Jeff Bezos, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world, has discovered four key things that will help you be more successful and happier.
Source: Profimedia
The founder of Amazon, entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, singled out the four most useful life tips from his perspective.
The power of kindness
Intelligence is important, but as Bezos learned growing up with his grandparents when he was 10, intelligence alone will not make you successful, writes Investor.me.
The story Bezos told Princeton graduates:
My grandfather drove. And my grandmother was sitting in the passenger seat. She smoked during these trips, and I hated the smell. At that age, I would use any excuse to make estimates and do a little arithmetic. I decided that one case would be for grandma. I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, estimated the number of inhalations per cigarette, and so on. When I was sure that I had reached a reasonable number, I put my head in the front of the car, patted my grandmother on the shoulder and proudly said: “In two minutes per breath, you took nine years of your life!”.
I vividly remember what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetical skills. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the back seat and didn’t know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who was driving in silence, stopped on the side of the highway. He got out of the car, came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow him. Grandfather looked at me and after a little silence said gently and calmly: “Jeff, one day you’ll realize it’s harder to be good than smart.”
Think about the people you respect. Think about people you admire. Think about the people you like to be around. They are smart. They are accomplished. However, what really sets them apart? They are kind, even when it is quite difficult. As Mark Cuban says, being nice is one of the most underrated skills in business.
As Bezos said, “Intelligence is a gift, kindness is a choice.” You can work to become smarter, but you cannot choose to be intelligent. But you can always choose to be kind.
Focusing on things that will never change
It’s hard to be innovative. It’s hard to be a true leader. Shortcuts usually bring short-term benefits. It is incredibly difficult to know what will change. Bezos is not worried about what will change. It focuses on what will not change. He built Amazon around things he knew would be stable over time, investing heavily in making sure Amazon would deliver those things — and improve its delivery of those things.
His story that he once told:
Very often I get the question: “What will change in the next 10 years?”. And it’s a very interesting question, it’s very common. I almost never get the question, “What won’t change in the next ten years?”. And I argue that the second question is actually more important, because you can build a business strategy around things that are stable over time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that will be true ten years from now. They want fast delivery, they want a wide selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer will come in and say, “Jeff, look, I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.” “I love Amazon, I just wish you would ship a little slower.” That is simply impossible.
And so the effort that we put into those things, developing those things, we know that the energy that we put into that today will still pay dividends to our clients ten years from now. When you have something you know to be true, even in the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. Focusing on things that won’t change doesn’t guarantee success. But it provides one of the best foundations for success you can find.
Izvor: youtube/PersonalFinanceInsider/print screen
Avoiding a lifetime of regret
When people think about something big they want to do, start their own business, change careers, move to a new city, etc. They often think about whether to regret the decision if things don’t work out, if it doesn’t turn out the way they wanted. Every new path is uncertain, the future is unpredictable. It is normal to be afraid that you will regret doing something new. But when you look back, you usually regret the things you didn’t do. A job you haven’t started. The career change you didn’t make. A move you didn’t make. You especially regret the times when you didn’t take risks.
As Bezos said about making the decision to start Amazon:
I went to my boss at the time and I really liked my job, and I told him I was going to start doing this thing, an online bookstore, and I already told my wife and she said, “Great, let’s go.” And I told my boss that and he said, “I think this is a good idea, but I think it would be even better for someone who didn’t already have a good job.”
For me, it was the right way to make such a very personal decision, because those decisions are personal, not like business decisions based on data. They are: “What does your heart say?”.
And for me, the best way to think about it was to project myself toward the age of 80 and say, “Look, when I’m 80, I want to minimize my regrets.” I don’t want to be 80 years old and have a quiet moment to think about my life and catalog a bunch of big regrets and failures in life. In most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be omissions. We wonder what would have happened. I knew that when I was 80 years old, I would never regret trying this thing (quitting a good job to start Amazon) that I was so excited about and it failed. If it didn’t work, fine. I would be very proud of the fact that I tried when I’m 80 years old. And I also knew that they would always haunt me if I didn’t try.
Say you’re afraid to start a business. With planning, preparation and support, fear is something you can overcome. But regret—the kind of regret that comes from one day wishing you had at least tried—is a feeling you can never overcome.
Creating a personal flywheel
The flywheel is an incredibly heavy wheel that requires a tremendous amount of effort to push. Keep pushing and the flywheel builds momentum. Keep pushing and eventually it starts to help you turn and generate its own momentum.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins applied the premise to business, showing how a company’s momentum is a self-reinforcing loop made up of several key initiatives that both feed and drive each other.
Amazon took this premise to an extreme, as Brad Stone describes an early version of Amazon’s flywheel in “The Everything Store”:
… Bezos and his associates sketched out their own cycle, which they believed drove their business. It went something like this: lower prices led to more customer visits. More buyers increased sales volume and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. This allowed Amazon to get more out of the fixed costs such as fulfillment centers and servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled further price reductions. Power up any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and that should speed things up. The key is to create momentum that, when you set any part of it in motion, naturally accelerates the entire mechanism.
Let’s say you sell swimming pools. New sales and installations form part of your momentum. Maintenance contracts make another one: the more new pools you sell, the more service contracts you can sell and the more scheduled maintenance visits you can generate. Those visits create more opportunities for your technicians to deliver great service, which settles referrals, upgrades and future sales. And don’t forget the ad hoc calls; each is an opportunity for a technician to turn a green pool blue, for you to sell another maintenance contract, and to identify outdated systems that could be replaced with new ones. And then there’s the inventory sale…
You can also make your own flywheel. Say you want to get in better shape. Exercise is one part. Eating healthier is another matter. Finding a few people to work with, at least occasionally, is another. Eat healthier and exercise is easier; having a workout partner provides a little pressure to help you stick to your routine. Exercising will make you want to eat healthier, just so you don’t feel like you “wasted” your workout by eating a bunch of empty calories, writes Investor.me.
Think about it this way: If you have only one primary driver of success, what happens when the momentum of that driver inevitably stops? What other drivers can you add to your business that will help you sustain and build momentum—and feed off that momentum?”.
(WORLD/Nova.rs)