Some of the best and famous Jeff Bezos quotes will motivate and inspire you to succeed.
Jeff Bezos, who is the CEO of American multinational company Amazon, with interests notably in e-commerce, is widely acclaimed in business and the world at large.
This comes as no surprise as Jeff Bezos sits gallantly at the top of Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the richest individual on the planet.
Bezos’s fortune plays a significant role in the popularity and acclaim of his name.
However, Bezos has solidly held on to that position despite tough contention from other brilliant business minds, thus, adding more reverence to his name.
Even more remarkable is how Jeff Bezos built the business empire that made him who he is and how profound and noteworthy that business empire is.
Even with the threat of a pandemic that brought the world to a standstill, economically, literally, and figuratively, his fortune did not plummet but consistently surged.
A report by the American daily middle-market newspaper, USA Today, revealed that Jeff Bezos’s fortune increased by $90.1 billion, an estimated 80% surge in his fortune.
These astounding successes makes Jeff Bezos quotes a key reference when it comes to success.
Key Takeaways
- Experiments yield success
- Always welcome criticisms
- Customer relations is supreme
- Evolution ensures success
The Best Jeff Bezos Quotes About Motivation
1. “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.”
2. “Everything you are comes from your choices.”
3. “Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.”
4. “We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”
5. “Be proud of your choices, not your gifts.”
6. “If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.”
7. “The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.”
Jeff Bezos Quotes About Long-Term Thinking
8. “If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish.”
9. “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.”
10. “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.”
11. “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
12. “The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?”
13. “People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”
14. “Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.”
15. “If you’re going to invest in an Internet stock, you must be a long-term investor.”
Jeff Bezos Quotes About Business
16. “Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.”
17. “Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.”
18. If you’re truly obsessed over customers, it’ll cover a lot of errors.”
19. “Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process.”
20. “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”
21. “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”
22. “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
23. “Advertising is the price you pay for unremarkable thinking.”
24. “I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.”
25. “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
26. “If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.”
27. “…Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient..”
28. “My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.”
29. “Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.”
30. “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.”
31. “If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
32. “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.”
33. “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
34. “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”
35. “Word of mouth is very powerful.”
36. “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”
37. “Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.”
38. “If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.”
39. “If you’re competitor focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”
40. “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
Jeff Bezos Quotes About Smart Decisions
41. “The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.”
42. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”
43. ““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.”
44. “For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions!”
45. “If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It’s such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.”
46. “I think one of the things people don’t understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It’s a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.”
47. “Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”
48. “Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.”
49. “Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.”
50. “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.”
51. “If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It’s such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.”
52. “If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.”
53. “There’s so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.”
54. “Seek instant gratification – or the elusive promise of it – and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you.”
55. “Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.”
56. “The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past – no matter how good it was.”
57. “I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.”
58. “We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.”
59. “It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”
60. “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.”
The Best Jeff Bezos Quotes About Success
61. “The keys to success are patience, persistence, and obsessive attention to detail.”
62. “It’ so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it.”
63. “If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”
64. “Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. A lot of people — and I’m just not one of them — believe that you should live for the now.”
65. “Working backwards from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be.”
66. “I like treating things as if they’re small, you know Amazon even though it is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one.”
67. “The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.”
68. “I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”
69. “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis.”
70. “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny because shiny doesn’t last.”
71. “If you’re very clear to the outside world that you’re taking a long-term approach, then people can self-select in.”
72. “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”
73. “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
74. “Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.”
75. “What we need to do is always look into the future.”
76. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you, it just works.”
77. “What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tailwind is now a headwind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.”
76. “At Amazon, we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”
77. “In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. E-books had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.”
78. “Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it’s good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.”
79. “Amazon is not too big to fail … If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end … We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”
80. “Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, ‘Good job, great quarter … And I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I’m working on a quarter that’ll happen in 2021 right now.”
Jeff Bezos Quotes About Innovation & Life
81. “We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.”
82. “If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”
83. “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”
84. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”
85. “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
86. “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”
87. “I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”
88. “Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at.”
89. “Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.”
89. “The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.”
90. “Great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday on behalf of customers.”
91. “If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.”
92. “You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.”
93. “If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.”
94. “Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.”
95. “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
96. “Work hard, have fun, and make history.”
97. “Kindness is a choice.”
98. “..It’s the right business decision to experiment more..”
99. “It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times”
100. “Invention by its very nature is disruptive.”
To Wrap Up
In the numerous years, Jeff Bezos has shared from his infinite pool of knowledge, he has shared several valuable nuggets of advice touching business, innovation, success, and life in general.
Compiled are 100 of those nuggets, which will definitely turn your life around when applied.
