The Top 78 Jeff Bezos Quotes on Business, Innovation, Life and More

Are you looking for your weekly dose of inspiration? If you are, we’ve got you covered. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon back in 1994. That’s right Amazon has been in business for 27 years and counting. Over the course of those years Bezos has become one the richest people in the world. During that time he hasn’t shied away from providing his wisdom on a range of topics from business to innovation, to taking risks to career and life advice.

If you are curious about what Bezos has to say on these topics then take take a look at some of his most insightful quotes.

Jeff Bezos on business:

1. "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."

2. "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."

3. "You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn't amazing, it won't matter. Nobody will watch."

4. "Your margin is my opportunity."

5. "I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you."

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

7. "In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts."

8. "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."

9. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

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

11. "We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term."

12. "If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned."

13. "A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last."

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

15. “Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.”

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16. "We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees."

17. “There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you are good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backwards, even if it requires learning new skills.”

18. "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.'"

19. “‘Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?’” “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” “To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.”

20. “Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions.”

21. “We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.”

Jeff Bezos on innovation:

22. "We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent."

23. "When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer."

24. "Market research doesn't help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, 'would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?' I guarantee you they'd have looked at you strangely and said, 'No, thank you.'"

25. “I do get asked, quite frequently: ‘what’s gonna change in the next 10 years?’ I rarely get asked, and it’s probably more important — and I encourage you to think about this — is the question what’s not going to change? The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come.”

26. “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment.”

27. "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."

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

29. "You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."

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

31. "Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, 'Are they right?' And if they are, you need to adapt what your're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It's a key part of invention."

32. "One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is 'one-size-fits-all' decision making...The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency."

33. "To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable."

34. “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.”

35. “If you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.”

36. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time.”

37. “Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient ... but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.”

38. “No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help.”

39. “Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa.”

40. “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight.”

41. “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.”

42. “To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”

43. “Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”

Jeff Bezos on taking risks:

44. "We take risks all the time, we talk about failure." "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."

45. “We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.”

46. “The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

47. "If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon.”

48. “If you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve."

49. "If you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake don't do anything new."

50. “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.”

51. “We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success."

52. “When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.”

53. “As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.”

Jeff Bezos on life and your career:

54. “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.”

55. “You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.”

56. “If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.”

57. "If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart."

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

59. "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."

60. “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. People who are right a lot change their mind without a lot of new data. They wake up and reanalyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases. “

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

62. “In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”

63. “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard.”

64. “If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough.” “They should just be as high quality as I can make them.”

65. “We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. 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.”

66. “You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of ‘be yourself’ is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.”

67. “Luck plays an outsized role in every endeavor, and I can assure you we’ve had a bountiful supply.”

Jeff Bezos on customer service

68. “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

69. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

70. “The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.”

71. "We don't focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers.”

72. We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience – importantly – even in those areas where we are already the leader."

73. "One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we're at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to.”

74. “Great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday [at Amazon] on behalf of customers.”

75. “There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”

76. “There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it.”

77. “Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.”

78. “I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.”

I hope you enjoyed reading these quotes as much as I enjoyed gathering them!

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Sources

https://www.indigo9digital.com/blog/14-inspiring-quotes-from-successful-retailers-about-life-and-business

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-shares-advice-for-entreprenuers-2019-6

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/28/6-must-see-quotes-from-amazons-jeff-bezos.aspx

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-quotes-2015-7#on-innovation-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-2