Jeff Bezos

This video was shared on X and I’ve now watched it probably a dozen times. The advice is timeless. Worth a watch if you have time.

You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you.

You can’t fake it, you can’t make them up. You can’t force a passion upon yourself. It doesn’t work that way. You have to try things until you find something you’re relatively good at. Then practicing will make you better at it which in turn will make you more passionate about it.

Your passions choose you and it’s your choice to practice them or to ignore them. What are you practicing?

You can’t be proud of your gifts, they were given to you, you lucked out. You can’t be proud of your gifts. You must work hard to combine your gifts with hard work. That can make you proud. Simply being proud of what you’ve been given is silly. What do you do with the gifts you were given?

Good leaders are right a lot.

People who are right a lot listen a lot. People who are right a lot, change their minds a lot. People who are right a lot change their beliefs a lot. An interesting observation, the best leaders are usually right, it’s interesting the next time you’re in a meeting to figure out who the leader is before you know who it is.

The changing your mind bit reminds me of the concept of strong opinions held loosely. Caring about what you believe in but not being blinded to new information.

Stubborn on vision, flexible on details.

You need to have a vision of where you’re headed but you need to not care about how you get there. The best leaders point the ship in the right direction and ensure the crew has enough fuel and rations to get them to the goal.

If you aren’t flexible on the details then behind your back your team calls you a micro-manager. This is not a good thing. Quit getting lost in the details and trust your team to do what you hired them for. Yes it won’t be exactly what you see in your mind, but you’re given your people ownership over something, which build confidence and self-esteem.

Success and failure are inseparable.

The bigger you get the bigger your experiments must get. I love this point of Jeff talking about Amazon and trying new things. If you experiments aren’t growing along side your company then you aren’t moving the needle enough. You don’t get success without some failure.

The funny part is no one talks about Amazons failures. No one brings up what Google has shut down because it didn’t work. No, we remember what worked. No one remembers your mistakes, your missteps, your large experiments. The only remember your wins.

Two Pizza Teams

Your teams need to be small enough that two pizzas feed them. If you have a team you can’t feed with two pizzas you have a team that’s too big and it’ll get difficult to manage it.

Shrink your teams. Give them autonomy. Expect more out of them. You may be surprised.

Out-law PowerPoint Presentations

Instead, Amazon has 6-page memos to read before a meeting. Once everybody has read it they then discuss it. There’s no sitting through PowerPoints at Amazon. You won’t even sit through presentations, you read your memo and then discuss.

I think we can sum up Bezos in one phrase, change is good. Don’t be afraid to change what you’ve been doing to get a better result. You don’t need to be Amazon to change the way you run meetings. You don’t need to be Bezos to have a different management philosophy. AND you don’t need to come up with it yourself, you can steal these ideas. I give you permission.

I’m going to order two pizzas.