Jeff Bezos on Work Quotes

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

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

"Work hard, have fun, make history."

"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."

"Failure and invention are inseparable twins."

"Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

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

"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."

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

"Maintain a Day 1 mentality."

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

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

"I strongly believe that missionaries make better products."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be."

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

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

"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."

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

"Execution is the hard part."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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