We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
Your margin is my opportunity.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that one person's challenges or inefficiencies can be leveraged by another as an opportunity for gain.
Jeff Bezos's quote, 'Your margin is my opportunity,' highlights the competitive nature of business, where the weaknesses or profit margins of one company can serve as an opportunity for others to innovate, improve, and seize market share. In a marketplace where margins are often tight, identifying the areas where competitors fall short allows businesses to capitalize on those gaps and grow their own revenues, ultimately leading to a more dynamic and competitive environment.
In practice
In a presentation about strategic business planning.
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.
Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.
If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.
Market leaders inevitably slip into decline when they tell the people what they want instead of giving the people what they want.
If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.
What is good for our customers is also in the long run good for us.
The market and the consumer and idea trump the system.
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