We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A brand reflects the reputation of a company, which is built through hard work and excellence.
In this quote, Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of a company's brand as a parallel to personal reputation. Just as individuals build their reputations based on their actions and the quality of their work, companies must earn their brand through consistent efforts and achieving excellence in their products and services. This highlights that a strong brand is not merely about marketing, but rather about the quality and integrity of what the company delivers.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
When discussing a company's values during a presentation, you could use this quote to emphasize the significance of reputation.
More from Jeff Bezos
All quotes βWork hard, have fun and make history.
If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.
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It's not about me, it's about you, the customer. And if I am effective in making what I do about you, and I can enhance you and elevate you, you will support me forever.
My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
All businesses and jobs depend on a vast number of people, often unnoticed and unthanked, without which nothing really gets done. They are all human and deserve respect and gratitude.
Explore this next great frontier where the boundaries between work and higher purpose are merging into one, where doing good really is good for business.
The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.