How to Invent, Innovate, and Stay Nimble | Jeff Bezos' Advice in 24 Minutes

If you're looking for ways to do hard things, choose a life of adventure, and empower people, then this video is for you.

You know, we all have adversity in our lives. You can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. Every time you figure out some way of providing tools and services that empower other people to deploy their creativity, you're really on to something.

Need motivation? Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation! What's up, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in that amazing thing you have inside you that I want to see burst out into the world. So let's get your motivation to a 10 and have 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 and writing his business plan for a new company called Amazon along the way. And made him the richest man in the world. It's Jeff Bezos, and here's my take on his top 10 rules of success, volume 3. Enjoy. So let's kick things off with rule number 1: experiment more.

You cannot invent and pioneer if you cannot accept failure. To invent, you need to experiment. And if you know in advance that it's going to work, it is not an experiment. And so that's a very important thing. You know, they are inseparable twins, failure and invention. And so you have to be willing to do that. And it's embarrassing to fail. You know, it's always embarrassing to fail. But you have to say, no, that's not how this works. If I said to you, you have a 10% chance of, with a particular decision, a 10% chance of a 100x return, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong 9 out of 10 times, and it's going to feel bad 9 out of 10 times. And in, in, in with technology, the outcomes, the results can be very long-tailed. The, it's very, the payoff is, can be very asymmetric, which is why you should do so much experimentation. You know, everybody knows that if you swing for the fences, you hit more home runs, but you also strike out more. But with baseball, that analogy doesn't go far enough, because with baseball, no matter how well you connect with the ball, you can only get 4 runs. The success is capped at 4 runs. But in business, every once in a while, you step up to the plate and you hit the ball so hard, you get 1,000 runs. And so when that— when you have that kind of asymmetric payoff and, you know, one at bat can get you 1,000 runs, it encourages you to experiment more. It's the right business decision to experiment more. It's also better for your customers. Customers like the successful experiments.

I love this point as lead-off, and I think you have to get used to experimenting more and failing more. And if you're in an environment where failure is shunned, where your parents and your friends and the people around you are gonna laugh at you, and that's just the environment that you're in, that failure sucks and failure's a reflection on you, then I strongly encourage you to start to shift what you consume. Watch more videos like this. I guarantee you, if you watched a video a day of people like this talking, your perspective of failure will change and so will you, and you'll take more experiments, you'll take more bets, and then you'll start to win. Let's move on to rule number 2. Choose to do hard things.

You know, we all have adversity in our lives. I would, I doubt if you really, you know, if you know somebody, any friend or anybody that you talk to, there's no lack of adversity. And by the way, that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up. You fall down, you get back up. It always happens. And, you know, you get certain gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those, but you— I guess my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud not of your gifts but of your hard work and your choices. So, you know, you may be— the kinds of gifts you get in life, you know, you might be really good at math, it might be really easy for you. That's a kind of gift. But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat. That's a choice. You can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. You can be grateful for them and thankful for them, and— but your choices You choose to work hard. You choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of.

This is a fantastic point and one that I think people are always working on. There's always something harder that you can work on. There's always something bigger that you can work towards. There's always a greater impact that you can have. So the things that I found hard 5 years ago, like making a YouTube video, they're not hard for me anymore, right? They're easy. But then to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing is constantly harder. And I think having people, videos, resources in your life that push you constantly to try to do harder and harder and harder and harder things is where your happiness will come from, is where your growth will come from, and where ultimately your success will come from. So it's a great point, I love it. Let's move on to rule number 3: be an inventor.

If you want to be an inventor of any kind, inventing a new, you know, a new service offering for customers or a new product or anything, Being an inventor requires, because the world is so complicated, you have to be a domain expert. I mean, in a way, even if you're not at the beginning, you have to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn enough so that you become a domain expert. But the danger is, once you become a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge. And so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that, you know, 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert, and have that beginner's mind, have that look at it freshly, even though they know so much about the domain. And that's the key to inventing. You have to have both. And I think that is intentional. I think all of us have that inside of us and we can all do it, but you have to be intentional about it. You have to say, yeah, I am going to become an expert and I'm going to keep my beginner's mind.

