One of the Greatest Speeches Ever | Jeff Bezos

you guys will find that you have passions and having a passion is a gift I think we all have passions and you don't get to choose them they pick you but you have to be alert to them you have to be looking for them and when you find your passion it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction it gives you purpose you could have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling and the best thing is to have a calling and if you find your passion you'll

have that and all your work won't feel like work to you many many kids and many grown-ups do figure out over time what their passions are and sometimes we let our I don't think it's that hard I think what happens though sometimes is that we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions and so that's what needs to be guarded against 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 gonna take bold bets they're gonna be experiments and if their experiments you don't know ahead of time go they're going to work experiments are by their very nature prone to failure but big success is 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 3rd party seller business all of those things are

examples of bull 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 calm 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 the desperate position where they only thing they can do is we could 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 it's not you can be out of work and you have terrible work-life balance you know even though you've got all the time in the world right you could just feel like oh my god you know I'm miserable and you would be draining energy

and so you have to find that harmony it's a much better word and I think for most people it's about meaning people want to know that they're doing something interesting and useful and for us you know because of the challenges that we have chosen for ourselves we get to work in the future and it's super fun to work in the future for the right kind of person do you need to be if you nimble and robust so you need to be able to take a punch and you also need to be quick and and and

and innovative and and doing new things at a high speed that's that's the best defense against the future and you have to always be leaning into the future if you're if you're leaning away from the future the future is gonna win every time never ever ever lean away from the future we all have adversity in our lives yeah I I would I would 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 the 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 but you 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 light 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 being an inventor requires because the world is so complicated you have to be a domain expert I mean in a way even if even if you're not at

the beginning you have to learn learn learn learn learn enough so to become a domain expert but the danger is once you've become a domain expert you can be trapped by that knowledge and so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that you know 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind have that that look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain and that's the key to inventing you have to have both and I think that is intentional I think all of us have

that inside of us and we can all do it but you have to be intentional about it you have to say yeah I am going to become an expert and I'm gonna keep my beginner's mind you can't skip steps you have to put one foot in front of the other things take time you there are no shortcuts and but but you want to do those steps with you know passion and ferocity 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 bewitch 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 you're gonna 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 and that really improves people's lives is a lot of hard work 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 context but I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where you know it's sort of peak of the sort of Internet you know mania and say 1999 you found people who were you know

very passionate something they kind of left that job and decided I'm gonna you know could do something in the internet because it's you know it was almost like the you know the 18-49 Gold Rush in a way I mean you find that people if you go back and study the history of the 18-49 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 if it's I don't want to be 80 and think shoot you know I missed 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 I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long term point of view

and I think this is something about which there's a lot of controversy you know there's a you know there's a you know something a lot of people and I'm just not one of them believe that you should live for the now I think what you do is you think about the the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's gonna leave you ultimately satisfied so this is just my this is the way it works for me and I mean this is everybody needs

to find that for themself so there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works works for you [Music] [Music]