Jeff Bezos Quotes

"What's dangerous is not to evolve."

"Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful."

"The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine."

"If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting."

"Our motto at Blue Origin is 'Gradatim Ferociter': 'Step by Step, Ferociously."

"What consumerism really is, at its worst, is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives."

"If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering."

"If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful."

"The common question that gets asked in business is, 'Why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'Why not?"

"There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery."

"My view is there's no bad time to innovate."

"The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works."

"We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient."

"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."

"It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work."

"If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away."

"A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."

"I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work."

"If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term."

"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts."

"It's very hard to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times."

"There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second."

"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 to be motivated."

"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."

"The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved."

"Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."

"If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness."

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

"If you decide that you're going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table."

"Determine what your customers need, and work backwards."

"Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood."

"All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's."

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

"Your margin is my opportunity."

"In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story."

"Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they're given, after all. Choices can be hard."

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

"Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at."

"One common pitfall for large organizations—one that hurts speed and inventiveness—is 'one-size-fits-all' decision making."

"I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person."

"That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better."

"Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter.' And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago."

"Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great."

"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had."

"If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow."

"We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details."

"Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency."

"Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities."

"All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts — not analysis."

"Some decisions are consequential and irreversible — these are one-way doors. But most decisions aren't like that — they are changeable, reversible — they're two-way doors."

"Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."

"I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next ten years?' I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next ten years?"

"I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two."

"Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate."

"Senior executives get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day."

"Your job is to make a small number of high-quality decisions."

"To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment."

"We need big failures in order to move the needle."

"If we don't, we're not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that's okay."

"No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn't help."

"The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers."

"The great paradox is that it's usually the missionaries who make more money."

"Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied."

"Work hard, have fun, make history."

"Morale comes not from things that you layer on to make people happy. It comes from being able to build."

"People like to build."

"The question is, Could it be done? The answer is, Absolutely."

"The physical book really has had a 500-year run."

"It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run."

"Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long."

"No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever."

"That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set."

"You can explain things to people, but you can't understand things to people."

"If there's a problem, there's a solution."

"Life is full of different risks."

"The things that you will regret when you're 80 are almost always the things that you did not do."

"They're acts of omission."

"I would never say no to something the team wanted to do, but I might say yes to something the team didn't want to do."

"You want there to be multiple ways to get to 'yes' because you want to encourage risk-taking."

"I was one of those people who every time I looked at something it looks like it could be improved."

"There's something wrong with it."

"How could this restaurant be better?"

"That's why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space."

"Two kids in their dorm room can't start anything important in space today."

"The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, 'Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other."

"People will visit Mars, they will settle Mars, and we should because it's cool."

"The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we'd have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins."