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 →Work hard, have fun and make history.
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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.
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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.
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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
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