Jeff Bezos's Top 10 Rules for Success

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He wants to build the infrastructure for future space travel.

Jeff Bezos didn't become one of the richest people in the world by following conventional wisdom.

I always admired Jeff. I mean, I met him 20 years ago or so, and, and I thought he was something special. But I didn't realize you could go from books to what, what's happened there.

He built Amazon by making decisions that most people wouldn't have the patience or courage to make. He focused on the long term when everyone else was chasing short-term results.

I would always rather lose a sale than lose a customer. And you're thinking long term. And shareholders and customers and the business, everyone is aligned if you think out 10 or 20 years.

Obsessed over customers instead of competitors.

Amazon was really built on just a small number of principles. Uh, the first one is Absolute customer obsession.

Trusted his instincts when the answer wasn't obvious.

The biggest things that we've done at Amazon, a lot of them come from instinct and hunches.

Made bold decisions despite uncertainty.

It's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets.

And chose action over regret.

I wanted not to have regrets.

Today we're breaking down the top 10 rules of success from Jeff Bezos. If you want to think bigger, take smarter risks, and achieve more in your own life and business, this video is for you. Need motivation?

To the top 10 with Believe Nation.

If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: think long term.

Whenever you're in a situation where it seems that short term, you're doing a business deal with someone, and if you think you're never going to deal with them again, then maybe you would come to a certain answer. But if you realize, "I'm probably going to deal with this person for the rest of my life in one way or another," you come to a different answer. And so long-term thinking, whether it's with your customers or your business partners or even with, you know, family members and loved ones, thinking about, "Okay, what do I want this to be like, not just right now, but 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now?" So, you know, in, in retail, you would— I would always rather lose a sale than lose a customer. And you're thinking long term and shareholders and customers and the business, everyone is aligned if you think out 10 or 20 years.

Rule number 2: Have an absolute customer obsession.

For me, the lessons, the big things are the same. So Amazon was really built on just a small number of principles. The first one is absolute customer obsession. And I really mean that, customer obsession instead of competitor obsession. So we pay attention to customers, I mean, to competitors, but we don't obsess over them.

We obsess over customers.

And Blue Origin is the same.

Rule number 3, build experience.

It is possible to, you know, be 18, 19, 20 years old, drop out of college, and be a great entrepreneur. And the world is We have famous examples of that working— Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. But these people are the exception. I always advise to young people, you know, go work at a best practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things, how to hire really well, how to interview, etc. There's a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company that will help you. And then you can still— there's still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed— it increases your odds. I mean, I started Amazon when I was 30, not when I was 20. And I think that that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed. So that would always be my advice.

And you finished college?

I finished college and I enjoyed college and I think it's been helpful to me. And then I went on and I worked for a really great company called D.E. Shaw Co. where I learned a tremendous amount, tremendous amount there.

Rule number 4, trust your instinct.

If you're running any organization of any scale whatsoever, it is essential to have data and to rely on data.

Of course.

If you're not, that's so basic and so fundamental, but the data doesn't tell you anything, everything, it doesn't tell you everything. And so if, for example, it often doesn't tell you about changes or things that you're missing things that you're not measuring properly. And so that's where anecdotes come into play, and that's where intuition and gut instinct and heart come into play. And a lot of those things are new. You know, the biggest things that we've done at Amazon, and it's gonna be true in space for Blue Origin as well, it's true in AI, a lot of them come from instinct and hunches. Nobody, if you take Echo and Alexa, which has been a fantastically successful product for us, installed in hundreds of millions of endpoints. Nobody was asking for a black cylinder that's always on, that you can talk to, and apps for music and to turn your lights on and off and set timers. And we didn't know if people would want that. You just have to kind of use your intuition. AWS, again, nobody was asking for that. We had to use our intuition. Third-party marketplace. You know, we're, we've been working on doing cloud computing in space at Blue Origin because cloud, you know, there's a lot— you get 8 times as much solar power per unit of area in space as you do on Earth. And so in principle, you could make data centers in space that would be very efficient. So that's something that, you know, Blue Origin is working on. A lot of other companies are working on that. But that's not something you can be sure is going to work. You don't know what launch costs are going to be and other things. So technically it works, but there's a lot of, a lot of mysteries about it too. And this is, I think when you're talking about invention, you have to be a wanderer. You have to wander because—

Curiosity.

