We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
Interpretation
In prosperous times, prioritizing what truly matters can be challenging for individuals and organizations.
Jeff Bezos highlights that during periods of abundance and success, people may become distracted and fail to concentrate on the essential tasks and objectives that drive long-term success. This quote emphasizes the need for discipline and focus, particularly when circumstances seem favorable and the temptation to overlook foundational priorities arises.
In practice
This quote could be used in a business presentation to remind teams to maintain their focus during times of success.
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.
Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets
Market leaders inevitably slip into decline when they tell the people what they want instead of giving the people what they want.
People are the core of every business. Businesses are based on relationships, and relationships are based on people. I would go to an average restaurant run by amazing people over an outstanding restaurant run by awful people.
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.
A business owner is the boss, but it's a job, a place that is stable and profitable. An entrepreneur is an artist of sorts, throwing his/herself into impossible situations and seeking out problems that require heart and guts to solve. Both are fine, but choose.
No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.
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