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"This is a reflection 10 years ago, does not constitute investment advice, and is now turned out only to share with you. "
It's about a successful life
1. I found a decision-making framework: the regret minimization framework. I imagine myself at 80 and look back on my life, and I hope that I will have as few regrets in my life as possible, and I will not regret even if I fail, and one of the things I may regret is that I never tried.
2. I'm going to take the risk of making a prediction: at the age of 80, at a moment when you are reminiscing about the past, you will be the only one who will quietly tell your life story to your heart, and the most fulfilling and meaningful part of it will be filled with a series of decisions you make.
3. Over time, many children and adults will know where their passions lie...... I don't think it's that difficult to do. The problem, I think, sometimes is that we let our sanity overrule those passions. Therefore, we need to be wary of this.
4. One piece of advice I would give to all young people: think carefully about each of your choices. It's not your talent that determines your life, it's your every choice. Talent is a good thing, of course, but you don't have to be proud of it, only what you have worked hard to get is something to be proud of. Talent is a gift we get, and the really hard thing for me is deciding to work hard, to make good use of my talent, to do things that I don't feel so comfortable with.
5. We all know that uniqueness (originality) is valuable, and we are all taught to "be yourself". What I'm really asking you to do is embrace and realistically recognize how much effort it takes to maintain that uniqueness.
6. The world wants you to fit into it, and it will do everything it can to attract you, but don't let that happen. You have to pay for being different, but it's worth it.
7. The universe wants you to be an ordinary person. In 1000 ways, it's pulling you towards the ordinary. Don't let it happen.
8. People who often do the right thing will listen more, people who often do the right thing will often change their minds, and people who often do the right thing will find ways to deny the beliefs they believe in.
9. Conventional wisdom is usually correct.
10. Many people (I'm not one of them) think that you should live in the moment. I think what you should do is think about your future and make sure you plan for it so that you can end up with a satisfying life.
11. Think about the people you admire in your life, they are likely to be the ones you can learn from and can serve as role models. For me, I always try to only work with people I admire. I encourage the employees of the company to do the same. Life is very short and it has to be done.
12. How do you earn trust? I can tell you how you won't win trust. You don't ask others to trust you, it definitely won't work. I think there's an easy way to earn trust. This approach is hard to implement and hard to do, but it's easy to say. The way to earn trust is to do the hard things well, and the second is to repeat them.
13. I believe that being curious and loving to explore is a survival skill. Our ancestors who lacked curiosity and did not have an inquisitive spirit may not survive as long as our ancestors who kept exploring the next mountain range to see if there were more food sources and a better climate.
14. The fairy tale version of "Be Yourself" is that as long as you let your uniqueness shine through, all the pain will disappear. This claim is misleading.
15. It's worth it to be yourself, but don't expect it to be easy or free, you have to constantly put in the effort.
16. I tell people that when the world around you changes, the change will be bad for you, and suddenly, the tailwind that used to be turned into a headwind, you have to go up to the wind and figure out what you have to do, because complaining is not the way.
17. All aspects of our society are getting better day by day. I am convinced of this. I'm an optimist. You know, the myth of the "good old days" is often fiction.
18. I think that the harmony between work and life is a good framework. I prefer to use the word "harmony" rather than "balance" because "balance" implies strict trade-offs. In fact, I would perform better at home if I was comfortable at work. If I'm comfortable at home, then I have more energy to put into my work – to be a better employee, a better colleague.
19. 80% of your happiness in life depends on who you choose to be with.
20. All entrepreneurs who can succeed have a firm belief, that is, they believe that I can succeed. Even if you fail five, ten, or even more times, don't be afraid of it, and continue to work hard after determining the right goal is an important way to success. Without such a spirit, then it will never be possible.
21. The only way out of a difficult situation is to create your own way out.
22. In the final analysis, what we are is our own choice. Create a great story for yourself.
23. Stress mainly stems from the fact that you are able to control something but not take action.
24. Each of us has a limited amount of time, where to spend time and how to use it, this is a way of thinking about the world with strong leverage.
