We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
Interpretation
Stay committed to your vision while being adaptable to the specifics that may change.
This quote by Jeff Bezos highlights the importance of having a clear and unwavering vision, which serves as a guiding star for one's endeavors. However, it also emphasizes the necessity of being flexible and open to adjusting the details or methods in achieving that vision, recognizing that the path to success may require alterations in tactics and approaches as circumstances evolve.
In practice
In a team meeting discussing project goals, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of staying true to the main objectives while being open to changes in tactics.
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.
We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies-in the minds of those closest to the work. It's been there in front of our noses all along while we've been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese-or at least manage like them.
Not even the King himself has the right to subordinate the interests of his country to his own feelings of love or hatred towards strangers; he is, however, responsible towards God and not to me if he does so, and therefore on this point I am silent.
A leader who is self-aware enough to know that he or she is not adept at everything is one who has taken the first step toward being a great leader.
Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
If more women are in leadership roles, we'll stop assuming they shouldn't be.
If a general shows confidence in his men but always insists on his orders being obeyed, the gain will be mutual.
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