So I think this is where it's really helpful to have multiple interests. So yes, you are the domain expert. I, I love YouTube. I'm all in on YouTube. I know YouTube inside out in most cases, and I have other interests. I love entrepreneurship. I love salsa dancing. I like League of Legends. I have a dog. I have a wife. All of these things are different parts of me, and as I am in my relationship talking to Nina, I get ideas for my YouTube channel. As I'm meeting an entrepreneur, I get another idea for my YouTube channel. So go Going all in on one thing and being that expert, but still having other interests where you can pull and learn from and see how things are done in that other industry and how it might apply to yours, I think is really, really, really important. The reason why it's so important is because a lot of the inventions are really just pulling something that works in nature or works in a different industry and applying it to yours, and poof, you've created something brand new. Let's jump to rule number 4, go step by step.

So your question is, you know, did I kind of anticipate what would happen over the last 22 years? At Amazon, and the answer is God, no. So, you know, Amazon started as a very small company. It was me and a few other people. I was driving all the packages to the post office myself in my 1987 Chevy Blazer. And when I raised money for Amazon, I had to raise $1 million, which I raised from 22 different investors, $50,000 each. They got 20% of the company for, for the million dollars. And it was a— 40 people told me no. So I did take 60 meetings to get 20 yeses. The first question was always, what's the internet? And I had to walk through that. And this was 1994, early '95. And so did I anticipate, you know, fast forward to today and the current version of it? No. It has been one foot in front of the other, and I think that that is true for most businesses where you kind of proceed adaptively. It's step by step. You figure it out, you have a success, and then you kind of double down on that success and you figure out what else you can do, what customers want.

Another great message. I think it's important you think big and you act small. I think Jeff had to think big to some extent, right? He left his high-paying job, he drove across the country, he was able to raise $1 million. For his business startup, that's because he had some kind of vision for what this could become. It's not like, "We're just gonna throw up a website and see what happens," right? He's not leaving his job for that. He's not getting investors for that. Could he have predicted that he would be the world's wealthiest person, to have over $100 billion in net worth? Maybe not. Maybe that was beyond his scope. But he had a bigger vision for what he wanted to do, and he's gonna start small. He's gonna do everything himself. He's gonna pack boxes. He's gonna do all the nitty-gritty stuff. And not just be the visionary only. Think big, act small. Let's go to rule number 5, find your calling.

Ever since I was 5 years old, that's when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, I've been kind of passionate about space rockets, rocket engines, space travel. I became a science fiction reader, and I've always known that I wanted to you know, do something having to do with space. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about it for really almost my whole life. And that's one of the things you guys will find, that you have passions. And having a passion is a gift. I think we all have passions. And you don't get to choose them, they pick you. But you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it's a fantastic gift for you because It gives you direction, it gives you purpose. You can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling. And the best thing is to have a calling. And if you find your passion, you'll have that and all your work won't feel like work to you.

That last sentence was critical. All your work won't feel like work to you. You have to enjoy the process. If you are starting something, just trying to reach a goal, just trying to be a millionaire, just trying to hit some arbitrary target, but you don't actually enjoy the work, you're going to fail. You will fail. It's great to have a goal and say, I'm going to do whatever it takes, but if you don't actually enjoy a good chunk of that work, then you're never going to make it. And that's why most entrepreneurs fail. You have to do the work that doesn't feel like work, even if it doesn't even make sense how it's going to work out at some point. Just trust that the dots will align in your future. That's how it actually works. Let's go to rule number 6: be nimble and robust.

The thing for companies is you need to be, um, nimble and robust. So you need to be able to need to take a punch, and you also need to be quick and, and, and innovative and, and doing new things at a high speed. That's, that's the best defense against the future. And you have to always be leaning into the future. If you're, if you're leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time. Never, ever, ever lean away from the future.

It's a great point. It's also how you win against a big competition. The big competition is slow and fat and lazy, and you can win not off your reputation, not off your experience, Not off your history, not off your brand name. You win because you're faster and because you care more. Be nimble. Let's go to rule number 7, be long-term oriented.

