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Jeff Bezos is a successful entrepreneur who started Amazon.com in 1994 at the beginning of the dot.com bubble and later became the biggest e-commerce business in the world. Jeff Bezos has a background in electrical engineering. The philosophy behind the success of Jeff Bezos needs to be examined to understand what it takes to become successful like him.
Jeff Bezos is a successful American entrepreneur who has a deep possession of customer experience, which enabled the rapid growth of Amazon. Jeff has also founded blue origin, a space company to commercialise space flight which is another attempt of Bezos to provide a quality customer experience.
To understand his philosophy, we need to look at his early life and when he first started Amazon to unravel his way of thinking.
Short snapshot of Jeff Bezos life
Jeff was born in 1964 in New Mexico. His father and mother were separated when he was 4, and later his mother married Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant. Jeff graduated in 1986 with a degree in computer engineering and science from the University of Princeton. After graduation, he worked in several finance firms, including D.E. Shaw’s, where he later became the youngest vice president. He continued his career in finance until 1994, when he started Amazon.com.
When Jeff was working in finance, he noticed an increasing trend of internet businesses, prompting him to start Amazon.com. Essentially Jeff started Amazon in his garage selling books across the united states, and soon later, he expanded his online business to include other countries and expanded the inventory of items sold on Amazon to pretty much everything.
Amazon when public in 1997, when many people thought this type of business would not last. Amazon exceeded all expectations and soon became the dominant e-commerce crushing other online markets. Amazon success, according to Jeff, is because of the exceptional customer service, low prices and fast delivery times. Today Amazon is worth over 1 trillion US dollars, the second company ever to pass the 1 trillion dollar mark after Apple.
Jeff founded Blue origin in 2000, a space company dedicated to commercialising and providing accessible space travel. In its early years, the company was extremely quiet without any public announcements or innovations. Jeff Bezos has supported Blue origin financially by selling Amazon stock to fund the company. In recent years Jeff sold over $1 Billion of his Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin.
In July 2021, Blue Origin made history when a rocket flew into orbit carrying Jeff, his brother and other people to experience 10 minutes of zero gravity in an attempt to sell future tickets of space flights. The company has succeeded in selling $100 million of tickets to future passengers. By doing this, Blue Origin has entered the space race along with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.
In addition, Bezos has acquired several businesses such as the Washington Post and Whole Food. His success has put him on the map as one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
What makes Jeff Bezos successful?
1- Success comes from iteration
In the early years, Amazon had many competitions in the e-commerce business, such as eBay. Amazon tried to develop many strategies to beat other competitors through its auction sites that failed miserably for many years. Until they decided to embed the auction into Amazon.com, which later became the amazon marketplace, Jeff believed that the secret to success is trial and error and producing as many iterations as possible until finding the best solution that suits customers.
Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details
Jeff Bezos
Entrepreneurs should have a clear idea of their vision and work hard to achieve it, but they need to be flexible on the details because there will be many mistakes and iterations along the way until a breakthrough happens.
2- Be a domain expert with a beginner’s mind
In Amazon, Jeff has a rule called Day one, which means that it is always day one at Amazon. It might sound silly, or it does not make sense. That means that you can be an expert and still have a fresh mind for ideas. You can practice for years and be an expert at what you do, but you still need to keep the beginner’s mind. The Beginners mind help you to look at things in a fresh way and think in the customer shoe to find ways of improving the service.
3- Find the life-work harmony
Jeff dislike life-work balance. Instead, he uses life-work harmony. There are two types of works in general, one that gives you energy and one that sucks energy from you. You can say the same thing about family and relationships; one can provide you with energy, and another that suck energy from you. Life-work harmony is when both your work and personal life give you energy.
This is different from life-work balance because it means how many hours you are spending on work and other things and how you can find the balance in your life. However, if your work is toxic or it does not energise you, then it has a negative effect on you. Life is too short to do things that suck energy from you. Therefore, finding life-work harmony is one of Bezos philosophies for success.
4- Make a small number of high-quality decisions
Jeff Bezos is not like other start-up entrepreneurs. He focuses more on quality than quantity of things. He admits that he is extremely slow at doing things, and he likes to take his time. To make quality decisions is to think long term and think in terms of your customer perspective.
5- Work fast by being slow
In many of Jeff Bezos interviews, he always emphasises that he like to take his time in doing anything. He gives anything that he does 100% attention to and does not multitask. He finds it distracting to do multiple things simultaneously and go as slow as possible to finish a task. Essentially Jeff works fast by being slow. He does things once and makes high-quality decisions and actions.
6- Have no regrets
When jeff was asked how he made the decision before quitting his job to start Amazon, Jeff projected himself in his 80s and asked himself if he will have regrets that he did not pursue his business idea? The answer was yes, which it seemed easy for Jeff to quit his job and start Amazon. The idea is that Jeff likes to live a life with no regrets, which means that even if something feels impossible or silly, it is better to try and fail than not try and live with regrets.
Your only regrets are the things you have not tried
7- Follow your passion
Jeff Believes that you do not choose your passion. Instead, your passion chose you. Passion comes from something you enjoy doing and gives you energy – so it comes naturally. If you do the things, you love you will be far more successful than others. You are more likely to succeed at anything if it is your passion.
8- Leverage your gifts
Any person has gifts that enable them to do things better than others – Basically, it is their superpower. Jeff says that you should not be proud of your gifts because they are given to you, and it comes naturally to you. However, you can be proud of your choices because it is up to you to work hard using your gifts.
Successful people are the ones who combine hard work with their gifts.
Jeff Bezos
9- Change your mind
One of 14 Amazon key principles is to practice being right a lot. According to Jeff, people who are right a lot are the people who listen a lot, people who change their minds a lot and seek to disconfirm their convictions. People always tend to observe the evidence that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, which usually does not make them right a lot. On the other hand, people who are right a lot can change their minds because they tend to disconfirm their views.
People who do not change their minds a lot, dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in
Jeff Bezos
The Bottom Line
Jeff philosophy is unorthodox, and it is why he is extremely successful. In the early days of Amazon, jeff was known for being extremely angry and could snap at other Amazon employees. He even hired a coach that could teach him how to control himself. It is an incredible transformation that Jeff went through, which also can be seen on amazon. Some Amazon principles such as two pizza teams and no PowerPoint presentation focus on eliminating the unnecessary structure in companies to aim more toward productivity and increasing the size of failure to avoid fatal mistakes.
There are many attributes that you can learn from Jeff Bezos, but fundamentally his recipe for success are those:
- Success comes from iteration
- Be a domain expert with a beginner’s mind
- Find the life-work harmony
- Make a small number of high-quality decisions
- Work fast by being slow
- Live a life with no regrets
- Follow your passion
- Leverage your gifts
- Change your mind
When you take his philosophy and simplify it, you can realise that it is extremely replicable by many. It only takes a strong mindset to apply and commit to your goals. You do not have to be a genius to do something extraordinary. It is the commitment that makes all the difference.
