Quotes By Jeff Bezos

Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right.

All my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not 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, and heart, and that's what we'll do with this Day One Fund too.

I'm so proud of that team, and I know for a fact when I'm eighty or, let's say-I always project myself forward to age eighty, but as I get older, I'm starting to do ninety-so I know that when I'm ninety, it's going to be one of the things I'm most proud of, that I took on the Washington Post and helped it through a very rough transition.

A culture of high standards is protective of all the "invisible" but crucial work that goes on in every company. I'm talkingabout the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward-it's part of what it means to be a professional.

Here's what we've figured out. Often, when a memo isn't great, it's not the writer's inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They're trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we're not coaching them right.

Unrealistic beliefs on scope-often hidden and undiscussed-kill high standards.

I ask people to visualize the company five years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, "The standards are so high now-boy, I'm glad I got in when I did!"

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.

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.

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

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

Things never go smoothly.

Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.

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

Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It's not optional.

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.