Is, you know, if you're not wandering, you're going in a straight line. That means you know where you're going. And a lot of the most important discoveries and most important inventions don't come from knowing where you're going.

Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Rule number 5: Prioritize your ideas better.

Early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilkie came to me one day. He worked for Amazon for a quarter of a century, but this is when he probably knew me only for a year. And he said, "Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon." And this was such a shocking idea for me. And, you know, as a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. It would hire these experienced senior executives, brilliant people like Diego and Jeff Wilkie, and there were several others too. And I would listen to them and they would teach me. And Jeff said, "You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon." I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "You have to release the work." at the right rate that the organization can accept it. And he was a manufacturing expert, and so, you know, his view of the world was, every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value, and in fact, it was creating distraction. And so he said, look, you have to figure out when to release these new ideas at a rate that the organization can accept them.

And this was—

I mean, this sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious at the time to me, and this was a profound insight for me. And so I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready. For the ideas. And then I also started figuring out, how can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas? That's about having the right senior team and the right leadership and getting those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit time. And that is what we built. We built a company that's very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And you do want to build as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of releasing the work was very profound for me, and it made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.

Rule number 6: Have a problem-solving mentality.

Fundamentally, I'm an inventor. It's the thing I do the best. It's the thing that I enjoy the most. I'm a good brainstormer. I love problem-solving. And it's, to me, that creation of new ideas is what drives the world forward. You know, somebody 10,000 years ago or whatever it was invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world wealthier. And that's what happens. Every discovery, every invention, somebody invented penicillin and they made the whole world better. And this, they discovered it, and they perfected it, and then they expanded it to other antibiotics. And this is like, we're sort of one invention at a time, the world gets more prosperous. And that's my mindset, that's how I think about the world. It's, I don't think there's any problem if we apply human ingenuity to it that we can't solve. And it's fun to do that too.

Rule number 7: Be bold.

My job, one of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold. And people love to focus on things that aren't yet working. And that's good, it's human nature. That kind of divine discontent can be very helpful. But you really, you know, it's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets. And you need to encourage that. And if you're going to take bold bets, they're going to be experiments. And if they're experiments, you don't know ahead of time whether they're going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But big successes, a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn't work. So, you know, bold bets, AWS, Kindle, Amazon Prime, our third-party seller business, all of those things are examples of bold bets that did work, and they pay for a lot of experiments. I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com, literally billions of dollars of failures, and you might remember Pets.com or Cosmo, or give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily. None of those things are fun, But they also— they don't matter. What really matters is companies that don't continue to experiment, companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where they— the only thing they can do is make a kind of Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are, you know, making bets all along, even, you know, big bets, but not bet the company bets, I don't, I don't believe in bet the company bets. That's when you're desperate. That's, that's the last thing you can do.

Rule number 8: Have no regrets.

I was living and working in New York City in 1994. I came across the fact that the World Wide Web was growing very quickly. It was tiny, but it was growing very fast. Most people had not heard of it. And I came up with this idea. The idea initially was very simple.

It was to sell books online.

And I went to my boss, who I liked a lot, his name was David, and I said, "I have this idea to start this company to sell books on the internet." And he took me on a long walk in Central Park in New York and listened to this idea in great detail. And he said, "It actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but I think it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job." And, um, I thought about that. That made a certain amount of sense to me. And he said, "Why don't you think about it for 2 days before you make a final decision?" And so I went away and I thought about this, and I was trying to figure out how to make this decision, 'cause in the moment, personal life decisions, those choices can be very challenging. And I finally figured out for me the right way to think about it, which was, I wanted not to have regrets. I pictured myself, you know, 80 years old and thinking back on my life in a quiet moment of reflection. Would I regret leaving this company in the middle of the year and walking away from my annual bonus and all those things that in the moment could be very confusing? And I thought, you know, when I'm 80, I'm not going to think about that. I'm not even going to remember it. But what I will do, I know for a fact I have this idea, and if I don't try, I'm gonna regret having never tried. And I know also, if I try and fail, I'll never regret having tried and failed. And as soon as I thought about it that way, I knew I had to give it a try.

