Jeff Bezos on Work Quotes

"Work hard, have fun, make history."

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

"Frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do."

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

"Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business."

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

"Inventing and pioneering involves a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time."

"Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically."

"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had."

"If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure."

"We want to be a large company that's also an invention machine."

"You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas."

"Failure and invention are inseparable twins."

"To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance it's going to work, it's not an experiment."

"If you hit a wall, you have to find a way to go around it, over it, or through it."

"Execution is the hard part."

"I strongly believe that missionaries make better products."

"Working on the wrong thing is the biggest waste of time."

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

"Stress comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over."

"What we need to do is always look into the future."

"Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time."

"Keep your hands on the steering wheel."

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

"I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this."

"One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."

"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."

"We don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

"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."

"The death of a company is Day 2. Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline."

"Maintain a Day 1 mentality."