Invent and Wander Quotes

“People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Focus on the big decisions. “As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?” he asks. “You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“what’s good for customers is good for shareholders.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“But Bezos had a rule, which was to use his heart and his intuition as well as empirical data in making a big decision. “There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way,”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Until July, Amazon.com had been primarily built on two pillars of customer experience: selection and convenience. In July, as I already discussed, we added a third customer experience pillar: relentlessly lowering prices.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Why focus on cash flows? Because a share of stock is a share of a company’s future cash flows, and, as a result, cash flows more than any other single variable seem to do the best job of explaining a company’s stock price over the long term.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking.”
― Walter Isaacson, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Among Republicans, we trailed only the military and local police; among Democrats, we were at the top, leading every branch of government, universities, and the press.”
― Walter Isaacson, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“You can invent your way to a better place.”
― Walter Isaacson, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“It's time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.”
― Walter Isaacson, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Future generations will figure out the details.”
― Walter Isaacson, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“In 1994 very, very few people had heard of the internet. It was used at that time mostly by scientists and physicists. We used it a little bit at D. E. Shaw for some things but not much, and I came across the fact that the web—the World Wide Web—was growing at something like 2,300 percent a year. Anything growing that fast, even if it’s baseline usage today is tiny, is going to be big. I concluded that I should come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it and keep working to improve it. So I made a list of products I might sell online. I started ranking them, and I picked books because books are super unusual in one respect: there are more items in the book category than in any other category. There are three million different books in print around the world at any given time. The biggest bookstores had only 150,000 titles. So the founding idea of Amazon was to build a universal selection of books in print. That’s what I did: I hired a small team, and we built the software. I moved to Seattle because the largest book warehouse in the world at that time was nearby in a town called Roseberg, Oregon, and also because of the recruiting pool available from Microsoft.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”),”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“They share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence. Through that lens, AWS and Amazon retail are very similar indeed. A”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos