We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
Interpretation
Businesses must adapt to attract new customers to remain relevant.
Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of continuous adaptation and customer understanding in business. If a company's clientele is stagnant or aging, it risks losing its market position and becoming obsolete. To thrive, businesses should consistently seek out new customers and innovate to maintain a youthful, dynamic presence in the market.
In practice
This quote can be used in a business strategy meeting to highlight the need for market analysis.
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.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
Creating a close connection to those you do business with has its many risks, rewards and consequences._x000D_ _x000D_ There are few things in business I have encountered that are more difficult than firing someone, particularly if that someone has always been, or has become a friend._x000D_ _x000D_ On the flip side, I have been rewarded with many friends.
People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.
The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.
The key to branding, especially for smaller firms, is to focus on a limited number of issue areas and develop superb expertise in those areas.
You say: "I'm a blue sky thinker." Investor thinks: "You have no business model, and you don't know how to ship."
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