the number one thing that has made us
successful by far is
obsessive-compulsive focus on the
customer if you’re gonna do anything new
or innovative you have to be willing to
be misunderstood when you’re criticized
first look in a mirror and decide are
your critics right if they’re right
need motivation watch a top ten with
believe nation what’s that believe
nation it’s Evan I believe in you and
this channel is designed to be a part of
your daily success routine so let’s get
your motivation to attend and get you
believing in you grab a snack and chew
in today’s lessons from a man who went
from quitting his high paying job in New
York to driving across the country to
Seattle to start his new business
writing the business plan in the car
ride along the way it was called Amazon
and it made him the richest man in
modern times is Jeff Bezos and here’s my
take on his top ten roses success vol 4
also if you want to know that Jeff and
other successful entrepreneurs have to
say about building unstoppable
confidence check out my 250 for
confidence series where every day for
the next 254 days I will send you a
morning video for free to help you build
your confidence the link to join is in
the description below
stress primarily comes from not taking
okay let’s kick it off with rule number
one focus on your customers the secret
sauce of Amazon where there several
principles at Amazon but the number one
thing that has made us successful by far
is obsessive-compulsive focus on the
customer as opposed to obsession over
the competitor and I talked so often to
other CEOs and some other CEOs and also
founders and entrepreneurs and I can
tell that even though they’re talking
about customers they’re really focusing
on competitors and it is a huge
advantage to any company if you can stay
focused on your customer instead of your
competitor
rule number two be resourceful I spent
an unusual amount of time with my
grandparents and especially with my
grandfather on the ranch so he had a
ranch in South Texas and I would spend
my summers there from age 4 to 16 and
they when I was four they were taking me
for the summer to kind of give my
parents a break you know that’s sort of
because they were so young and it was
useful and I was a handful I’m sure and
anyway he he he created the illusion for
me when I was four years old that I was
helping him on the ranch which of course
could not have been true but I believed
it and and then as by the time I was 16
of course I was actually helping on the
ranch I you know I can fix prolapsed
cattle I can you know we did all over on
veterinary work some of the cattle even
survived and we fixed windmills and laid
you know water pipelines and built
fences and barns and fixed the bulldozer
that you guys talked about and so one of
the things that’s so interesting about
that lifestyle and about my grandfather
is he did everything himself you know he
didn’t call of that if one of the
animals was sick he figured out what to
do himself and
so what does it mean no delegation being
resourceful I think is the you know that
you can always you can’t if there’s a
problem there’s a solution and of course
issue is you mature and and get into the
business world and anything you do on a
team you very quickly realize that it’s
not about just your own resourcefulness
it’s about team resourcefulness and how
does that work and rule number three
love what you do I have this great
luxury I love my job I tap dance into
work even I get that I just got back for
an amazing vacation in Norway
I got to go dog sledding and go to a
wolf preserve and all this really cool
stuff but I couldn’t wait to get back to
work because it’s so fun and the reason
weather is this fun for me is I get to
work in the future so my job I have very
limited kind of day-to-day operational
needs that you know I’ve constructed my
job so that I don’t have to be pulled
into the present
I can stay two or three years in the
future rule number four start small
everything I’ve ever done has started
small Amazon started with a couple of
people and Blue Origin started with five
people and the budgetable origin was
very very small now the budget applauds
and has approaches a billion dollars a
year a next year would be more than a
billion dollars in Amazon who literally
was ten people today it’s half a million
people but you it’s hard to remember for
you guys but for me it’s like yesterday
I was driving the packages to the post
office myself and hoping one day we
could afford a forklift and so so for me
I’ve seen small things get big and it’s
part of this day one mentality I like
treating things as if if they’re small
you know Amazon even though it is a
large company I wanted to have the heart
and spirit of a small one rule number
five learn how to deal with critics my
approach to criticisms and what I teach
and preach inside Amazon is when you’re
criticized for
look in a mirror and then decide are
your critics right if they’re right
change there are two kinds of critics
there are well-meaning critics who you
know they they’re worried it’s not gonna
work but they do want it to work and so
it could be I can give you example
customer reviews and be one of those
when I first did customer reviews 20
years ago publishers were some book
publishers were not happy about it
because some of them are negative and so
