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Founders: #155 Jeff Bezos (Shareholder Letters and Speeches)

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What I learned from reading Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson. ---- [2:38] The whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, failures, things that don't work. You need to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have a setback, you get back up and you try again. You're using resourcefulness; you're using self-reliance; you're trying to invent your way out of a box. We have tons of examples at Amazon where we’ve had to do this. [4:08] I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid. [5:51] 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 (#15), Benjamin Franklin (#115), Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs (#5), 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. [8:26] One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retain

[00:00:00] You learn different things from your grandparents than you do from your parents. It's just a very different relationship. I spent all my summers from age 4 to 16 on my grandfather's ranch. He was incredibly self-reliant. If you're in the middle of nowhere, you don't pick up the phone and call somebody when something breaks. You fix it yourself. As a kid, I got to see him solve all these problems himself. He was a careful, conservative, quiet, and introverted sort of person, not prone to crazy acts. [00:00:32] One day, he was all by himself at the main gate of the ranch, and he…

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