Jeff Bezos Quotes

“You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”

“You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.”

“The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.”

“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.”

“We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”

“Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.”

“People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.”

“When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission.”

“If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting”

“We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied.”

“Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.”

“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.”

“I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying”

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

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details”

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

“When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

“Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

“Seek instant gratification – or the elusive promise of it – and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you.”

“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.”

“Some decisions are consequential and irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly. But most decisions are changeable, reversible—they're two-way doors.”

“You have to be willing to accept the risk of failure if you want to succeed on a grand scale”

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

“The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, 'Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,' and that is true. Everything I've accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.”

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”

“Focus on the things that don't change”

“Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.”

“What's dangerous is not to evolve”

“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”

“If you don't give up on your dreams, they don't give up on you”

“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful”

“Work hard, have fun, make history”

“In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”

“One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out”

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness”

“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate”

“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.”

“Your personal brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.”

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

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

“I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.”

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

“If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.”

“You don't have to be the best, you just have to be the best at what you do.”

“Your margin is my opportunity.”

“The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer.”

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts.”

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

“The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.”

“If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”