it was very controversial practice at
that time but we thought was right and
so we stuck to our guns and and and and
had a deep teal on that and didn’t
didn’t didn’t change but there’s a
second kind of critic which is the
self-interested critic and they come in
all shapes and sizes you know they’re so
they can be any kind of institution
competitors of course and so when you
are doing some in a new way and if
customers embrace the new way what’s
gonna happen is incumbents who are
practicing the older way are not gonna
like you and they’re gonna be
self-interested critics and so you do
need as you’re looking yourself in the
mirror to try and tease those two things
apart rule number six be effective we
try to create teams that are no larger
than can be fed with two pizzas we call
that the two pizza team rule no power
points are used inside of Amazon so
every meeting we have that when we hire
a new executive from the outside
this is the weirdest meeting culture you
will ever encounter and new executives
have a little bit of you know culture
shock and their first Amazon meeting
because what we do is somebody for the
meeting has prepared a six page memo a
narrative Lee structured memo that is
got you know real sentences and topic
sentences and verbs and now it’s not
just bullet points and it lays out and
supposed to create the context for what
will then be a good discussion so and
then we read those memos silently in the
meeting so it’s like a study hall and we
do that everybody sits around the table
and we read silently from usually about
half an hour however long it takes us to
read the document and then we discuss it
and it’s so much better than the typical
PowerPoint presentation for so many
reasons I definitely recommend a memo
over the PowerPoint and the reason we
read them in the room by the way is
because just like you know high school
kids executives will Bluff their way
through the meeting as if they’ve read
the memo because we’re busy and so you
got to actually carve out the time for
the memo to get read and that’s what the
first half hour of the meeting is for
and then everybody’s actually read the
memo they’re not just pretending to have
read rule number seven follow your
intuition I believe in the power of
wandering all of my best decisions in
business and in life have been made with
heart intuition guts you know not not an
analysis when you can make a decision
with analysis you should do so but it
turns out in life that your most
important decisions are always made with
instinct intuition taste heart rule
number eight act on your great ideas I
picked books because there were more
items in the book category than any
other category and so you could build
universal select
there were three million in 1994 when I
was pulling this idea together the the
the three million different books active
and in print in any given time in the
largest physical bookstore has only had
about a hundred and fifty thousand
different titles and so I could see how
you could make a bookstore online with
Universal selection every book ever
printed even out of print ones was the
original vision for the company and so
that’s why books when did you know that
Amazon is going to be something way
bigger than just a bookstore well I knew
that the books
strangely because I was very prepared
for this to take a really long time I
knew that the books business was gonna
be successful in the first thirty days I
was shocked at how many books we sold we
were ill-prepared you know I had we had
all the we had only ten people in the
company at that time and most of them
are software engineers and so everybody
including me and the suckers were all
like packing boxes we didn’t even have
packing tables and down we were on our
hands and knees on a concrete floor
packing the boxes and about you know one
or two in the morning I said to one of
my software engineering colleagues I
said you know Paul we this is killing my
knees we need to get knee pads and Paul
looked at me and he’s like Jeff we need
to get packing tables and I was like oh
my god that is such a good idea the next
day I bought packing tables and it
doubled our productivity and probably
saved our backs and our knees to rule
number nine be a visionary my greatest I
would have such a good feeling if I
could be an 80 year old guy and laying
there thinking about my life if I could
say look there is now a bunch of
entrepreneurs in space because I took my
amazon lottery winnings and built the
heavy lifting infrastructure that does
take billions of dollars in capex to
lower the cost of access to space that’s
how you get millions of people living
and working and by the way we need that
for those of you who like to think about
the future at all you can do a simple
calculation you know we can argue about
you know what limited resources on earth
and so on and so on but here’s the
calculation that you cannot argue with
which is you take current baseline
energy usage on earth compound it at
just a few percent a year for just a few
hundred years and you have to cover the
entire surface of the earth and solar
cells so you have to we’re gonna have to
decide do we want a society of
pioneering invention expansion growth or
do we want a society of stasis and
personally I believe because the earth
is finite and if you want a society of