25. From the perspective of the whole society, if you want to be successful in your career and life, you must create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you come in contact with. Any business, a business that does not create value for the people who come into contact with it, even if it seems successful on the surface, will not last long in this world. It will be gone.
26. If you haven't had the experience of coming out of a difficult period, it means that you haven't experienced a real test.
About business thinking
1. I firmly believe that missionaries can make better products, and they pay more attention to them. For a missionary, it's not just business that's important. Society needs business activities, and business must also be meaningful, however, this is not a reason for you to do this. You do this because there is something meaningful that drives you to do it.
2. A good commercial product has at least four characteristics: customers like it, it can be developed to a very large scale, it has a strong return on capital, and it is sustainable.
3. The most important thing is the thing that will not change greatly, and the most important thing is the stable thing, the cornerstone that you will rely on in the future, and you know that it will definitely be there.
4. Many companies make the mistake of losing confidence when the external environment suddenly changes, and instead chase the latest wave.
5. If your strategy is based on ephemeral things – who your competitors are, the technologies you can adopt, etc., these things will change quickly, so you will have to change your strategy quickly.
6. Being customer-centric, rather than competitor-centric, brings many benefits, one of which is that you will be motivated if you are ahead in a certain field. If you're completely competitor-centric, it's hard to stay motivated once you're number one in a certain area.
7. We always want to be the most customer-centric company in the world. We're not going to change that, that's why we've been so successful. But I promised that we would add one more and that we would be the best employer and the safest place to work in the world.
8. I often remind my employees to be scared and wake up with fear every morning. Not afraid of competition, but afraid of our customers. Because of our customers, our company is what it is today.
9. We have established a relationship with our customers, and we have a great responsibility to them. We need to know that if other people provide better service to customers, customers will not be loyal to us anymore.
10. Our mission is to raise the level of customer expectations, so that all companies can improve their level. If we can do that, then we're doing something truly meaningful.
11. What we are trying to do is not to create great services for millions of customers, we are trying to create great services for every customer. If you think about it this way, then the result of creating a great service for every customer is that you will win millions of customers.
12. You're going to spend 70% of your time "building" a great customer experience and 30% of your time "yelling" at it.
13. I am often asked the question, "What will change in the next ten years?" but I am rarely asked, "What will not change in the next ten years?" I think the second question is more important than the first because you need to base your strategy on the things that don't change. What an exciting principle to put all your resources in the unchanging thing.
14. If you do something and look at the next 3 years, there will be many people competing with you, but if you can focus on the next 7 years, then there will be very few people who can compete with you. Because very few companies are willing to take that long-term view.
15. I once asked Warren Buffett, your investment philosophy is very simple, why don't others do the same thing as you? Buffett said, "Because no one wants to get rich slowly." ”
16. It's easy to have an idea. It's hard to turn an idea into a successful product. It takes a lot of steps to go from idea to result, and it takes perseverance.
17. Long-term thinking is not only a necessary condition for true ownership, but also the inevitable result of true ownership. For example, a landlord is different from a tenant. I know a couple who rent out their house to tenants. As a result, tenants nailed the tree to the hardwood floor instead of using a tree stand to erect it. I guess that's what it calls "expedient". Of course, there are always particularly bad tenants, but no landlord is so short-sighted.
18. One of the most important business rules is: complaining is not the way to go. Know that you can only work with the world you have, not with the world you want.
19. I believe that optimism is a necessary quality in everything you do (entrepreneurship or other things). It's not that you're going to be blindly optimistic or unrealistic, I mean you're going to keep focusing on eliminating risk and adjusting your strategy until you feel truly optimistic about your strategy.
20. Many great innovators, whose time unit seems to be different from ordinary people, are very obsessed with speed. It is this dedication to speed that allows them to transform "a month" into "a day" and "a day" into "an hour", which can make those revolutions that almost change the world a reality.
21. Doing things at high speed is the best defense for the future. If you move closer to the future, the future will win every time.
22. The so-called "entrepreneurial spirit" is actually more of a mentality, rather than working for yourself. Entrepreneurship is resourcefulness and problem-solving. If you meet people who seem to be really good problem solvers, you take a step back and realize that they are self-reliant people.