I ask everybody to not think in 2 to 3 year time frames, but to think in 5 to 7 year time frames. To not think about, when somebody says to me, congratulates Amazon on a good quarter, which is a very common thing to say, you meet somebody, they're being nice, they looked at your financial results for the quarter, they're like, good quarter. I say thank you, but what I'm thinking to myself is that quarter, all that, those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about 3 years ago. And so like today I'm working on, you know, a quarter that is going to happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and it's probably been done for a couple of years. And so if you start to think that way, it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy, and your ability to look around corners gets better. So many things improve if you can take a long-term— by the way, it's not natural for humans. So it's a discipline that you have to build, the kind of, you know, get rich slowly schemes are not big sellers on infomercials, you know. It's— and so that's something that you have to sort of steel yourself for, discipline and teach over time.

I think this is a really hard message for entrepreneurs to take on, especially in the early stages of a business, because you can't wait 5 years for something to happen. You know, there are realities of you wanting to pay your bills and get by and have to leave your job and have something that you can really build up and succeed with. I think especially at the early stages it's good to have a healthy balance where yes, you have this big vision, you have a plan, you know what you want to accomplish, you know where you want to be in 5 years, 10 years, even beyond, and I need to do something right now to make money, you know, and I need to provide great customer service and take advantage of immediate opportunities in front of me. Combining both those things, especially at the early stages, to get you to the point where you have enough money coming in that you you can only think about the future and where you want to go and not be so concerned about the immediate. But when you're starting off now, I think the danger is too many people only stay in the immediate. They're only thinking about— maybe not even next quarter— thinking about the next week, which is necessary just for survival, and it's important. But spend a little bit of time, and that percentage increases over time from, you know, 5%, 10%, 20%, 25%. You keep increasing that percentage of time of how forward-thinking your ideas and your actions Moving on, rule number 8 is choose a life of adventure.

You can choose. We all get to choose our life stories, and it's the choices that define us, not our gifts. Everybody in this room has many gifts. I have many gifts. You can never be proud of your gifts because they're gifts. They were given to you. You might be, you know, tall, or you might be really good at math, or you might be extremely beautiful or handsome, or You know, there are many gifts, and you can only be proud really of your choices, because those are the things that you are acting on. And one of the most important choices that each of us has, and you know this just as well as I do, is you can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. And when you're 80, which one of those things do you think you're going to be more proud of? You're going to be more proud of having chosen a life of service and adventure.

I think most people don't consciously wake up and choose to be mediocre or choose to be easy. I think it's part of our language and part of what we do naturally as humans. I like the label of adventure though. I think if you were to ask yourself right now, what does a life of adventure look like for me? Service and adventure, what does that look like? Like today, a month, in a year? Like, what am I— what are the activities that lead to a life of service and adventure? If you ask yourself that question right now, you'll start to come up with different activities, a different way of living, a different mindset, different tasks that you should be doing to fulfill that dream instead of the one that you're currently doing, which is really of ease and comfort. So, love that point. Thank you, Jeff. Let's round it up. Let's keep moving. Rule number 9: Find allies.

What motivates me when times are rough? Um, you know, I find if I'm stressed about something, it's usually because I'm not doing anything about it. And so if I'm stressed about something, I'm trying to figure out why am I stressed. I'm listening to my body as a signal that I'm— that something is awry. And then I find that the stress goes away The second I take the first step of, you know, identify the source of the stress— why am I stressed about this? What's going on? And then, you know, talk to somebody about it. Find allies. You know, I would say that if you can find friends who are interested in similar things or want to help you solve a problem— problem solving is is inspiring for me all by itself. I have— as long as I have allies, there's nothing more fun than getting in a room with a group of inventors and saying, look, here's the problem, let's invent a solution to it. And as soon as you start doing that, I find that it turns from something that might create stress into something that creates fun.

It's a really good point, and I think you can divide your allies into work and business allies, entrepreneur allies, and personal, family, friends kind of allies. If the project you're dealing with, the problem, the stress is coming from your business— how do I grow? How do I market? How do I get my new product out there? Your friends and family might be able to be empathetic, but they can't give you strategies, specific advice, because they don't know how to solve that problem. And so whether you have a mastermind group or whether you have some people that you can call on that can help you could be really helpful. And then on the other side, having the friends and family, having somebody close to you who who can deal with just the ups and downs, who if you feel bad about yourself or down or some tragedy happened, to be able to bounce that off and not be isolated and alone all the time. You know, for me, my wife Nina is fantastic at that. If I need to bring something up, she's the one that I'll talk to about more personal stuff. And my mastermind group and some key mentors and people that I talk to on the business side are always there for me when I need help and input. So I think finding those allies, being able to have business allies and personal allies, be really beneficial. Let's finish it off with rule number 10: empower people.

