1. “If you find your passion, all your work won’t feel like work to you.” – Jeff Bezos
2. “You guys will find that you have passions and having a passion is a gift. I think we all have passions, and you don’t get to choose them. They pick you, but you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them.” – Jeff Bezos
3. “One of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold. People love to focus on things that aren’t yet working, and that’s good, it’s human nature, that kind of divine discontent can be very helpful, but it’s incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets and you need to encourage that. And if you’re going to take bold bets, there are going to be experiments. And if there are experiments, you don’t know ahead of time, they’re going to work.” – Jeff Bezos
4. “You can be out of work. And have terrible work-life balance. You know, even though you’ve got all the time in the world, you could just feel like, oh my God, I’m miserable and you would be draining energy. And so you have to find that harmony, it’s a much better word. And I think for most people, it’s about meaning. People want to know that they’re doing something interesting and useful.” – Jeff Bezos
5. “You need to be nimble and robust. You need to be able to take a punch, and you also need to be quick, innovative, doing new things at a high speed. That’s the best defense against the future.” – Jeff Bezos
6. “You have to always be leaning into the future. If you’re, leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time. Never, ever, ever lean away from the future.” – Jeff Bezos
7. “I guess my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices. You might be really good at math. It might be really easy for you. That’s a kind of gift. But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat. That’s a choice. You can’t really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. Um, you can be grateful for them and thankful for them but your choices, you choose to work hard, you choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of.” – Jeff Bezos
8. “And so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert AND have that beginner’s mind. Have that ‘look at it freshly’, even though they know so much about the domain and that’s the key to inventing. You have to have both. And I think that is intentional. I think all of us have that inside of us and we can all do it, but you have to be intentional about it. You have to say, yeah, I am going to become an expert and I’m going to keep my beginner’s mind.” – Jeff Bezos
9. “You can’t skip steps. You have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time. There are no shortcuts. But you want to do those steps with, you know, passion and ferocity.” – Jeff Bezos
10. “It’s easy to have ideas. It’s very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are a lot of steps in between, and it takes persistence relentlessness.” – Jeff Bezos
11. “I always tell people who are, you know, who think they want to be entrepreneurs that you need a combination of stubborn, relentlessness and flexibility. You have to know when to be which, and basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it’ll be too easy to give up, but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision, you’ll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong and you’re going to need to be able to change those things.” – Jeff Bezos
12. “You really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life and trying to make sure you’ve minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions, that works for family decisions.” – Jeff Bezos
13. “If you think about that, so I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. And I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy, there’s a lot of people and I’m just not one of them, believe that you should live for the now. I think what should do is you think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. Everybody needs to find that for themselves. I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.” – Jeff Bezos
3. “One of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold. People love to focus on things that aren’t yet working, and that’s good, it’s human nature, that kind of divine discontent can be very helpful, but it’s incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets and you need to encourage that. And if you’re going to take bold bets, there are going to be experiments. And if there are experiments, you don’t know ahead of time, they’re going to work.” – Jeff Bezos
4. “You can be out of work. And have terrible work-life balance. You know, even though you’ve got all the time in the world, you could just feel like, oh my God, I’m miserable and you would be draining energy. And so you have to find that harmony, it’s a much better word. And I think for most people, it’s about meaning. People want to know that they’re doing something interesting and useful.” – Jeff Bezos
5. “You need to be nimble and robust. You need to be able to take a punch, and you also need to be quick, innovative, doing new things at a high speed. That’s the best defense against the future.” – Jeff Bezos
6. “You have to always be leaning into the future. If you’re, leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time. Never, ever, ever lean away from the future.” – Jeff Bezos
7. “I guess my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices. You might be really good at math. It might be really easy for you. That’s a kind of gift. But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat. That’s a choice. You can’t really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. Um, you can be grateful for them and thankful for them but your choices, you choose to work hard, you choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of.” – Jeff Bezos
8. “And so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert AND have that beginner’s mind. Have that ‘look at it freshly’, even though they know so much about the domain and that’s the key to inventing. You have to have both. And I think that is intentional. I think all of us have that inside of us and we can all do it, but you have to be intentional about it. You have to say, yeah, I am going to become an expert and I’m going to keep my beginner’s mind.” – Jeff Bezos
9. “You can’t skip steps. You have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time. There are no shortcuts. But you want to do those steps with, you know, passion and ferocity.” – Jeff Bezos
10. “It’s easy to have ideas. It’s very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are a lot of steps in between, and it takes persistence relentlessness.” – Jeff Bezos
11. “I always tell people who are, you know, who think they want to be entrepreneurs that you need a combination of stubborn, relentlessness and flexibility. You have to know when to be which, and basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it’ll be too easy to give up, but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision, you’ll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong and you’re going to need to be able to change those things.” – Jeff Bezos
12. “You really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life and trying to make sure you’ve minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions, that works for family decisions.” – Jeff Bezos
13. “If you think about that, so I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. And I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy, there’s a lot of people and I’m just not one of them, believe that you should live for the now. I think what should do is you think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. Everybody needs to find that for themselves. I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.” – Jeff Bezos