23. Day Two is a state of stagnation, followed by backwardness, followed by painful and painful decline, and finally death. Therefore, we will always remain entrepreneurial (Day One).
24. Here are the beginner's tips for guarding Day One: obsession with customers, skepticism about formalism, a desire to conform to external trends, and the ability to make high-speed decisions.
25. We live in a complex world, and if you know how to make things easier and more frictionless for people, they will value what you do.
26. I emphasize that the purpose of "long-term first" is to establish a clearer public image of the company. Warren Buffett once said, "You can have a rock concert, you can have a ballet." But don't use ballet to promote the rock concert you're going to host. "A company needs to be clear about the type and manner of its gigs so that investors can decide whether to 'buy' or not.
27. Looking at the past, we were called "Amazon is finished", "Amazon scam" and "Amazon bomb", and this was the case in the first 3 years of our company's establishment. Here's what I'm trying to say: be open to misinterpretation. I believe that if you want to innovate, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long time, and if you can't accept being misunderstood, then don't do anything innovative. But often, you can only beat your competitors by adopting a "non-consensus but correct" view.
28. If you never want to be criticized, for God's sake, don't do anything innovative.
29. If you are unwilling or unable to accept a strong trend quickly, the outside world will push you to the "next day". The "next day" is stagnant, then irrelevant, then an excruciatingly painful recession, and finally death.
30. Real innovation is not only to create, but also to improve. It's not difficult to create something new, but it's hard to create something new and better.
31. Staying humble and paranoid will pay off. At the end of the day, don't change your strategy just because some "audience" doesn't understand it.
32. It's not that bad to take a detour. We've also had products like the Fire Phone that didn't perform very well. There are too many failed experiments to list them all. But there is no 1001st success without 1000 failures.
33. As the saying goes: "Failure is an orphan, and success has many fathers." This statement is very correct, and it speaks to something essential: for anything large-scale to be completed and successful, there must be many "fathers".
34. I've been making mistakes all my life. The corporate world knows this: I have the stigma of failure all over me. But I think what sets us apart is how we deal with failure. I believe that Amazon is the best company in the world when it comes to allowing failure.
Failure and innovation are inseparable twins. As the company grows, everything needs to scale, including those tests that fail. If the scale of failure does not grow, then what you invent is actually very small.
If there is a 10% chance of a 100x return, you should bet every time. This is usually true. But there is still a good chance that you could be wrong.
In business, when you occasionally step on "home plate", you can score 1000 points. This long-tail distribution of returns is exactly what makes bold investments necessary. A big win bet can far outweigh the cost of losing many times.
35. One of the things that often happens in large companies is that the speed of decision-making slows down. I think one of the reasons is that senior executives within large companies are starting to model all decisions as if they were heavyweight, irreversible, and have important consequences.
But that's not the case with most decisions, they're like a two-way door, and if you make a bad decision, you can walk through the door and back and try again. The second type of decision-making should be made by individuals or small groups with a high degree of judgment.
36. For the company, the brand is like a personal reputation. It's hard to earn a reputation, it's easy to lose it. You know, you can't decide which day you'll have a new identity and a new reputation. You need to look for truth from the past and history and discover something that already exists. Then "double down" and turn it into your own reputation.
You could say that we have disappointed a small number of people, but we will make more money. But if you let people down, you lose your brand reputation. And for us, brand reputation is much more valuable than money.
37. If you do something that can't be talked about, it's hard to generate word-of-mouth.
38. The company should do one thing: it must be strong and agile. So you need to be able to withstand the blow, but also be able to react quickly, innovate and adopt new approaches quickly. It's the best way to defend the future.
About business management
1. At Amazon, we have adhered to the three major ideas for 18 years. That's why we're successful: customer first, creativity, learning to be patient.
2. We make business extension decisions very prudently. Basically, we have two directions: backward based on the needs of our customers, which is very important, and forward, based on our skills.
3. Whenever we are faced with such a problem that puts us in an infinite loop and we can't make decisions, we will turn it into a direct question: "What will be better for the customer?"
