20 Inspiring Jeff Bezos quotes about business
1. “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.” – Jeff Bezos
2. “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.” – Jeff Bezos
3. “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” – Jeff Bezos
4. “It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.” – Jeff Bezos
5. “Work Hard, have fun, make history.” – Jeff Bezos
6. “Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.” – Jeff Bezos
7. “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.” – Jeff Bezos
8. “Any business plan won’t survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.” – Jeff Bezos
9. “The framework I found, which made the decision (to start Amazon in 1994) incredibly easy, was what I called a regret minimization framework. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimize the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.” – Jeff Bezos
10. “Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about.” – Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos quotes
11. “When (competitors are) in the shower in the morning, they’re thinking about how they’re going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we’re thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.” – Jeff Bezos
12. “If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.” – Jeff Bezos
13. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.” – Jeff Bezos
14. “You want to look at what other companies are doing. It’s very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don’t want to look at it as if, ‘OK, we’re going to copy that.’ You want to look at it and say, ‘That’s very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?’ And then put your own unique twist on it.” – Jeff Bezos
15. “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.” – Jeff Bezos
16. “Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.” – Jeff Bezos
17. “Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people — and I’m just not one of them — believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is 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. This is the way it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.” – Jeff Bezos
18. “You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives (that) encourage ideas. In order for innovative ideas to bear fruit, companies need to be willing to “wait for 5-7 years, and most companies don’t take that time horizon.” – Jeff Bezos
19. “I want to see good financial returns, but also to me there’s the extra psychic return of having my creativity and technological vision bear fruit and change the world in a positive way.” – Jeff Bezos
20. “You know if you make a customer unhappy, they won’t tell five friends, they’ll tell 5,000 friends. So we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don’t, it will be shame on us.” – Jeff Bezos
Which Jeff Bezos quote resonates with you the most and why? Please leave a comment below!