On the internet today, you know, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry. That's how—

how—

because you don't— the heavy lifting infrastructure is in place for that. Today, two kids in their dorm room can't do anything interesting in space. You know, you could build a CubeSat. There's not that much interesting about CubeSats. And the, um, it'll be, that may change, but right now there's just, you need, there are certain laws of physics and certain things you need size for and that things need to be big. We need to be able to put big things in space at low cost. And so if I'm 80 years old and I can say to myself that Blue Origin did the heavy lifting, you know, I'm using my Amazon winnings to do a new piece of heavy lifting infrastructure. Which is low-cost access to space. Vehicles have to be reusable. You can't throw them away. Throw away space vehicles every time, you're never going to lower the cost. So we're trying to lower the price of admission into space so that thousands of entrepreneurs can then do amazing, surprising things. Nobody in 1995 predicted Snapchat. You know, it's like, I can't predict for you what amazing entrepreneurs, brilliant, amazing entrepreneurs will do in space. But I know if I give them low-cost access to space, some brilliant, you know, 22-year-old is going to figure it out. It's one of those things about what companies get sustainable. It's those that provide platforms upon which others can build. If you— Amazon does empower others, empower others to do things. So AWS is like that. Kindle Direct Publishing is like that. Our third-party selling business is like that. Fulfillment by Amazon is like that. Every time you figure out some way of providing tools and services that empower other people to deploy their creativity, you're really on to something.

So first off, I'm really grateful to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for empowering entrepreneurs like me through CreateSpace to write books. The Top 10 Rules of Success is through CreateSpace. It's an Amazon company, and that's where where it's being sold. And I think whatever mission you're on, it's important to empower others to help you on that mission. So not every idea has to be through you. Other people can help support the cause. You can't be such a control freak egomaniac that it only is you. It's that the mission is bigger than everything else. And so someone like Martin Luther King wasn't on the front lines all the time, but he shone the light on people who were doing great things and empowered them and inspired them to do more. I think this works also on a micro level, so it's not just about the mission and the big picture thing. It also works on a small level. The people on your team, are you micromanaging every single decision, or can you empower them to make decisions on their own and help your company achieve even better results as well? So thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know which was your favorite rule. What did you learn the most from this video, and how are you going to immediately apply it somehow to your life or your business? My favorite rule was rule number 2, which was do hard things. It's a constant reminder that I need to do more, do more difficult challenges, not get comfortable, not get lazy, not continue to coast on my talent, but push harder constantly to do bigger things. I wanna know, what did you learn from this video? Leave it in the comments below. I'm excited to see what you have to say. Now, I made this video because NoLeafClover830 asked me to. If there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, check out the link in the description. You can go and cast your vote on the request line. I also want to give a quick shout out to Tim Schmoyer from Video Creators. Tim, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and for being one of the quotes on the back and for posting it to your Instagram channel. I really, really appreciate the support, man, and I'm so glad you enjoyed the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

You have to back up and find the right time horizon for what you're trying to do. But, you know, at Amazon, we probably do most of our things. We expect to get some results in sort of 5, 6, 7, 8 years. But we find a lot of our, you know, other companies that compete against us in various ways, they're often trying to get things done in, you know, 2 or 3 years. And so we can do things that, you know, if everything has to work in 2 to 3 years, then that limits what you can do. If you give yourself the breathing room to say, "Okay, I'm okay if it takes 7 years," all of a sudden you have way more opportunities. I've always been focused. When I was in Montessori school, the Montessori school teacher told my mom that I wouldn't switch tasks, and they got me to switch tasks by picking me up, including my chair, and just moving me to the new task station. I've gotten a little better about that over the years, but it's still— task switching is still a problem for me.

Raise your standard. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 rules of success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual The tips and tricks and tips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.