Jeff bezos quotes

One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.

The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible. The hard part is figuring out when to be which.

People don't want gadgets, they want services.

My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

Seek instant gratification - or the elusive promise of it - and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, 'let's be simple minded. We know this is a feature that's good for customers. Let's do it.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

We change our tools and then our tools change us.

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.

The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.

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.

If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And 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.

Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.

If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.

The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.

Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.

Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and thy're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun.

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.

There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.

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.

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy-they're given after all. Choices can be hard.

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.

It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today

I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.

The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”

Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.

The common question that gets asked in business is, why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

Work hard, have fun and make history.

If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.

In the end, we are our choices.

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

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.

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 think about 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. This is the way it works for me.

Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.

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

I told all of our original investors that they would lose their money for sure.

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.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy - they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Read the Declaration of Independence to your children as a tradition every Fourth of July. Make sure they understand why the word "pursuit" precedes the word "happiness."

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

Determine what your customers need, and work backwards.

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.

Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.

One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that customer expectations are always rising, and I find that very exciting.

I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected.

You know, if you make a customer unhappy they won't tell five friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So, we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don't, it will be shame on us.

Word of mouth is very powerful.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.

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.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

I have a strongly held belief that one of the reasons that Amazon has been successful is because we do not obsess over competitors. Instead we obsess over customers.

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy to be motivated.

If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.

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.

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.

Things never go smoothly.

If you build a great product or service, people will talk about it. But it starts with having something that's worth talking about.

A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.

Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often

Teachers, who are really good create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning. If you do something and you find it a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it. The great teachers somehow convey in their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning. You end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. That's a real talent some people have to convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students.

If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don't do anything new.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.

Obsess about customers, not competitors.

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

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

I try to spend my time on areas that I think are important for the future, and where I think I can add value.

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to chase what is kind of the "hot passion" of the day.

Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.

The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.

Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.

We like to pioneer, we like to explore, we like to go down dark alleys and see what's on the other side.

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.

You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

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.

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.

All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.