4. Many companies describe themselves as customer-centric, but few do it. Most big tech companies focus on their competitors. They see what others are doing and then quickly follow up. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of Amazon is driven by customers telling us what they want.
5. How to face rising customer expectations and always stand at the forefront of the tide? A single way will not work, and a variety of methods must be combined, but high standards must be an important part of it. I believe that high standards can be learned.
In fact, it's easy to learn to master high standards by hearing and seeing them, and high standards are contagious. Bring newcomers into a team with a high standard and they will adapt quickly, and vice versa. If low standards prevail, it will also spread quickly.
6. Use the phrase "put aside disputes and work together", it can save a lot of time. If you're confident in a certain direction, even if you don't agree with the other side, it's best to say, "Look, I knew we were going to disagree on this, but would you like to fight with me?
7. Data-based decisions win broad approval, while judgment-based decisions should be questioned and often controversial. At least until it is put into practice and confirmed.
Any company that is not willing to put up with controversy must limit its decision-making to the first option. But in our view, doing so limits controversy, but also greatly limits innovation and long-term value creation.
8. Whether in life or work, the best decisions I make are based on heart, taste, intuition and courage, and analysis is not decisive.
9. Our investment decisions will continue to be based on long-term market leadership, rather than short-term profits or Wall Street reactions. If we had to choose between good accounting statements and maximizing the present value of our own cash flows in the future, we would choose cash flow.
10. Most decisions, as long as there is about 70% of the information you want, you should probably be made, if you wait until you have 90% of the information to make a decision, most of the time, you may be slow.
11. At Amazon, we don't do PPT. All of our company meetings are in the form of a "six-page memo" where you write your thoughts in complete sentences and complete paragraphs. At this point, you have to think very clearly.
12. You are easily overwhelmed by the "inbox" of life, so you become a completely reactive person...... The only solution I know of is to set aside some of your own time.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, I would "pre-emptively strike". During this time, I try not to make meeting arrangements. For the other three working days, I fill my schedule and meet with the various general managers of our company.
13. When managers encounter failure, they should continue to move forward and do bigger and more important things. Don't stop them, and don't tell them to go away. If you really want great people to be bold and innovative, then even if they fail, don't let them worry, don't make them think, "Actually, I just want to do the right thing." ”
14. After every failure, we ask ourselves, "Do you still believe in this vision?" If we have unwavering faith, it empowers us to seek new ways.
15. For large companies to achieve "zero-error" innovation, they need to have the culture of a fast-growing small company, which is quite rare.
16. I like to exercise the reverse veto. For example, I would never veto something that the Amazon Studio team wanted to do, but I would probably approve of what the team didn't want to do. You have to be more in favor because you want to encourage risk-taking.
17. A common pitfall for large organizations is "one-size-fits-all" decision-making, which hurts speed and creativity.
18. I am rarely dragged into the day's work. I'm going to start working in the next two or three years. Most of my leadership teams have the same arrangement.
My friends congratulated me after Amazon's quarterly earnings report and said: Well done, great quarter. I would say, thank you, but this quarter's statement was predicted 3 years ago.
19. The trick to being an entrepreneur is: know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. My rule of thumb is: be stubborn in the big things and be flexible in the small details.
20. We at Amazon are always flexible when it comes to details, but when it comes to vision, we are stubborn and ruthless. We have never failed when we have made up our minds to do something, and we will not fail at this point.
21. What you should do is not to invest all the company's administrative resources, time, energy and personnel to strive to improve 1% of operational efficiency. Instead, you should start by trying to scale your company to a scale where even 1% efficiency is crucial.
22. If we put the technology aside and just hand it over to the R&D department, the effort we put into the technology may not be so crucial, but we are not taking this path. Technology permeates our entire team, in all our processes, in our decisions, in our path to innovation for every business. It's deeply integrated into everything we do.
23. In real life, the most powerful weapon of traditional business is: location, location, location, and for us, the three most important things are: technology, technology, and technology.
