Invent and wander, p.1
Invent and Wander, page 1
Invent & Wander
The Collected Writings of
JEFF BEZOS
Harvard Business Review Press & PublicAffairs
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey P. Bezos
Introduction copyright © 2021 by Walter Isaacson
Published by Harvard Business Review Press and PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The PublicAffairs name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
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Contents
Introduction by Walter Isaacson
A Note on Sourcing
Part 1
The Shareholder Letters
It’s All About the Long Term (1997)
Obsessions (1998)
Building for the Long Term (1999)
Taking the Long View (2000)
The Customer Franchise Is Our Most Valuable Asset (2001)
What’s Good for Customers Is Good for Shareholders (2002)
Long-Term Thinking (2003)
Thinking About Finance (2004)
Making Decisions (2005)
Growing New Businesses (2006)
A Team of Missionaries (2007)
Working Backward (2008)
Setting Goals (2009)
Fundamental Tools (2010)
The Power of Invention (2011)
Internally Driven (2012)
“Wow” (2013)
Three Big Ideas (2014)
Big Winners Pay for Many Experiments (2015)
Fending Off Day 2 (2016)
Building a Culture of High Standards (2017)
Intuition, Curiosity, and the Power of Wandering (2018)
Scale for Good (2019)
Part 2
Life & Work
My Gift in Life
A Crucial Moment at Princeton
“We Are What We Choose”: Address to the Princeton Graduating Class of 2010
Resourcefulness
Why I Went from a Hedge Fund to Selling Books
Finding the Root Cause
Creating Wealth
The Idea for Prime
Thinking Three Years Out
Where the Idea of Amazon Web Services Came From
Alexa, AI, and Machine Learning
Physical Stores and Whole Foods
Buying the Washington Post
Trust
Work-Life Harmony
Recruiting Talent: Do You Want Mercenaries or Missionaries?
Decisions
Competition
Government Scrutiny and Big Companies
The Climate Pledge
The Bezos Day One Fund
The Purpose of Going into Space
It’s Still Day One for America
Introduction
by Walter Isaacson
I AM OFTEN ASKED who, of the people living today, I would consider to be in the same league as those I have written about as a biographer: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, and Albert Einstein. All were very smart. But that’s not what made them special. Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator. And that’s why my answer to the question is Jeff Bezos.
So, what are the ingredients of creativity and imagination, and what makes me think that Bezos belongs in the same league as my other subjects?
The first is to be curious, passionately curious. Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful. He asks and tries to answer hundreds of charmingly random questions: Why is the sky blue? What does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? Do a bird’s wings move faster when flapping up or when flapping down? How is the pattern of swirling water similar to that of curling hair? Is the muscle of the bottom lip connected to that of the top lip? Leonardo did not need to know these things to paint the Mona Lisa (though it helped); he needed to know them because he was Leonardo, always obsessively curious. “I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”
A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. Whenever Steve Jobs launched a new product such as the iPod or iPhone, his presentation ended with street signs that showed an intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he said at one of these presentations. “We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” Einstein, likewise, realized how important it is to interweave the arts and the sciences. When he felt stymied in his quest for the theory of general relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart, saying that the music helped connect him to the harmony of the spheres. From Leonardo da Vinci, we have the greatest symbol of this connection between the arts and sciences: Vitruvian Man, his drawing of a nude male standing in a circle and a square, a triumph of anatomy, math, beauty, and spirituality.
In fact, it helps to be excited by all disciplines. Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin wanted to know everything you could possibly know about everything that was knowable. They studied anatomy and botany and music and art and weaponry and water engineering and everything in between. People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature. Both Franklin and Leonardo were fascinated by whirlwinds and swirling water. That helped Franklin figure out how storms move up the coast and to chart the Gulf Stream. It helped Leonardo understand how the heart valve works as well as to paint both the water rippling by the ankles of Jesus in the Baptism of Christ and the curls of the Mona Lisa.
Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field, a phrase that was used about Steve Jobs and comes from a Star Trek episode in which aliens create an entire new world through sheer mental force. When his colleagues protested that one of Jobs’s ideas or proposals would be impossible to implement, he would use a trick he learned from a guru in India: he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid. You can do it.” It usually worked. He drove people mad, he drove them to distraction, but he also drove them to do things they didn’t believe they could do.
Related to that is the ability to “think different,” as Jobs put it in a memorable set of Apple ads. The science community at the beginning of the twentieth century was puzzling over how the speed of light seemed to remain constant no matter how fast the observer was moving toward or away from the source. At the time Albert Einstein was a third-class patent clerk in Switzerland who was studying devices that sent signals between different clocks in order to synchronize them. He came up with an out-of-the-box thought based on his realization that people who were in different states of motion would have different perceptions of whether the clocks were synchronized. Perhaps the speed of light is always constant, he theorized, because time itself is relative depending on one’s state of motion. It took the rest of the physics community a few years to realize that this “theory of relativity” was right.
One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. Our teachers and parents, becoming impatient, tell us to stop asking so many silly questions. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years—or to let our children do so.
Jeff Bezos embodies these traits. He has never outgrown his wonder years. He retains an insatiable, childlike, and joyful curiosity about almost everything. His interest in narrative and storytelling not only comes from Amazon’s roots in the booksellin g business; it is also a personal passion. As a kid, Bezos read dozens of science fiction novels each summer at a local library, and he now hosts an annual retreat for writers and moviemakers. Likewise, although his interest in robotics and artificial intelligence was sparked because of Amazon, these fields have grown to become intellectual passions, and he now hosts another gathering each year that brings together experts interested in machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. He collects historical artifacts from great moments in science, exploration, and discovery. And he connects this love of the humanities and his passion for technology to his instinct for business.