stasis I think it’s good first of all I
don’t personally believe the stasis is
even compatible with freedom so I think
for me that’s a big problem
second of all it’s gonna be dull stasis
is gonna be very dull you don’t want to
live in the stasis world and so of
course we’re gonna continue get more
efficient too we have been for hundreds
of years we’ve been getting more
productive more efficient that’s that
trend is going to continue but even so
we’re gonna want to use more energy more
energy per capita and also I don’t want
to stabilize population I would love for
the vea trillion humans in the source
system with a trillion humans we would
have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand
Mozart’s it’d be an incredible Sybil’s
don’t you want that dynamism it’d be so
much merging my this is for your
great-great-great grandchildren but what
kind of world do you want them to live
in I want them to live in that expansive
world that is you know learning more
about the universe and moving out
throughout the source system and rule
number ten the last one before a very
special bonus clip is be willing to be
misunderstood if you’re gonna do
anything new or innovative you have to
be willing to be misunderstood and if
you can’t tolerate that then for God’s
sake don’t do anything new or innovative
and
important thing we’ve done has been
misunderstood often by well-meaning
sincere critics sometimes of course by
now I’ve got a really special bonus
script from Jeff on how to invent and
pioneer that I think you’re gonna really
enjoy but before that it’s time for the
three point landing questions on the
move from just watching another video to
taking action in your life for business
and if you’re feeling bold leave your
answers in the comments below here we go
question number one what great idea of
yours do you need to act on brush number
two how can you start on it in a small
way and question number three how will
you deal with critics who attack your
summers are always dissatisfied they
even when they don’t know it even when
they think they’re happy they actually
do want a better way
and they just don’t know yet what that
should be and that’s why I always warn
people customer obsession is not just
listening to customers customer
obsession is also inventing on their
behalf because it’s not their job to
invent for these Sol’s and so you need
if you want more jeff bezos check out
his best advice on work-life balance
video that we made the link is right
there next to me I think you’ll enjoy it
continue to believe and I’ll see you
there if you’re giving great customer
experience there’s the only way to do that is with happy people
successful by far is
obsessive-compulsive focus on the
customer if you’re gonna do anything new
or innovative you have to be willing to
be misunderstood when you’re criticized
first look in a mirror and decide are
your critics right if they’re right
need motivation watch a top ten with
believe nation what’s that believe
nation it’s Evan I believe in you and
this channel is designed to be a part of
your daily success routine so let’s get
your motivation to attend and get you
believing in you grab a snack and chew
in today’s lessons from a man who went
from quitting his high paying job in New
York to driving across the country to
Seattle to start his new business
writing the business plan in the car
ride along the way it was called Amazon
and it made him the richest man in
modern times is Jeff Bezos and here’s my
take on his top ten roses success vol 4
also if you want to know that Jeff and
other successful entrepreneurs have to
say about building unstoppable
confidence check out my 250 for
confidence series where every day for
the next 254 days I will send you a
morning video for free to help you build
your confidence the link to join is in
the description below
stress primarily comes from not taking
okay let’s kick it off with rule number
one focus on your customers the secret
sauce of Amazon where there several
principles at Amazon but the number one
thing that has made us successful by far
is obsessive-compulsive focus on the
customer as opposed to obsession over
the competitor and I talked so often to
other CEOs and some other CEOs and also
founders and entrepreneurs and I can
tell that even though they’re talking
about customers they’re really focusing
on competitors and it is a huge
advantage to any company if you can stay
focused on your customer instead of your
competitor
rule number two be resourceful I spent
an unusual amount of time with my
grandparents and especially with my
grandfather on the ranch so he had a
ranch in South Texas and I would spend
my summers there from age 4 to 16 and
they when I was four they were taking me
for the summer to kind of give my
parents a break you know that’s sort of
because they were so young and it was
useful and I was a handful I’m sure and
anyway he he he created the illusion for
me when I was four years old that I was
helping him on the ranch which of course
could not have been true but I believed
it and and then as by the time I was 16
of course I was actually helping on the
ranch I you know I can fix prolapsed
cattle I can you know we did all over on
veterinary work some of the cattle even
survived and we fixed windmills and laid
you know water pipelines and built
