bezos also founded ‘Blue Origin’. He owns the ‘The Washington Post’.
Why should we follow him?
If we look over the life history of Jeff Bezos, we’ll find that his childhood was not smooth. His parents divorced in his early age. He was hard working from his childhood. When he was a student of high school, Jeff worked as a cook at McDonald’s Corporation. He was self-independent from his childhood. We should also motivate our young generation to be self-independent.
We also find that Jeff Bezos was a brilliant student from his school life. He won the Silver Knight Award. He has achieved success both in his academic life and professional life. Jeff Bezos always suggests us to work with amusement. If we find pleasure in our work, then we can give more concentration to it. He motivates us to increase our tolerance with the criticisms of our work.
Jeff Bezos says that our new experience of work always comes with criticisms. We should not bother about the critics. Jeff Bezos’ suggestions and advice are valuable for us. We should follow him and his words to improve our work.