24. Once you have a grand vision, you will find that it also includes hundreds of small visions. You have to be able to sort relentlessly, to be able to say, "No, we don't do this, we don't do that." We focus on just these three things. ”
About organizational talent
1. There are two kinds of talents in the world: missionaries vs mercenaries. The former is truly loved, and I am a missionary and not a mercenary every day. Mercenaries are mercenaries who can sweep away all those who stand in their way for money and power, while missionaries have righteous goals and try to make the world a better place. You know, the paradox is that in the end, it's often the "missionaries" who make more money.
2. One of the big differences between the founder (entrepreneur) of the company and the professional manager is that the founder will stick to the vision and work hard for it in every detail. I think one of the big dangers of bringing in professional managers is that if something doesn't work, the first thing they do is change their vision. This practice is usually incorrect.
3. As a manager, if you don't have the confidence to recruit outstanding talents, then don't think that you can become bigger and stronger.
4. The ultimate success of a company does not lie in the success of products, but in the success of talents.
5. No team should exceed the size of two pizzas. For big things, you obviously need big teams, but you need to break down big teams into smaller teams...... It's a lot of small teams to get big things done – it takes a lot of effort to organize. If you can organize it well, then communication within these small teams will become very natural and easy.
6. During the interview, I will ask the candidate to tell me an example of what they created. I would tell them that it doesn't have to be a patentable invention, it can be some kind of measurement method that is created and followed, or it can be some kind of business process that is created. You have to pick people who are uniquely creative.
You're going to recruit people who like to create, to create – you want to make sure they're interested in creating at all levels. You know, sometimes you run into people who only like to talk on paper and can't make real progress in the real world.
7. It is not an easy thing to want to work at Amazon. (During the interview, I tell job seekers, "You can work overtime, work hard, or work smart, but at Amazon, you don't have a choice, all three.") We're trying to create something that matters—something that's valuable to our customers, something we can tell our children and grandchildren. To create something like this, it is destined to be difficult.
8. Talent is our most important resource. All companies want to hire the best talent, and Amazon is committed to helping everyone reach their potential.
9. If you want to work for a long time, it's important to be around interesting people.
10. At Amazon, we believe that only a unique combination of talents can create a unique product.
About corporate culture
1. You can write down the corporate culture, but you can't create the corporate culture out of thin air. You have to discover the corporate culture in the process of practice, dig into the corporate culture, and slowly create the corporate culture over time through the people and events, through the past success stories and failure stories that have become part of the company's tradition.
2. The atmosphere in our company is more easy-going, which I think helps employees say "no" to me. Not only do they say "no" to me, but just as importantly, they can also say what's on their minds to their supervisors, vice chairmen, and other company executives. I think there's a huge benefit to having an easy-going atmosphere.
3. Good words do not need protection, but ugly words need protection. Our cultural norms allow people to say ugly things, and you don't have to invite those people to your dinner party, but you should let them say it.
4. Serious and lively, the two are not contradictory, you can definitely do it. That's what we're trying to do, and it's the biggest thing we've achieved. We're going to have big problems, we're going to stick together, we're going to laugh.
5. My main job is to try to help maintain the company culture – high standards of operational excellence, creativity, and a willingness to fail and be willing to try. I am the "balancer" of the company, and I can say "yes" to the institutional "no".
6. Building a culture of high standards is worth the effort, and there are many benefits. The most obvious benefit is that you'll be building better products and services for your customers, and that's enough. The less obvious benefit is that people are attracted to high standards, and high standards are also helpful in hiring and retaining talent. A more subtle benefit: a culture of high standards protects all the intangible, yet critical, work that every company is doing.
7. Part of the company culture is path-dependent – here's the lesson you learn along the way.
8. People in our company like to create, so other people who like to create will be attracted here, and people who don't like to create will feel uncomfortable here. Therefore, the company is constantly improving itself.
9. People on the outside may think that Amazon has reached the top of the world, and while they have every reason to be curious, inside the company, we try to avoid thinking that way.
10. In short, some companies have a conqueror mentality, while ours has an explorer mentality.
11. Don't be complacent. One way to do this is to always keep a beginner's mentality. Have the mindset that you're a newbie in this game, and there may be someone you don't know who is serving your customers better than you.
12. In the business world, you should generally not boast about your accomplishments, for whatever reason.
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