Dan Willis breaks down four lessons from Jeff Bezos for entrepreneurs: he grew up working-class without elite education, Amazon started in a garage with no fancy office needed, Bezos used Google ads early and modern entrepreneurs should leverage Instagram and YouTube, and he never stopped seeking the next opportunity from books to cloud services to space travel.
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It's official, ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in history. But even better than that, he's got all kinds of wealth to give us as entrepreneurs and small business owners that can help us to succeed. Stick around. Welcome back, guys. I am Dan Willis of millennialmotivator.ca. I'm here to help you create, engage, and inspire as entrepreneurs and small business. Today I'm pretty pumped about this topic, guys. Jeff Bezos is one of the all-time great entrepreneurs, great success story, great guy, great family, just all-around great guy, and he's going to space, so who doesn't love that? But if you're new to the channel and you're an entrepreneur or small business, I put out videos Monday through Saturday on topics for helping entrepreneurs and small business grow, whether that's marketing or case study or skill sets. We look at all kinds of different stuff, but it's all about helping you take your business to the next level. So if that's you, go ahead and hit that subscribe button down there, click the bell, you'll get a notification whenever my next video comes up. But without further ado, let's get down to a couple things that we all need to learn from Jeff Bezos. Okay guys, first lesson that we can take from Jeff is this: humble beginnings. Okay guys, any success can start from anywhere. You don't have to be born into riches, you don't have to be born into wealth, you don't need Ivy League schooling. You can work. You can come from a place of hard work, and that will be enough to get you where you're going. Jeff did not grow up in some wealthy environment. He grew up in a place where he saw his dad busting his butt day after day after day after day. Learned that, worked that, brought it into his life, made some great achievements throughout his life, and made the decision that he was going to be a hard worker from start to finish. It's a vital lesson, guys. Start from humble beginnings. Doesn't matter where you begin, it's where you finish that's gonna count, okay? So, first lesson from Jeff is make sure you don't let your environment, don't let your history, don't let your background tie you down and drag you down. Okay guys, next up is one that is pretty self-apparent, but a business doesn't need to start from crowdfunding, seed funding, yada yada yada, et cetera et cetera. The reality is Jeff started in a garage. That's where Amazon started. It started in a garage. Okay? So do you need a fancy office? Do you need fancy materials? Do you need— no, you don't need any of that. What you need is you need to get started. You need to have a vision. You need to have a passion and then take the tools around you and just use them to go. Jeff grew his business. He funded Amazon on Google. He— when he started Amazon, Jeff went, here's this Google thing, it's just starting out, I'm just starting out, their ads seem to be really amazing, I'm gonna use their ads to boost Amazon, which at the time was like, oh, they're a book thing. Now you've got one of the greatest competitors for Google, one of the big 3. You've got Amazon and Facebook and Google going at it. Amazon grew because it saw the potential in a tool, took it, grabbed it, and used it, ran with it. So, if you're an entrepreneur just getting started, your small business is just getting started, here's what you gotta do. Take a look at the tools available to you today. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Facebook Live, all of these great tools that are out there that Jeff didn't have available to him. If you have a concept, a passion, an idea, don't use your circumstances as an excuse. You don't need wealth, you don't need a ton of stuff to grow, you don't need a ton of connections. Those things help, don't get me wrong. I'm not negating the power of money or connections. What I am saying though is we have more tools than he did when he got started. All it takes is vision, drive, and purpose. Go get it. Last and not least, guys, it's all about what is next, okay? And what is amazing to me about Jeff is this: he had Amazon. It was this small thing out of a garage. It was something about books and people buying books and doing books online. And he started with that and it started off great and it saw— he saw the potential and he saw the growth. And then from that it grew and it became, okay, well let's make this some products other than books, you know, book-like products that go with it. And all of a sudden you've got Amazon, which is this competitor to eBay that nobody saw coming. And for some reason it just seemed to keep growing. And now we've got the Amazon Space Program, which is just like, how did we get from a A self-publishing print company all the way to the latest in space technology, the guy that wants to take us out into the universe and travel space and travel the world. How did we make that jump? The reason we made that jump is Jeff never sits back. He never goes, okay, great, we're here. This is great. Let's stop innovating. Let's stop growing. Let's stop finding new ways to build. Let's just stop where we are. He never says that. He never has that. So, what can we take from that as entrepreneurs in small business? It's this, it's a simple thing. Never be satisfied with where you are. And I'm not talking about finances, I'm not talking about money, okay? Because I assure you, when Jeff goes home, he's not checking his bank account to make sure that there's enough funds in there. He's not worried about which pennies are gonna be spent where on his space program. What he is concerned about is this. How does he find success? What's the next step? What's the next thing? Where is he gonna head? Who does he need to connect with? These are the things that are on the top of his mind. And it's— some people would say it's easier for him because he has the finances to do that. I would argue he has the finances to do that because he knew that from the beginning. So don't stop. Don't stop innovating. Don't stop creating. Don't stop trying new things. If you haven't tried new channels, new people, new meetings, go to it. Hit the conferences up. Go meet people. Innovate ideas. Just brainstorm for a day. Lock yourself away in your office and brainstorm for a day. How do you take what you're currently doing And grow it? What would that look like? What direction would you head in? What's new? What's exciting? What do you want to do? Hit that up. Head that direction. Make that a reality. Go that way. That's it for today though, guys. If you enjoyed the video, go ahead and click that subscribe button. I'm going to throw up some other videos here for you to take a look at, of course, as we usually do. I might even throw this into a Jeff Bezos playlist and you guys can watch all kinds of great stuff that he does with his time. But that's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something. Let me know. Question of the day down in the comments below: How are you going to be like Jeff?
