We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A successful business can grow by either leveraging existing skills or adapting to customer needs.
In his quote, Jeff Bezos highlights two fundamental strategies for business growth: building on one's own strengths and skills or pivoting to meet the evolving demands of customers. He emphasizes the importance of understanding what customers truly need and being willing to learn and adapt in order to provide those solutions, exemplified by the Kindle's development based on customer feedback.
Themes
BusinessGrowthSkillsCustomersInnovation
In practice
Example use cases
In a business seminar discussing strategies for growth.
More from Jeff Bezos
All quotes βWork hard, have fun and make history.
Jeff BezosRead
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.
Jeff BezosRead
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.
Jeff BezosRead
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.
Jeff BezosRead
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.
Jeff BezosRead
Similar quotes
He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.
W. Edwards DemingRead
I think that, too many times, business has been seen as acting in its narrow self-interest rather than, essentially, contributing more broadly to society. I think a lot of that is unintentional; I don't think that many managers are deliberately trying to be unethical or are not trying to be sensitive to social needs.
Michael PorterRead
To those who are engaged in commercial dealings, justice is indispensable for the conduct of business.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.
Steve JurvetsonRead
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.
Scott CookRead
In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.
James SurowieckiRead