Monday marked Jeff Bezos’ final day as the CEO of Amazon, the company he launched in 1994 as an online bookseller that is now an ecommerce behemoth worth $1.7 trillion — the company that has made him the richest person in the world with a nearly $200 billion fortune.
Over Bezos’ roughly 27 years as CEO, he’s regularly shared advice and lessons learned in interviews and his annual letters to Amazon shareholders.
Here are some of the best examples of what Bezos, 57, has shared over the years.
- Take risks
“When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever,” Bezos said in a 2018 interview.
That philosophy helped shape Bezos’ life before he even launched Amazon. When he was just 30 years old, Bezos had a Wall Street job at hedge fund D. E. Shaw, but he saw promise in the future of the internet economy and got the idea to build a bookstore online. Bezos’ boss agreed the idea had potential, but he still tried to convince Bezos that it would be less of a risk to keep the job he had.
- Make good decisions – fast
Bezos believes that the key to maintaining an innovative business is to make “high-quality, high-velocity decisions.”
In his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos wrote about the importance of speed and “nimbleness” in making Amazon “a large company that’s also an invention machine.” While he admits that some decisions are “irreversible or nearly irreversible,” most are not.
“Most decisions … are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors,” he wrote. In those cases, when you make a decision that is “suboptimal,” according to Bezos, “you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.”
- Finding your calling
Figuring out your passion in life is a central point in the advice that Bezos says he most often gives to his younger employees, as well as his four children, the billionaire said at the George W. Bush Presidential Center’s Forum on Leadership in 2018.
“You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling,” Bezos said. “And if you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, because that’s the big deal.”
In other words, finding a way to make a career out of your passion is Bezos’ idea of true success. And, he believes that everyone has a passion.
- Don’t lose your distinctiveness
In April, in his final letter to shareholders as Amazon’s CEO, Bezos wrote about the importance of holding onto your “originality.”
“We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable,” Bezos wrote. “We are all taught to ‘be yourself.’ What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”
Bezos went on to say that “it’s worth it” to maintain your distinctiveness, even though it requires “continuous hard work.”
“The fairy tale version of [the advice] ‘be yourself’ is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine.
- Embrace the inefficiency of wandering
In his 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos included a section titled, “Intuition, curiosity, and the power of wandering.” In that section, the Amazon CEO wrote about the importance of setting aside time to explore your curiosity in order to come up with new, innovative solutions to challenges.
Amazon’s business may depend on efficiency, with customers ordering almost any product and expecting it delivered to their door within a few days or less. But, Bezos believes that a healthy dose of inefficiency is necessary to succeed. In the letter, he describes this as “wandering,” or exploring and experimenting even if it means taking a roundabout path to a solution.
