Jeff Bezos’s Life Advice Will Change Your Future (MUST WATCH)

[Music] i've made billions of dollars of failures at amazon.com literally billions of dollars of failures it's easy to have ideas it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day [Music] 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 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 know you might remember pets.com or cosmo or you know give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily none of those things are fun but 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 i think stress you can be one of the things that's very important to note about stress is that stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over so if i find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress that's a a a a warning flag for me what it means is there's something that i haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me and i haven't yet taken any action on it i find as soon as i identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that situation even if it's not solved the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it so stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring i think in large part so stress doesn't come people get stressed wrong all the time in my opinion stress doesn't come from hard work for example you know you can be working incredibly hard and loving it and likewise you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that so and likewise if you kind of use the you know use that as an analogy for what i was just talking about if you're out of work but you're going through you know a disciplined approach of you know a series of job interviews and so on and working to remedy that situation you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing it's easy to have ideas it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product there are a lot of steps in between it takes persistence relentlessness so i always tell people who are you know who think they want to be entrepreneurs it's you need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility and you have to know when to be which and basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it'll be too easy to give up but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision you'll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong and you're going to need to be able to change those things so i think taking an idea successfully all the way to the market and turning it into a real product that people care about that really improves people's lives is a lot of hard work i don't really remember the exact day or anything but when i was in college is when i started thinking about wanting to be an entrepreneur someday so it was i was not the kid with the lemonade stand you know i didn't i wasn't one of these kids who was always trying to raise me i always wanted to be a scientist when i was little but i'd also always loved computers i like i was lucky because at my age this is unusual to have access to a mainframe computer from my elementary school when i was in fourth grade and uh quickly learned that there was a pre-programmed star trek game on that computer and then i never did anything except play star trek with the computer so i don't know how formative that was certainly led it certainly helped my star trek knowledge considerably and and but i've always loved computers somewhere in college i started watching some of the people who were like setting up you know college pizza delivery services and you know the kind of the core entrepreneurs and thinking you know this looks like a really fun thing to do do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day i think we actually saw this i think you see it all over the place in many different contexts but i think we saw it uh in the internet world quite a bit where you know at the sort of peak of the sort of internet uh you know mania and say 1999 you found people who were uh you know very passionate and they kind of left that job and decided i'm gonna you know do something in the internet because it's you know it was almost like the you know the 1849 gold rush in a way i mean you find that people uh if you go back and study the history of the 1849 gold rush you find that you know at that time everybody who was in was within the shouting distance of california was you know they might have been a doctor but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold and that that almost never works and even if it does work you know according to some metric financial success or whatever it might be i suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied so you really need to be very clear with yourself and i think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80 looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have that works for that works for career decisions it works for family decisions you know do you want i have a 14 month old son and it's very easy for me to if i think about myself when i'm 80 i know i want to watch that little guy grow up and so it's i don't want to be 80 and think shoot you know i miss that whole thing and i don't have the kind of relationship with my son that i wished i had and so on and so on so if you think about that so 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