We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.
Interpretation
Learn from others without imitation, adding your own creativity.
In this quote, Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of observing the strategies and practices of other companies to gain insights, but he cautions against outright copying their ideas. Instead, he advocates for an approach that encourages inspiration and innovation, where one takes elements from others' successes and tailors them with a unique perspective or twist to drive one's own creativity and progress.
In practice
In a business conference discussing the importance of inspiration over imitation.
We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Work 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.
Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.
Innovation comes ultimately from a diversity of perspectives. So when you combine ideas from different industries or different cultures, that's when you have the best sense of developing groundbreaking ideas.
To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.
The company's most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand - innovation from everyone.
For a long time, I've ranted against naming your startup community 'Silicon Whatever.' Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
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