fences and barns and fixed the bulldozer
that you guys talked about and so one of
the things that’s so interesting about
that lifestyle and about my grandfather
is he did everything himself you know he
didn’t call of that if one of the
animals was sick he figured out what to
do himself and
so what does it mean no delegation being
resourceful I think is the you know that
you can always you can’t if there’s a
problem there’s a solution and of course
issue is you mature and and get into the
business world and anything you do on a
team you very quickly realize that it’s
not about just your own resourcefulness
it’s about team resourcefulness and how
does that work and rule number three
love what you do I have this great
luxury I love my job I tap dance into
work even I get that I just got back for
an amazing vacation in Norway
I got to go dog sledding and go to a
wolf preserve and all this really cool
stuff but I couldn’t wait to get back to
work because it’s so fun and the reason
weather is this fun for me is I get to
work in the future so my job I have very
limited kind of day-to-day operational
needs that you know I’ve constructed my
job so that I don’t have to be pulled
into the present
I can stay two or three years in the
future rule number four start small
everything I’ve ever done has started
small Amazon started with a couple of
people and Blue Origin started with five
people and the budgetable origin was
very very small now the budget applauds
and has approaches a billion dollars a
year a next year would be more than a
billion dollars in Amazon who literally
was ten people today it’s half a million
people but you it’s hard to remember for
you guys but for me it’s like yesterday
I was driving the packages to the post
office myself and hoping one day we
could afford a forklift and so so for me
I’ve seen small things get big and it’s
part of this day one mentality I like
treating things as if if they’re small
you know Amazon even though it is a
large company I wanted to have the heart
and spirit of a small one rule number
five learn how to deal with critics my
approach to criticisms and what I teach
and preach inside Amazon is when you’re
criticized for
look in a mirror and then decide are
your critics right if they’re right
change there are two kinds of critics
there are well-meaning critics who you
know they they’re worried it’s not gonna
work but they do want it to work and so
it could be I can give you example
customer reviews and be one of those
when I first did customer reviews 20
years ago publishers were some book
publishers were not happy about it
because some of them are negative and so
it was very controversial practice at
that time but we thought was right and
so we stuck to our guns and and and and
had a deep teal on that and didn’t
didn’t didn’t change but there’s a
second kind of critic which is the
self-interested critic and they come in
all shapes and sizes you know they’re so
they can be any kind of institution
competitors of course and so when you
are doing some in a new way and if
customers embrace the new way what’s
gonna happen is incumbents who are
practicing the older way are not gonna
like you and they’re gonna be
self-interested critics and so you do
need as you’re looking yourself in the
mirror to try and tease those two things
apart rule number six be effective we
try to create teams that are no larger
than can be fed with two pizzas we call
that the two pizza team rule no power
points are used inside of Amazon so
every meeting we have that when we hire
a new executive from the outside
this is the weirdest meeting culture you
will ever encounter and new executives
have a little bit of you know culture
shock and their first Amazon meeting
because what we do is somebody for the
meeting has prepared a six page memo a
narrative Lee structured memo that is
got you know real sentences and topic
sentences and verbs and now it’s not
just bullet points and it lays out and
supposed to create the context for what
will then be a good discussion so and
then we read those memos silently in the
meeting so it’s like a study hall and we
do that everybody sits around the table
and we read silently from usually about
half an hour however long it takes us to
read the document and then we discuss it
and it’s so much better than the typical
PowerPoint presentation for so many
reasons I definitely recommend a memo
over the PowerPoint and the reason we
read them in the room by the way is
because just like you know high school
kids executives will Bluff their way
through the meeting as if they’ve read
the memo because we’re busy and so you
got to actually carve out the time for
the memo to get read and that’s what the
first half hour of the meeting is for
and then everybody’s actually read the
memo they’re not just pretending to have
read rule number seven follow your
intuition I believe in the power of
wandering all of my best decisions in
business and in life have been made with
heart intuition guts you know not not an
analysis when you can make a decision
with analysis you should do so but it
turns out in life that your most
important decisions are always made with
instinct intuition taste heart rule
number eight act on your great ideas I
picked books because there were more
items in the book category than any
other category and so you could build
