9 important lessons I learned from different talks and speeches of Jeff Bezos.
3 min readNov 16, 2020
- Look out for a niche. Bezos selected books as the first best product to sell online. He realized that with millions of books worldwide and millions in the print always, all couldn’t be stored in a physical store but building an online store was always possible. Now, amazon no longer just sells books but A to Z products online.
- Being customer-centric has been the top priority at Amazon. You have to have a long term vision. Amazon has worked very hard to have a laser-like focus on customer satisfaction. One mustn’t worry about one’s competitors. Worry about the customers because it’s not the competitors who are going to pay. It’s the customers who are going to pay. So the focus has to be on the customers. In an interview, he said, “We are not competitor obsessed, we are customer-obsessed. We start with customers and work backward.” When we work backward, we start with identifying the customer needs and problems and then work towards providing a solution for that. He firmly believes that what is best for the customer ultimately turns out to be the best for the company.
- Act now to avoid regretting later. When he learned in the late ’90s that web usage was growing at an astronomical pace of 2300% a year, he became passionate to try a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth. And that’s how Jeff left his job to start Amazon. I learned that we need to try and act even if we have the fear of failure because, at the age of 80, we will regret more not trying and not the failure itself.
- Make a team. Very rare ideas in the world could be achieved single-handedly. We need a team to get something important done which could impact the world. That has been the guiding rule which Amazon has followed all along. Building great teams to deliver great results.
- Trust is to a company what reputation is to people. It’s said that when a man loses his reputation, he loses everything. Similarly for a company, winning the trust of the customers is the most important factor for its long-term growth. Trust can be won in different ways. By delivering in time, or by acting instantly on a customer complaint, or by under-promising and over-delivering. Trust once broken is hard to repair and regain. We can’t ask for trust, we have to earn it a hard way.
- Be stubborn on vision but at the same time be reasonable and flexible on the details. It’s easy to have an idea but it’s difficult to execute the same and bring it to fruition. As an entrepreneur, we need to have a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility. Being firm and unwavering on what we want is a must but remaining firm and stubborn on how to get that is unwise. He says, “If you are not stubborn, you will give up on experiments soon. And if you are not flexible, you will pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to the problem you are trying to solve.”
- Never stop experimenting. To need to invent, we need to experiment. If we knew in advance what is going to be the result, then it’s not an experiment. And experiments turn into inventions after many failures. So never be afraid of failures. Failures and inventions are inseparable twins. This quote of Jeff sums it up: “If you double the number of experiments done in a year, you are going to double your inventiveness.”
- Stress in life comes from ignoring the things we shouldn’t be ignoring. When we don’t take action on things that are under our control, the stress creeps in. It’s important to take the first step in the right direction even though it may not give us an instant result.
- Life is all about choices. We can choose to live a life of ease and comfort or a life of service and adventure. We need to go into the future and imagine what we would be more proud of at the age of 80. We will get the answer. We should not be proud of our gifts. We should be proud of our choices and hard work. We may be good at some skills, and that’s our gift. We can be thankful for that. But unless we choose to work hard on that to take it to the next level, we will not get the results we have been looking for.,
