One of the Greatest Speeches Ever | Jeff Bezos



you guys will find that you havepassions and having a passion is a giftI think we all have passions and youdon't get to choose them they pick youbut you have to be alert to them youhave to be looking for them and when youfind your passion it's a fantastic giftfor you because it gives you directionit gives you purpose you could have ajob or you can have a career or you canhave a calling and the best thing is tohave a calling and if you find yourpassion you'll have that and all yourwork won't feel like work to you manymany kids and many grown-ups do figureout over time what their passions areand sometimes we let our I don't thinkit's that hard I think what happensthough sometimes is that we let ourintellectual selves overrule thosepassions and so that's what needs to beguarded against my job one of my jobs asthe leader of Amazon is to encouragepeople to be boldand people love to focus on things thataren't yet working and that's good it'shuman nature that kind of divinediscontent can be very helpful but youreally you know it's incredibly hard toget people to take bold bets and youneed to encourage that and if you'regonna take bold bets they're gonna beexperiments and if their experiments youdon't know ahead of time go they'regoing to work experiments are by theirvery nature prone to failure but bigsuccess is a few big successescompensate for dozens and dozens ofthings that didn't work so you know boldbets AWS Kindle Amazon Prime our 3rdparty seller business all of thosethings are examples of bull bets thatthat did work and they pay for a lot ofexperiments I've made billions ofdollars of failures at amazon.comliterally billions of dollars offailures andyou know you might remember pets calm orCosmo or you know give myself a rootcanal with no anesthesia very easilynone of those things are fun but butthey also they don't matter what reallymatters is companies that don't continueto experiment companies that don'tembrace failure they eventually get inthe desperate position where they onlything they can do is we could kind ofHail Mary bet at the very end of theircorporate existencewhereas companies that are you knowmaking bets all along even you know bigbets but not bet the company bets Idon't I don't believe in bet the companybets that's when you're desperate that'sthat's the last thing you can do it'snot you can be out of work and you haveterrible work-life balance you know eventhough you've got all the time in theworld right you could just feel like ohmy god you know I'm miserable and youwould be draining energy and so you haveto find that harmony it's a much betterword and I think for most people it'sabout meaning people want to know thatthey're doing something interesting anduseful and for us you know because ofthe challenges that we have chosen forourselves we get to work in the futureand it's super fun to work in the futurefor the right kind of person do you needto be if you nimble and robust so youneed to be able to take a punch and youalso need to be quick and and and andinnovative and and doing new things at ahigh speed that's that's the bestdefense against the future and you haveto always be leaning into the future ifyou're if you're leaning away from thefuture the future is gonna win everytime never ever ever lean away from thefuture we all have adversity in ourlives yeah I I would I would I doubt ifyou really you know if you know somebodyany friend or anybody that you talk tothere's no lack of adversity and the andby the way that's good because it's whatteaches us how to get back up you falldown you get back up it always happensand you know you get certain gifts inlife and you want to take advantage ofthose but you I guess my advice onadversity and success would be to beproud not of your gifts but of your hardwork and your choices so you know youmay be the kinds of gifts you get lightyou know you might be really good atmath it might be really easy for youthat's a kind of gift but practicingthat math and taking it to the next stepthat could be very challenging and hardand take a lot of sweat that's a choiceyou can't really be proud of your giftsbecause they were given to you you canbe grateful for them and thankful forthem and but your choices you choose towork hard you choose to do hard thingsthose are choices that you can be proudof being an inventor requires becausethe world is so complicated you have tobe a domain expert I mean in a way evenif even if you're not at the beginningyou have to learn learn learn learnlearn enough so to become a domainexpert but the danger is once you'vebecome a domain expert you can betrapped by that knowledge and soinventors have this paradoxical abilityto have that you know 10,000 hours ofpractice and be a real domain expert andhave that beginner's mind have that thatlook at it freshly even though they knowso much about the domain and that's thekey to inventing you have to have bothand I think that is intentional I thinkall of us have that inside of us and wecan all do it but you have to beintentional about it you have to sayyeah I am going to become an expert andI'm gonna keep my beginner's mind youcan't skip steps you have to put onefoot in front of the other things taketimeyou there are no shortcuts and but butyou want to do those steps with you knowpassion and ferocity it's easy to haveideas it's very hard to turn an ideainto a successful productthere are a lot of steps in between ittakes persistence relentlessness so Ialways tell people who are you know whothink they want to be entrepreneurs it'syou need a combination of stubbornrelentlessness and flexibility and youhave to know when to bewitch andbasically you need to be stubborn onyour vision because otherwise it'll betoo easy to give up but you need to bevery flexible on the details because asyou go along pursuing your vision you'llfind that some of your preconceptionswere wrong you're gonna need to be ableto change those things so I think takingan idea successfully all the way to themarket and turning it into a realproduct that people care about and thatreally improves people's lives is a lotof hard workdon't try to chase what is kind of thehot passion of the day I think weactually saw this I think you see it allover the place in many different contextbut I think we saw it in the internetworld quite a bit where you know it'ssort of peak of the sort of Internet youknow mania and say 1999 you found peoplewho were you know very passionatesomething they kind of left that job anddecided I'm gonna you know could dosomething in the internet because it'syou know it was almost like the you knowthe 18-49 Gold Rush in a way I mean youfind that people if you go back andstudy the history of the 18-49 Gold Rushyou find that you know at that timeeverybody who was in was within theshouting distance of California was youknow they might have been a doctor butthey quit being a doctor and theystarted panning for gold and that thatalmost never works and even if it doeswork you know according to some metricfinancial success or whatever it mightbe I suspect it leaves you ultimatelyunsatisfied so you really need tobe very clear with yourself and I thinkone of the best ways to do that is thisnotion of projecting yourself forward toage 80 looking back on your life andtrying to make sure you've minimized thenumber of regrets you have that worksfor that works for career decisions itworks for family decisions you know doyou want I have a 14 month old son andit's very easy for me to if I thinkabout myself when I'm 80 I know I wantto watch that little guy grow up and soif it's I don't want to be 80 and thinkshoot you know I missed that whole thingand I don't have the kind ofrelationship with my son that I wished Ihad and so on and so onso if you think about that so I guessanother thing that I would recommend topeople is that they always take a longterm point of view and I think this issomething about which there's a lot ofcontroversy you know there's a you knowthere's a you know something a lot ofpeople and I'm just not one of thembelieve that you should live for the nowI think what you do is you think aboutthe the great expanse of time ahead ofyou and try to make sure that you'replanning for that in a way that's gonnaleave you ultimately satisfied so thisis just my this is the way it works forme and I mean this is everybody needs tofind that for themself so there are alot of paths to satisfaction and youneed to find one that works works foryou[Music][Music]

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