- The number one thing that has made us successful
by far is obsessive compulsive focus
on the customer.
If you're going to do anything new or innovative,
you have to be willing to be misunderstood.
When you're criticized, first look in a mirror
and decide, are your critics right?
If they're right, change.
- Need motivation?
- Watch your Top 10 with Believe Nation.
- What's up Believe Nation, it's Evan.
I believe in you and this channel is designed
to be a part of your daily success routine
so let's get your motivation to a 10
and get you believing in you.
Grab a snack and chew on today's lessons
from a man who went from quitting his high-paying job
in New York to driving across the country to Seattle
to start his new business,
writing the business plan in the car ride along the way.
It was called Amazon and it made him
the richest man in modern times.
He's Jeff Bezos and here is my take
on his top 10 rules of success, volume four.
Also if you want to know what Jeff
and other successful entrepreneurs
have to say about building unstoppable confidence,
check out my 254 confidence series
where everyday for the next 254 days
I will send you a morning video for free
to help you build your confidence.
The link to join is in the description below.
- Stress primarily comes from not taking action.
(upbeat music)
- Okay, let's kick it off with rule number one.
Focus on your customers.
- The secret sauce of Amazon,
where there are several principles at Amazon,
but the number one thing that has made us successful by far
is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer
as opposed to obsession over the competitor.
And I talk so often to other CEOs and,
some other CEOs, and also founders and entrepreneurs,
and I can tell that even though
they're talking about customers,
they're really focusing on competitors,
and it is a huge advantage to any company
if you can stay focused on your customer
instead of your competitor.
- Rule number two, be resourceful.
- I spent an unusual amount of time with my grandparents,
and especially with my grandfather on the ranch.
So he had a ranch in South Texas
and I would spend my summers there
from age four to 16.
And when I was four, they were taking me for the summer
to kind of give my parents a break,
'cause I was so young.
And it was useful.
I was a handful, I'm sure.
And anyway,
he created the illusion for me
when I was four years old that I was helping him
on the ranch, which of course could not have been true.
(audience laughs)
But I believed it.
And by the time I was 16
of course I was actually helping on the ranch.
I can prolapsed cattle.
We did all of our own veterinary work.
Some of the cattle even survived.
(audience laughs)
And we fixed windmills and laid water pipelines
and built fences and barns
and fixed the bulldozer that you guys talked about.
And so one of the things that's so interesting
about that lifestyle and about my grandfather
is he did everything himself.
He didn't call a vet if one of the animals was sick.
He figured out what to do himself.
- So what does it mean, no delegation?
- Being resourceful I think.
If there's a problem, there's a solution.
And of course as you mature and get into the business world
and anything you do on a team
you very quickly realize that it's not about
just your own resourcefulness,
it's about team resourcefulness and how does that work.
- Rule number three, love what you do.
- I have this great luxury, I love my job.
I tap dance into work.
I just got back from an amazing vacation in Norway.
I got to go dog sledding and go to a wolf preserve
and all this really cool stuff,
but I couldn't wait to get back to work 'cause it's so fun.
And one of the reasons it's fun for me
is I get to work in the future,
so my job, I have very
limited day-to-day operational needs.
I've constructed my job
so that I don't have to be pulled into the present.
I can stay two or three years in the future.
- Rule number four, start small.
- Everything I have ever done has started small.
Amazon started with a couple of people, and
Blue Origin started with five people.
And the budget at Blue Origin was very, very small.
Now the Blue Origin approaches a billion dollars a year,
and next year it'll be more than a billion dollars.
And Amazon, it literally was 10 people.
Today it's half a million people,
but it's hard to remember for you guys,
but for me it's like yesterday I was driving the packages
to the Post Office myself
and hoping one day we could afford a forklift.
So for me, I've seen small things get big
and it's part of this day one mentality.
I like treating things as if, if they're small,
Amazon even though it is a large company,
I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one.
- Rule number five, learn how to deal with critics.
- My approach to criticism
and what I teach and preach inside Amazon
is when you're criticized, first look in a mirror
and decide, are your critics right?
If they're right, change.
There are two kinds of critics.
There are well-meaning critics who,
they're worried it's not going to work
but they do want it to work,
and I could give you an example of customer reviews
would be one of those.
When we first did customer reviews 20 years ago,
some book publishers were not happy about it
because some of them were negative,
and so it was a very controversial practice at that time,
but we thought it was right
and so we stuck to our guns and had a deep heel on that
and didn't change.
But there's a second kind of critic,
which is the self-interested critic,
and they come in all shapes and sizes.
So they can be any kind of institution,
competitors of course,
and so when you are doing something in a new way,
and if customers embrace the new way,
what's going to happen is incumbents
who are practicing the older way are not going to like you,
and they're going to be self-interested critics.
And so you do need as you're looking yourself in the mirror
to try and tease those two things apart.
- Rule number six, be effective.
- We try to
create teams that are no larger
than can be fed with two pizzas.
We call that the two pizza team rule.
No PowerPoints are used inside of Amazon.
So every meeting, when we hire a new executive
from the outside,
(audience laughs)
this is the weirdest meeting culture
you will ever encounter,
and new executives have a little bit of culture shock
in their first Amazon meeting
because what we do is somebody for the meeting
has prepared a six page memo,
a narratively structured memo
that has got real sentences and topic sentences
and verbs and nouns, not just bullet points.