That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.
Of course, he also has some of the infuriating traits that distinguished Steve Jobs and others. Despite his fame and influence, he has remained, behind his boisterous laugh, somewhat of an enigma. But through his life tale and writings, it is possible to get a sense of what drives him.
When Jeff Bezos was a young kid—big eared, with a booming laugh and insatiable curiosity—he spent his summers on the sprawling South Texas ranch of his maternal grandfather, Lawrence Gise, an upright but loving naval commander who had helped develop the hydrogen bomb as an assistant director of the Atomic Energy Commission. There Jeff learned self-reliance. When a bulldozer broke, he and his grandfather built a crane to lift out the gears and fix them. Together they castrated the cattle, built windmills, laid pipe, and had long conversations about the frontiers of science, technology, and space travel. “He did all his own veterinary work,” Bezos recalls. “He would make his own needles to suture up the cattle with. He would take a piece of wire, use a blowtorch to heat it up, pound it flat, sharpen it, drill a hole through it—make a needle. Some of the cattle even survived.”
Jeff was a voracious reader with an adventurous mind. His grandfather would take him to the library, which had a huge collection of science fiction books. Over the summers Jeff worked his way through the shelves, reading hundreds of them. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein became his favorites, and later in life he would not only quote them but also occasionally invoke their rules, lessons, and lingo.
His self-reliance and adventurous spirit were also instilled by Jeff’s mother, Jackie, who was just as tenacious and sharp as her father and son. She became pregnant with Jeff when she was only seventeen. “She was a high school student,” Jeff explains. “You’re probably thinking, ‘Wow in 1964 in Albuquerque, it was probably really cool to be a pregnant girl.’ No, it wasn’t. It took a lot of grit. And a lot of help from her parents. The high school actually even tried to kick her out of school. I guess they thought pregnancy might be contagious. And my grandfather being a cool and wise guy negotiated a deal with the principal that allowed her to stay and finish high school.” What was the main lesson Jeff learned from her? “You grow up with a mother like that and you have unbelievable grit,” he says.
Jeff’s biological father ran a bicycle store and performed in a circus unicycle troupe. He and Jackie were married only briefly. When Jeff was four, his mother remarried. Her second husband was a better match, a person who also taught Jeff the value of grit and determination: Miguel Bezos, known as Mike. He, too, was self-reliant and adventurous. He had come to the United States at age sixteen as a refugee from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, traveling on his own and wearing a jacket his mother had sewed for him out of household rags. After he married Jackie, he adopted her lively son, who took his last name and forever after considered him his real father.
As a five-year-old in July 1969, Jeff watched television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission that culminated with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. It was a seminal moment. “I remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents,” he says. “Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement. They know something extraordinary is happening. That definitely became a passion of mine.” Among other things, his exhilaration about space turned him into one of those hard-core Star Trek fans who knows every episode.
At his Montessori preschool Bezos was already fanatically focused. “The teacher complained to my mother that I was too task focused and that she couldn’t get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me,” he recalls. “And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that’s still probably true today.”
In 1974, when he was ten, his passion for Star Trek led him to computers. He discovered that he could play a space video game on the terminal in the computer room of his elementary school in Houston, where his father was working for Exxon. This was in the days before personal computers, and a dial-up modem connected the school’s computer terminal to the mainframe of a company that had donated its excess computer time. “We had a teletype that was connected by an old acoustic modem,” Bezos says. “You literally dialed a regular phone and picked up the handset and put it in this little cradle. And nobody—none of the teachers knew how to operate this computer, nobody did. But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing.… And then, we learned that the mainframe programmers in some central location somewhere in Houston had already programmed this computer to play Star Trek. And from that day forward all we did was play Star Trek.”
His mother encouraged his love of electronics and mechanics by shuttling him to and from RadioShack and letting him turn the family garage into a science project lab. She even indulged his penchant for creating ingenious booby traps to frighten his younger brother and sister. “I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby traps,” he says. “My mom is a saint, because she would drive me to RadioShack multiple times a day.”
His childhood business heroes were Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. “I’ve always been interested in inventors and invention,” he says. Even though Edison was the more prolific inventor, Bezos came to admire Disney more because of the audacity of his vision. “It seemed to me that he had this incredible capability to create a vision that he could get a large number of people to share,” he says. “Things that Disney invented, like Disneyland, the theme parks, they were such big visions that no single individual could ever pull them off, unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on. Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction.”
By the time he was in high school, his family had moved to Miami. Bezos was a straight-A student, somewhat nerdy, and still completely obsessed with space exploration. He was chosen as the valedictorian of his class, and his speech was about space: how to colonize planets, build space hotels, and save our fragile planet by finding other places to do manufacturing. “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded.
He went to Princeton with the goal of studying physics. It sounded like a smart plan until he smashed into a course on quantum mechanics. One day he and his roommate were trying to solve a particularly difficult partial differential equation, and they went to the room of another person in the class for help. He stared at it for a moment, then gave them the answer. Bezos was amazed that the student had done the calculation—which took three pages of detailed algebra to explain—in his head. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.” It was a difficult realization. His heart had been set on becoming a physicist, but finally he had confronted his own limits.