Rule number 9, focus on your core values.

We do so many different things, so this is a question I sometimes get. How can you do so many different things Why don't you stick to the knitting? The kind of traditional advice would be to stay focused and keep the business simple. And I— the way I think about this is we actually do stick to one thing. It's just not described— it's on the business itself. We do web services, which is, you know, big enterprises buying compute services from us. And we have our retail business and we have Amazon Studios, which is making original content, Amazon Go, the things you listed. So, but the, the cultural thread that runs through all these things is the same. We only have a few principles at Amazon, kind of core values that we go back to over and over again. And if you looked at each of the things that we do, you would see those run straight through everything. So the first one, and by far the most important one, is customer obsession. And we talk about it as customer obsession as opposed to competitor obsession. And I have seen over and over again companies talk about that they're customer-focused, but really, when I pay close attention to them, I believe they are competitor-focused. And that's just a completely different mentality. By the way, competitor focus can work, um, but I don't think it works in the long run as well as customer focus. For one thing, once you're the leader if your whole culture is competitor obsessed, it's kind of hard to stay energized and motivated if you're out in front. Whereas customers are always unsatisfied, they're always discontent, they always want more. And so no matter how far you get out there in front of your competitors, you're still behind your customers. So they're always pulling you along. So customer obsession is a deep principle that underlies everything we do. Another one is is eagerness to invent. So we love to pioneer. And when we have done— by the way, whenever we have tried to do something in a kind of me-too fashion, we have failed at it. We need to have something that is differentiated, unique, something that customers are going to like, that we're kind of leading with. So that's another element that works for us. And then another one is long-term thinking. We are willing to, to take some time and be patient with our business initiatives, and that runs through everything. So a lot of our competitors might have 2 to 3 year kind of time frames, and we might have more of a 5 to 7 year sort of time frame. And then the last one, operational excellence. So literally, you know, how do you have high standards around, you know, Identifying defects, fixing defects at the root, all of those kinds of things that lead to what I think also can be in a simpler way just stated as professionalism, that you want to do things right just for the sake of doing them right. So let—

And number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is choose to do hard things.

A young person starting their career, I think there are probably a lot of things. Some of them are very well known and people have heard them many times. They're still true. One of those that you should always focus on. A young person should find something that they're passionate about to do. And that's not going to surprise anyone. It's a clear thing to do. It's very hard— if you don't love your work, you're never going to be great at it. I think the other thing I would suggest to any young person, even before they start their career, is to really think about their choices. Because I find young people— and when I was young, I made this mistake too— you can get very fixed on your gifts. So everybody has gifts, you know, you have gifts and you have things that you didn't get gifted. Maybe you're extremely beautiful, maybe you're extremely good at mathematics, maybe you— there are a lot of things that you can be given. But those things can confuse you because they're not the things that construct your life. It's your choices that construct your life, not your gifts. You can celebrate your gifts, be proud of them, be happy of them. Actually, don't be proud of them. Be celebratory of them, but you can't be proud because they're gifts. They were given to you. You didn't earn them. You can only be proud of the things you earn. And so as I got older, I started to realize I wasn't proud of my gifts. I was always good at school, school was always easy for me, and I was always proud that I was a great student. I got A's in all my classes, I was good at math, all of that, and I thought, I thought that's who I was, but it's not true. Those are the things that are gifts. What was hard for me is deciding to work hard, deciding to use my gifts in certain ways. To challenge myself, to do things that I didn't think I could do, to put myself in uncomfortable situations. We all get— I would say to a young person, you can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. Which one of those, when you're 90 years old, are you going to be more proud of? 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 3 million in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together. The, the, the 3 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, because 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. Ill-prepared, you know, I had, we had all the, 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 software engineers, were all like packing boxes. We didn't even have packing tables, and down, we were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes, and at about, you know, 1 or 2 in the morning, I said to one of my software engineering colleagues, I said, I said, you know, Paul, we, 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. 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.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. To be. Believe. For 10 more amazing rules from Elon Musk, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Earth turns out to be this computer to understand, to get to figure out the answer of the meaning of life, and it comes up with the answer 42. And but then it's like, what the heck does 42 mean? Um,