The Success Story of Jeff Bezos

“If you don’t have big dreams and goals, you’ll end up working really hard for someone who does”.

When you think of Amazon, the first thing that comes to mind is the experiments, invention, innovation, creativity and customer satisfaction that the company provides. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon is the richest person in the world with a net worth of $179.6 billion. Additionally, he also owns a rocket company ‘Blue Origin’ and ‘Washington Post’ newspaper.

Why is Amazon so successful?

Amazon came into existence through a never-ending search for building a quality organisation. Amazon was built on the pillars of strength of character, single minded focus and a will to provide the highest consumer experience to every person linked with the company.

Jeff Bezos went on with his dream to build a web retailing system while the world was still entangled in the thought of how an internet can function. The key focus for Amazon has never been to defeat competitors. Rather it focuses on helping consumers and building a value for them. This keeps them focused in implementing their plans and policies.

3 Business Lessons from Jeff Bezos

Take Risks

“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,” Bezos said in an interview. 

That philosophy helped him to shape his life before he even launched Amazon. When he was just 30 years old, Bezos had a Wall Street job at hedge fund D. E. Shaw, but he saw potential in the future of the internet economy and got the idea to build a bookstore online. Bezos’ boss agreed to his idea, but he still tried to convince Bezos that it would be less of a risk to keep the job he had. But Bezos being Bezos, decided to just go for it and he moved across the country to start Amazon out of a garage in the Seattle suburbs in the summer of 1994. The website went live a year later, on July 16, 1995. And the rest is history.

Make fast but good decisions

Bezos believes that the key to maintaining an innovative business is to make “high-quality, high-velocity decisions.”

In his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, he wrote about the importance of speed in making Amazon “a large company that’s also an invention machine.” “Most decisions are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors,” he wrote. In those cases, when you make a decision that is “suboptimal (below the standard),” according to Bezos, “you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.”

Don’t lose your individuality

In his another letter, Bezos wrote “We all know that individuality – originality – is very valuable,” Bezos wrote. “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 or individuality. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”

Bezos went on to say that “it’s worth it” to maintain your individuality, even though it requires “continuous hard work.”