5 lessons from Jeff Bezos's greatest success in 27 years as Amazon CEO

In 2021, Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO of Amazon, formerly the online book-selling company he founded in 1994. Today, Amazon is an e-commerce giant worth 1.8 million. trillion dollars, and that same company made him the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than 200 billion dollars.

During his roughly 27 years as CEO of Bezos, he regularly shares tips and lessons learned in interviews and in his annual letters to Amazon shareholders.

Accept the risk

"When you think about the things you'll regret when you're 80, they're almost all the things you didn't do. It's very rare that you regret something you did, whether it failed, didn't work, whatever," Bezos said in a 2018 interview.

That philosophy helped shape Bezos' life before he founded Amazon. When he was just 30 years old, Bezos got a job on Wall Street at hedge fund D. E. Shaw, but he saw promise in the future of the Internet economy and came up with the idea to start an online bookstore. Bezos' boss agrees that the idea has potential, but he still tries to convince Bezos that it is less risky to continue the job he currently has.

"I picture myself at 80 years old, thinking back to my life in a quiet moment: Do I regret leaving this company in the middle of the year and giving up my annual bonus?", Bezos said of the moment. that moment in his life in a 2020 fireside chat in India.

Of course, Bezos decided to do just that, and he traveled the country to found Amazon from a garage in suburban Seattle in the summer of 1994. The site went live a year later, on July 16. 1995.

"I don't think I'll ever regret trying and failing. And I think I'll always be haunted if I decide not to try," Bezos said in 2018. So he "chooses to have children." less safe way to follow my passion and I'm proud of that choice."

Picture yourself as an 80-year-old looking back on your life, and choices you might regret also align with personal decisions, Bezos added.

"I'm not just talking about the business," he said. It applies to all sorts of things, like you love someone but don't dare tell them, and then 50 years later you're like, "Why didn't I tell her? Why didn't I just say it out loud? than?"

"It's the kind of regret that's so hard to be happy when you look back on your own life, in a private moment, it's the story of your life..."

Make the right decision – quickly

Bezos believes that the key to sustaining an innovative business is making "high-quality, high-speed decisions."

In his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos wrote of the importance of speed and "agility" in making Amazon "a great company and an inventing machine."

"Most decisions are changeable, reversible - they are a two-way door," he wrote. In those cases, when you make the "non-optimal" decision, you don't have to live with the consequences that long. You can reopen the door and come back."

According to Bezos, those kinds of decisions should be made "quickly," otherwise, people or companies that spend too much time pondering reversible decisions risk being "sluggish", not thinking critically about the risks, not testing enough, and consequentially reducing invention".

Bezos said in an interview at the Economic Club of Washington DC that "All of my best decisions in business and in life are made with heart, intuition, guts - not must be by analysis".

Listen to your heart's call

Finding passion in life is at the heart of advice Bezos says he often gives to younger employees as well as his four children, the billionaire said at the Center's Leadership Forum President George W. Bush 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 find the calling of your heart, you've hit the jackpot, because that's a big deal."

In other words, finding a way to build a career out of passion is real success from Bezos' perspective. And, he believes that everyone has a passion.

"You don't choose your passion, your passion chooses you," he said at the time. "We are all gifted with certain passions, and the lucky ones are the ones who can pursue those."

The road to success is nothing but a straight road

In Amazon's 2018 letter to shareholders, there was a section titled "Intuition, Curiosity, and the Power of Wandering." In that section, the Amazon CEO wrote about the importance of taking time to explore one's own curiosity to come up with new, innovative solutions to challenges.

According to Bezos, one of the lessons he learned while building Amazon was that "success can come through repetition: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, over and over again," he wrote, adding that "the path to success is nothing but a straight road."

Don't lose your difference

"We all know that being different - unique - is valuable," Bezos wrote. "We've all been taught to 'be who we are'. What I'm really asking you to do is accept and be realistic about the amount of energy it takes to maintain that difference."

Bezos says it's "well worth it" to maintain your distinction, though it requires "continuous hard work."

"The fairy tale version of 'be yourself' advice is that all pain stops as soon as you allow your differences to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worthwhile, but don't expect it to be easy or free," Bezos wrote.

Since stepping down as CEO, Bezos has moved to serve as executive chairman of Amazon's board and said he's shifting his focus to projects like Blue Origin. On Tuesday, July 20, 2021, Bezos made his first trip to space aboard Blue Origin's first passenger jet