Jeff Bezos on Confidence Quotes

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

"Big things start small."

"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."

"In the end, 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 tailwind is now a headwind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy."

"If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting."

"You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn't amazing, it won't matter."

"I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat buffets, but you have to be careful what you pick."

"You have to have a certain amount of optimism to be an entrepreneur."

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

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

"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."

"You want your customers to value your service; you don't want them to be just satisfied."

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

"Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. That is why it is always Day 1."

"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."

"Failure and invention are inseparable twins."

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

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

"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."

"Keep your eyes on the customer, not the competitor."

"Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency."

"Stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring."

"If you're going to invent, it means you're going to fail. You have to be okay with that."

"We are all very focused on the long term, and that gives us a lot of confidence."

"The death of a company is when it starts to look at the past and say, 'That's how we did it then.'"

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

"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."

"If you're going to do anything new, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."

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

"I strongly believe that missionaries make better products."

"Market research doesn't help. If you had gone to a customer in 1905 and asked, 'What do you want?' they would have said, 'A faster horse.'"