More Words of Wisdom from Jeff Bezos

by Scott Edward Walker on February 14th, 2013

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a favorite video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com and a truly extraordinary entrepreneur.

In this solid 17-minute clip, Jeff shares some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs, including the following:

  • “One of the things that is very hard to believe when you’re 22 or 23 is that you don’t already know everything.”  (at 1:49)
  • “The business plan won’t survive its first encounter with reality…But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get mentally comfortable in the space.”  (at 3:42)
  • “It’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic.  If you believe on that first day… that there’s a 70% chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the self-doubt…To pretend that it’s not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things.”  (at 4:15)
  • “What you do with those early investment dollars…is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk.”  (at 4:50)
  • “I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal.  I knew if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that.  But I knew the one thing I might regret is not having ever tried – and I knew that would haunt me every day.”  (at 8:03)
  • “The rate of change is getting faster and faster.  Every decade that goes by there are more important discoveries per unit of time than there were in the previous decade.”  (at 11:20)
  • “Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over…. Stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring…”  (at 12:12)
  • “I love people counting on me.”  (at 14:02)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott

 

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