And it lays out and supposed to create the context
for what will then be a good discussion.
And then we read those memos silently in the meeting,
so it's like a study hall.
And we do that, everybody sits around the table
and we read silently for usually about half an hour,
however long it takes us to read the document,
and then we discuss it.
And it's so much better
than the typical PowerPoint presentation
for so many reasons.
I definitely recommend the memo over the PowerPoint,
and the reason we read them in the room by the way,
is because just like high school kids,
executives will bluff their way through the meeting
as if they've read the memo,
(audience laughs)
because we're busy and so you got to actually
carve out the time for the memo to get read,
and that's what the first half hour of the meeting is for,
and then everybody's actually read the memo.
They're not just pretending to have read the memo.
- Rule number seven, follow your intuition.
- I believe in the power of wandering.
All of my best decisions in business and in life
have been made with heart, intuition, guts
not analysis.
When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so
but it turns out in life
that you're most important decisions
are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart.
- Rule number eight, act on your great ideas.
- I picked books because there were more items
in the book category than any other category,
and so you could build universal selection.
There were three million,
in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together,
three million different books
active and in print at any given time
and the largest physical bookstores
only had about 150,000 different titles,
and so I could see how you could make a bookstore online
with universal selection.
Every book ever printed, even the out of print ones
was the original vision for the company,
and so that's why books.
- And when did you know that Amazon
is going to be something way bigger than just a bookstore?
- Well I knew that the books,
strangely 'cause I was very prepared
for this to take a really long time.
I knew that the books business was going to be successful
in the first 30 days.
I was shocked at how many books we sold.
We were ill-prepared.
We had only 10 people in the company at that time
and most of them were software engineers,
and so everybody, including me and the softwares,
were all packing boxes.
We didn't even have packing tables.
We were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor
packing the boxes,
and about one or two in the morning
I said to one of my software engineering colleagues,
I said, "Paul,
"this is killing my knees.
"We need to get knee pads."
And Paul looked at me and he's like,
"Jeff, we need to get packing tables."
(audience laughs)
And I was like, "Oh my God, that is such a good idea."
The next day I bought packing tables
and it doubled our productivity
and probably saved our backs and our knees too.
- Rule number nine, be a visionary.
- My greatest, I would have such a good feeling
if I could be an 80-year-old guy
and laying there thinking about my life
if I could say look, there is now a bunch of entrepreneurs
in space because I took my Amazon lottery winnings
and built the heavy-lifting infrastructure,
that does take billions of dollars in cap ex,
to lower the cost of access to space.
That's how you get millions of people
living and working in space.
And by the way, we need that.
For those of you who like to think about the future at all,
you can do a simple calculation.
We can argue about what limited resources on Earth
and so on and so on,
but here's the calculation that you cannot argue with,
which is you take current baseline energy usage on Earth,
compound it at just a few percent a year
for just a few hundred years,
and you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth
in solar cells, so
we're going to have to decide
do we want a society of pioneering, invention,
expansion, growth?
Or do we want a society of stasis?
And personally, because the Earth is finite,
and if you want a society of stasis,
I think it's got,
first of all, I don't personally believe
that stasis is even compatible with freedom,
so I think for me that's a big problem.
Second of all, it's going to be dull.
Stasis is going to be very dull.
You don't want to live in the stasis world.
And so, of course we're going to continue
to get more efficient too.
We have been for hundreds of years,
we've been getting more productive, more efficient.
That trend is going to continue.
But even so, we're going to want to use more energy,
more energy per capita,
and also, I don't want to stabilize population.
I would love for there to be a trillion humans
in the solar system.
With a trillion humans, we would have 1,000 Einsteins
and 1,000 Mozarts.
It'd be an incredible, don't you want that dynamism?
It'd be so much more interesting.
This is for your great, great, great, grandchildren,
but what kind of world do you want them to live in?
I want them to live in that expansive world
that is learning more about the universe
and moving out throughout the solar system.
- And rule number ten, the last one
before a very special bonus clip,
is be willing to be misunderstood.
- If you're going to do anything new or innovative,
you have to be willing to be misunderstood.
And if you can't tolerate that,
then for God's sake, don't do anything new or innovative.
Every important thing we've done
has been misunderstood
often by well-meaning, sincere critics.
Sometimes, of course, by self-interested, insincere critics.
- Now I've got a really special bonus clip from Jeff
on how to invent and pioneer
that I think you're going to really enjoy.
But before that, it's time
for the three point landing question.
It's time to move from just watching another video
to taking action in your life or business.
And if you're feeling bold,
leave your answers in the comments below.
Here we go.
Question number one,
what great idea of yours do you need to act on?
Question number two,
how can you start on it in a small way?
And question number three,
how will you deal with critics who attack your great idea?
- Customers are always dissatisfied
even when they don't know it,
even when they think they're happy,
they actually do want a better way,
and they just don't know yet what that should be.
And that's why I always warn people,
customer obsession is not just listening to customers.
Customers obsession is also inventing on their behalf,
'cause it's not their job to invent for themselves.
And so you need to be an inventor and a pioneer.
- If you want more Jeff Bezos,
check out his best advice
on work life balance video that we made.
The link is right there next to me.
I think you'll enjoy it.
Continue to believe and I'll see you there.
- If you're giving great customer experience,
the only way to do that is with happy people.