Why Jeff Bezos BANNED PowerPoints at Amazon

The number one thing that has made us successful by far is Obsessive compulsive focus on the customer if you're going to do anything new or innovative You have to be willing to be misunderstood When you're criticized first look in a mirror and decide are your critics right if they're right change Need motivation watch a top 10 with believe nation. What's up believe nation? It's Evan I believe in you and this channel is designed to be a part of your daily success routine So let's get your motivation to a 10 and get you believing in you grab a snack and chew on today's lessons from a man Who went from quitting his high-paying job in New York to driving across the country to Seattle to start his new business? Writing the business plan in the car ride along the way It was called Amazon and it made him the richest man in modern times He's Jeff Bezos And here's my take on his top 10 rules of success volume 4 Also, if you want to know what Jeff and other successful entrepreneurs have to say about building unstoppable confidence Check out my 254 confidence series where every day for the next 254 days I will send you a morning video for free to help you build your confidence. The link to join is in the description below Stress primarily comes from not taking action Okay, let's kick it off with rule number one focus on your customers the secret sauce of Amazon where there are several principles of Amazon But the number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to Obsession over the competitor and I talk so often to other CEOs and some other CEOs and also Founders and entrepreneurs and I can tell that even though they're talking about customers They're really focusing on competitors and it is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay Focused on your customer instead of your competitor rule number to be resourceful I spent an unusual amount of time with my Grandparents and especially with my grandfather on the ranch so he had a ranch in South Texas and I would spend my summers there from age 4 to 16 and They when I was 4 they were taking me for the summer to kind of give my parents a break You know, it's sort of because they were so young And it was useful. I was a handful. I'm sure and And anyway, he he he he created the illusion for me when I was 4 years old but I was helping him on the ranch, which of course could not have been true, but I believed it and And then as by the time I was 16, of course, I was actually helping on the ranch I you know, I could I can fix prolapsed cattle I can you know, we did all of our own veterinary work some of the cattle even survived And we fixed windmills and laid You know water pipelines and built fences and barns and fixed that fixed the bulldozer that you guys talked about and So one of the things that's so interesting about that Lifestyle and about my grandfather is he did everything himself you know, he didn't call of that if one of the animals was sick he figured out what to do himself and So what does it mean? No delegation being resourceful? I think is the you know that you can always you can't if there's a problem There's a solution and of course issue is you mature and and get into the business world and anything you do on a team You very quickly realize that it's not about just your own resourcefulness It's about team resourcefulness and how does that work and rule number three love what you do? I have this great luxury I love my job. I tap dance into work even I get back. I just got back for an amazing vacation in Norway I got to go dog sledding and go to a wolf preserve and all this really cool stuff But I couldn't wait to get back to work because it's so fun And the reason one reason is fun for me is I get to work in the future. So my job I'm I have very Limited kind of day-to-day operational Needs that you know And I've constructed my job so that I don't have to be pulled into the present I can stay two or three years in the future rule number four start small everything I've ever done has started small Amazon started with a couple of people and Blue origin started with five people and The budget of blue origin was very very small now the budget of blue origins Approaches a billion dollars a year the next year will be more than a billion dollars in Amazon who literally was ten people today It's half a million people, but you it's hard to remember for you guys, but for me, it's like yesterday. I was driving the packages to the post office myself and Hoping one day we could afford a forklift and so but so for me I've seen small things get big and it's part of this day one mentality I like treating things as if if they're small, you know Amazon even though it is a large company I wanted to have the heart and spirit of a small one rule number five learn how to deal with critics My approach to criticism and what I teach and preach inside Amazon is When you're criticized first look in a mirror and decide are your critics, right? if they're right Change there are two kinds of critics There are well-meaning critics who you know, they They're worried. It's not going to work, but they do want it to work And so it could be I can give you example customer reviews would be one of those When we first did customer reviews 20 years ago Publishers were some book publishers were not happy about it because some of them are negative and so it was very controversial practice at that time, but we thought it was right and so we stuck to our guns and and And had a deep heel on that and didn't didn't didn't change but There's a second kind of critic, which is the self-interested critic and they come in all shapes and sizes You know, they're so they can be any kind of institution competitors Of course, and so when you are doing something a new way and if customers embrace the new way What's going to happen is? incumbents who are practicing the older way Are not gonna like you and they're gonna be self-interested critics And so you do need as you're looking yourself in the mirror to try and tease those two things apart rule number six be effective we try to Create teams that are no larger than can be fed with two pizzas. We call that the two pizza team rule No, PowerPoints are used inside of Amazon So every meeting we have that when we hire a new executive from the outside This is the weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter and new executives have a little bit of you know culture shock in their first Amazon meeting because what we do is Somebody for the meeting has prepared a six-page Memo a narratively structured memo that is got, you know real sentences and topic sentences and