People Quotes
You must always be doing things and obviously succeeding. The hard part is to keep people always at the window because of the spectacle you put on for them. And you must do this for years.
I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people.
The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, for as much as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof.
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy tobe motivated.
When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people - for a long time, anyway - are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.
Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room.
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willingto invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people... Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We're willing to plant seeds, let them grow-and we're very stubborn. We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
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 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.
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.
Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.
If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.
People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.
There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.
The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.
What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.
If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details... People who are right a lot change their mind... They have the same data set that they had at the beginning, but they wake up, and they re-analyze things all the time, and they come to a new conclusion, and then they change their mind.
I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.
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