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i talk a lot about willingness to be misunderstood that's a really important thing to have if you're going to do anything new or different in the world it is going to be misunderstood sometimes by well-meaning critics sometimes by self-interested critics you'll get all kinds and it's okay it's all part of the process the only way to avoid criticism altogether is to be completely conventional in everything you do so how do you respond to the criticism what do you do what's the right thing to do well i think the first thing you do is you ask are the critics right you listen you ask are they right or even if they're not completely right is there some piece of it that's right that you can be inspired by and then if you decide by the way that the answer is no that you believe you have conviction that what you're doing is the right course then no force in the world should be able to move you you should have a deep keel but if you decide that your critics that there is something then you should change and i give you an example from the early days of amazon of one where we refused to change this we were small enough that most people didn't pay much attention to us or care about us i'm taking you way back to like 1995 1996 we pioneered this thing called customer reviews and i got a letter one day from a publisher a book publisher that said hey you must not understand your business you're losing sales because you're allowing negative customer reviews on the book detail pages why don't you just put positive reviews and i thought about this and i thought no he's wrong we don't make money when we sell things we make money when we help people make purchase decisions it was a different framing and so getting to today's news you know we listened to our critics and we decided the framing that we have been using all these years is competitive compensation we look at what other job opportunities there are and what the competitive compensation levels are and we offer competitive compensation and actually non-competitive world leading benefits packages but just competitive compensation so in light of this you know thinking about this trying to decide do we want to change we realize we just made a decision well you can offer competitive competition or you can decide to lead and as soon as we framed it that way we're like let's decide to lead i think people will follow and what was it the critics said that caught your eye basically they were saying they were if you read between the lines because a lot of the specific criticism was not correct but if you read between the lines what they really wanted us to do they said because you could also say look there are so many companies they're all the fast food companies there's you know the baristas and there's you know like wait a second why are you focusing on us but that what they're really saying is we're focusing on you because you're a leader and we want you to lead that's what they're actually saying and as soon as you recognize it that way instead of it feeling like criticism it feels empowering they're asking us to lead because we're a symbol of innovative iconic company we're a gold standard for innovation we should lead [Music] you know we all have adversity in our lives 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 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 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 people like us we are getting used to be criticized we are getting used to be sad no people say no to you when people say yes to you we really appreciate you know why people should say yes to you you have to prove so as an entrepreneur you have to get used to be challenged have to get used to be said no by the other people by the found by the investors by your customers by the people but this this is the opportunity when everybody believe it you have no chance when only few people believe it you believe it you prove it that's your chance how at the end of the day what has been the driver which has made you who you are yeah i wish people can say yes to me but if they say yes i have no choice i have to accept it of course you're not happy when people say no have a good sleep wake up try it again it's always my fault not the other people's part why you can convince people if you cannot prove it but the thing is that very important there are two group of people you have to convince him first group people your team they believe in you they trust in you and they believe the things we agreed together and second is uh your customers they really love your products and investors it's okay there's this culture in silicon valley that kind of makes startups seem glamorous and i never really believed that right i never had a goal of starting a startup and my goal when i realized that i had a company was to get it to be a good company as quickly as possible right and kind of get out of what you'd call the like risky startup phase where you are just like constantly about to die and where you can get to a point where you can actually do some interesting things and make make a lot of more interesting bets so i don't know i never read a lot of the literature on this and i mean maybe if i had then i wouldn't have made so many mistakes but so i don't know if like if learning for me is the right way to go on this but i mean but it did i think your model must have come from somewhere though even if it was even if you it was unintentional right like were you influenced by peter thiel or sean well yes people see all these people once i met them i actually i hadn't really heard of peter thiel before i'm talking about yeah right yeah but he was massively influential on my thinking right i mean like a lot of the early lessons that i took on how to think about strategy came from peter and sean and i did pay a lot of attention when i was growing up to microsoft i thought i mean i grew up you know using you know windows 3.1 and then windows 95 and i just thought that those were like the most unbelievable things on an individual level i think it is always it's always really good if if there's something that you're incredibly passionate about and just so