verbs and nouns not just bullet points and It lays out and supposed to create the context for what will then be a good discussion. So and then we read those memos silently in the meeting so it's like a study hall and We do that Everybody sits around the table and we read silently for usually about half an hour however long it takes us to read the document and then we discuss it and it's so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons I definitely recommend the memo over the PowerPoint and the reason we read them in the room by the way is because just like You know high school kids Executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they've read the memo because we're busy and so You've got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read and that's what the first half hour of the meeting is For and then everybody's actually read the memo. They're not just pretending to have read rule number seven follow your intuition I believe in the power of wandering all of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart intuition guts You know not not Analysis When 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 intuition taste Heart rule number eight act on your great ideas. I picked books Because there were more items in the book category than any other category and so you could build universal selection there were three million in 1994 when I was Pulling this idea together the the the three million different books active and in print at any given time and the largest physical bookstores only had about 150,000 different titles and so I could see how you could make a bookstore online with universal selection Every book ever printed even the out-of-print ones was the original vision for the company And so that's why books and when did you know that Amazon is going to be some going to be something way bigger than just a Bookstore well, I knew that the books Strangely because I was very prepared for this to take a really long time. I knew that the books Business was gonna be successful in the first 30 days. I was shocked at how many books we sold we were ill-prepared You know I had we had all the We had only ten people in the company at that time and most of them were software engineers And so everybody including me and the suffers were all like packing boxes We didn't even have packing tables and down We were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes and it about you know one or two in the morning I said to one of my software engineering colleagues I said You know Paul We This is killing my knees. We need to get knee pads and Paul looked at me And he's like Jeff we need to get packing tables And I was like oh my god. That is such a good idea the next day I bought packing tables, and it doubled our productivity and probably saved our backs and our knees to rule number nine be a visionary my greatest I would have such a good feeling if I could be an 80 year old guy and Laying there thinking about my life if I could say look there is Now a bunch of entrepreneurs in space because I took my Amazon lottery winnings and built the heavy lifting Infrastructure that does take billions of dollars in capex to lower the cost of access to space That's how you get millions of people living and working and by the way we need that For those of you who like to think about the future at all You can do a simple calculation You know we can argue about You know what limited resources on earth and so on so on but here's the calculation that you cannot argue with Which is you take? current baseline energy usage on earth Compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years And you have to cover the entire surface of the earth and solar cells so You have to we're gonna have to decide do we want a society of Pioneering invention expansion growth, or do we want a society of stasis and Personally I believe because the earth is finite, and if you want a society of stasis I think it's good first of all I don't personally believe the stasis is even compatible with freedom So I think for me. That's a big problem second of all It's gonna be dull Stasis is gonna be very dull. You don't want to live in the stasis world and so of course We're gonna continue get more efficient to we have been for hundreds of years. We've been getting more productive more efficient That's that trend is gonna continue But even so we're gonna want to use more energy more energy per capita and also. I don't want to stabilize population I would love for there to be a trillion humans in the solar system with a trillion humans We would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozart's it'd be an incredible symbols Don't you want that dynamism it'd be so much mercy my this is for your great great great grandchildren But what kind of world do you want them to live in I want them to live in that expansive world that is you know? Learning more about the universe and moving out throughout the solar system and rule number 10 the last one before a very special bonus clip Is be willing to be misunderstood If you're gonna do anything new or innovative You have to be willing to be misunderstood, and if you can't tolerate that then for God's sake don't do anything new or innovative Every important thing we've done has been misunderstood Often by well-meaning sincere critics sometimes of course by self-interested Insincere critics Now I've got a really special bonus clip from Jeff on how to invent and pioneer that I think you're gonna really enjoy But before that it's time for the three-point landing questions time to move from just watching another video to taking Action in your life for business, and if you're feeling bold leave your answers in the comments below here We go question number one What great idea of yours do you need to act on question number two? How can you start on it in a small way and question number three? How will you deal with critics who attack your great idea? Customers are always dissatisfied They even when they don't know it even when they think they're happy They actually do want a better way And they just don't know yet what that should be and that's why I always warn people customer obsession is not just Listening to customers customer obsession is also inventing on their behalf Because it's not their job to invent for themselves and so you need to be an inventor and a pioneer If you want more Jeff Bezos check out his best advice on work-life balance video that we made the link is right there next to me I think you'll enjoy it continue to believe and I'll see you there if you're giving great customer experience There's the only way to do that is with happy people