universal select
there were three million in 1994 when I
was pulling this idea together the the
the three million different books active
and in print in any given time in the
largest physical bookstore has only had
about a hundred and fifty thousand
different titles and so I could see how
you could make a bookstore online with
Universal selection every book ever
printed even out of print ones was the
original vision for the company and so
that’s why books when did you know that
Amazon is going to be something way
bigger than just a bookstore well I knew
that the books
strangely because I was very prepared
for this to take a really long time I
knew that the books business was gonna
be successful in the first thirty days I
was shocked at how many books we sold we
were ill-prepared you know I had we had
all the we had only ten people in the
company at that time and most of them
are software engineers and so everybody
including me and the suckers were all
like packing boxes we didn’t even have
packing tables and down we were on our
hands and knees on a concrete floor
packing the boxes and about you know one
or two in the morning I said to one of
my software engineering colleagues I
said you know Paul we this is killing my
knees we need to get knee pads and Paul
looked at me and he’s like Jeff we need
to get packing tables and I was like oh
my god that is such a good idea the next
day I bought packing tables and it
doubled our productivity and probably
saved our backs and our knees to rule
number nine be a visionary my greatest I
would have such a good feeling if I
could be an 80 year old guy and laying
there thinking about my life if I could
say look there is now a bunch of
entrepreneurs in space because I took my
amazon lottery winnings and built the
heavy lifting infrastructure that does
take billions of dollars in capex to
lower the cost of access to space that’s
how you get millions of people living
and working and by the way we need that
for those of you who like to think about
the future at all you can do a simple
calculation you know we can argue about
you know what limited resources on earth
and so on and so on but here’s the
calculation that you cannot argue with
which is you take current baseline
energy usage on earth compound it at
just a few percent a year for just a few
hundred years and you have to cover the
entire surface of the earth and solar
cells so you have to we’re gonna have to
decide do we want a society of
pioneering invention expansion growth or
do we want a society of stasis and
personally I believe because the earth
is finite and if you want a society of
stasis I think it’s good first of all I
don’t personally believe the stasis is
even compatible with freedom so I think
for me that’s a big problem
second of all it’s gonna be dull stasis
is gonna be very dull you don’t want to
live in the stasis world and so of
course we’re gonna continue get more
efficient too we have been for hundreds
of years we’ve been getting more
productive more efficient that’s that
trend is going to continue but even so
we’re gonna want to use more energy more
energy per capita and also I don’t want
to stabilize population I would love for
the vea trillion humans in the source
system with a trillion humans we would
have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand
Mozart’s it’d be an incredible Sybil’s
don’t you want that dynamism it’d be so
much merging my this is for your
great-great-great grandchildren but what
kind of world do you want them to live
in I want them to live in that expansive
world that is you know learning more
about the universe and moving out
throughout the source system and rule
number ten the last one before a very
special bonus clip is be willing to be
misunderstood if you’re gonna do
anything new or innovative you have to
be willing to be misunderstood and if
you can’t tolerate that then for God’s
sake don’t do anything new or innovative
and
important thing we’ve done has been
misunderstood often by well-meaning
sincere critics sometimes of course by
now I’ve got a really special bonus
script from Jeff on how to invent and
pioneer that I think you’re gonna really
enjoy but before that it’s time for the
three point landing questions on the
move from just watching another video to
taking action in your life for business
and if you’re feeling bold leave your
answers in the comments below here we go
question number one what great idea of
yours do you need to act on brush number
two how can you start on it in a small
way and question number three how will
you deal with critics who attack your
summers are always dissatisfied they
even when they don’t know it even when
they think they’re happy they actually
do want a better way
and they just don’t know yet what that
should be and that’s why I always warn
people customer obsession is not just
listening to customers customer
obsession is also inventing on their
behalf because it’s not their job to
invent for these Sol’s and so you need
if you want more jeff bezos check out
his best advice on work-life balance
video that we made the link is right
there next to me I think you’ll enjoy it
continue to believe and I’ll see you
there if you’re giving great customer
experience there’s the only way to do that is with happy people
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