Quotes By Jeff Bezos

I know if I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I'm adding value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home. It makes me a better husband, a better father. Likewise, if I'm happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss.

But it's really dangerous to demonize the media. It's dangerous to call the media lowlifes. It's dangerous to say they're the enemy of the people.

The teacher complained to my mother that I was too task-focused and that she couldn't get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me. And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that's still probably true today.

Still, with all of our faults and problems, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the US ... It's still Day One for this country.

Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com's success.

We had so many orders that we weren't ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all. In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor.

I'll debate something for an hour or a day or a week. And I'll say, "You know what? I really disagree with this, but you have more ground truth than I do. We're going to do it your way. And I promise I will never tell you I told you so."

I prioritize sleep unless I'm traveling in different time zones. Sometimes getting eight hours is impossible, but I am very focused on it, and I need eight hours. I think better. I have more energy. My mood is better.

Even when our kids were four, we would let them use sharp knives, and when they were seven or eight, we would let them use certain power tools. My wife, much to her credit, has this great saying: "I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid," which is a great attitude about life.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss who I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park,listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job."

If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said "Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?" I guarantee you they'd have looked at you strangely and said, "No, thank you."

At a fulfillment center recently, one of our Kaizen experts asked me, "I'm in favor of a clean fulfillment center, but why are you cleaning? Why don't you eliminate the source of dirt?" I felt like the Karate Kid.

I will hazard a prediction. When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the mostpersonal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made.In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you, and good luck!

The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don't know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap intoour own inner imagination about what's possible.

We want to make money when people use our devices-not when people buy our devices. We think this aligns us better with customers. For example, we don't need our customers to be on the upgrade treadmill. We can be very happy to see people still using four-year-old Kindles!

We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to.

To be clear, we take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.

So, the four elements of high standards as we see it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope.

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you'll find on surveys. They live with the design.