Jeff Bezos । 5 Minutes for the NEXT 50 Years of Your LIFE

people have very high standards how they want their work life to be and i said look if you can get your work life to be where you enjoy half of it that is amazing because very few people ever achieve that because the truth is everything comes with overhead that's reality everything comes with pieces that you don't like you could be a supreme court justice and there's still going to be pieces of your job you don't like every job comes with pieces you don't like and we need to say that's part of it you have to figure out how to set up your life in such a way that you can minimize the things and i find people don't dislike hard work what people dislike and what is being out of control like they can't control their life they can't control their environment this happens to me when i get over scheduled i hate being over scheduled i want some time to be able to think and free myself we all have the same amount of time in the world nobody has more time than anybody else and when you become a very successful person one of the things you start to get over scheduled so 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 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 i i when i was young i had i made this mistake too you can get very fixed on your gifts so everybody has gifts you know you 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 and 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 my advice would be the same for any kind of entrepreneur and that is make sure that you are focused on something you're passionate about so if you look at the early internet companies they were started and focused on doing something that they thought was very interesting long before the internet was fashionable in any way um you know i i you know we are currently an underdog once again we've been in business for six years and there was exactly one year where we were not the underdog and that was 1999. i like the the underdog years because it makes uh you know i liked it when all the people we hired their parents told them they were crazy like that was the that was kind of the good era fortunately it's back in 1999 all the parents were like you know giving their brothers and sisters high fives you know my son is working at amazon.com so that's a very uh you can't follow the fashion when you're trying to do a startup company or i think really anything in life but you have to as an entrepreneur if you're gonna if you're gonna build a company pick something you think is interesting that has the intersection of genuinely creating real customer value and then just stay right there and let the wave catch you whatever it is that you want to do there's going to be risk in your life and risk is a necessary component of progress you can make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind whether they be the geographical physical exploration that i've just been talking about or whether it be you know a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field or i bet you could ask that question of every speaker here and i bet that every speaker here has taken substantial risks uh whether it be intellectual or otherwise to achieve what their you know what they've done [Music] you