Insights by Jeff Bezos zipped

Good morning! In today’s newsletter, we explore Jeff Bezos's rare and insightful interview on the Lex Friedman podcast. As the visionary founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos shared powerful concepts that shape how he builds businesses and thinks about innovation. His conversation offers insights for anyone to learn what drives one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Today's Feature Podcast Summary

Hosted By: Lex Fridman
Podcast: Lex Fridman Podcast
Guest Spotlight: Jeff Bezos, a titan known for revolutionizing e-commerce and space travel.

Quick Listen:

• Wandering: Jeff Bezos sees himself as an inventor. Wandering for Jeff means allowing yourself to come up with and try lots of ideas, even if 99 of 100 fail. For entrepreneurs, this is about exploring broadly and not fearing wrong turns.

• Two-Way Door in Decision Making: Make decisions fast if you can undo them. If not, think very hard because one-way decisions are expensive to come back from. Since most decisions go two-ways, this helps moving quickly without fear because there is a backup plan.

• Truth Telling: Jeff lives by always seeking the truth, if possible. As social beings we used to survive by agreeing. But to succeed, you need to speak out, even if it’s hard. Encourage everyone, even the newest person, to share their honest thoughts.

• Agreeing and disagreeing depending on certainty: Jeff Bezos believes that compromise or stubbornness is bad if you can know the truth. If there is a degree of uncertainty, he relies on “disagree and commit”.

• Documents Over Presentations: Write multi-page memos, read it together, then discuss. It forces better thinking and understanding. When everyone reads these before meetings, discussions are deeper and more productive.

Let’s dive into these lessons from Jeff Bezos's discussion, illustrating how simple yet impactful strategies can lead to monumental success and groundbreaking innovations.

Insightful Takeaways

Inventiveness and Discovery: Insights from Jeff Bezos's Approach

Jeff Bezos champions the concept of "wandering" as a crucial component of invention. For him, wandering isn't aimless—it's a deliberate exploration of ideas and possibilities, where there is room for creativity and the goal is not to be efficient in such an exercise. This is backed by a study performed in 2016 (Infona) with more than 200 college students that found that the students’ creativity significantly improved when allowing their minds to wander.

He distinguishes inventions from discoveries using the example of the telescope and Jupiter. The telescope, as an invention, required imaginative engineering and problem-solving to create. Observing Jupiter through it, was a discovery made possible by that invention.

According to a 2017 McKinsey report, companies that foster creativity are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers in revenue growth, highlighting the business value of nurturing an inventive mindset (McKinsey).

In practice, Bezos’s wandering means encouraging teams to remove time boundaries in meetings and allow for (unconventional) ideas to surface.Ideas can easily be killed through objection, nevertheless, we should try and find solutions to those. This approach seeks out unforeseen opportunities. Ask yourself this: Is something still efficient if it produced no outcomes? Such as a 30-minute meeting where everyone just shares what everyone else already knows?

Further invention insights:

• Cost-reducing inventions:  “The Invention of the plow made the whole world richer because it made farming less expensive”

• “Inventors greatest dream is when the infrastructure is taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon or customer service as an invention anymore.”

• Like the phone or the Kindle, “Humans invent new tools and then those tools change us.”

Navigating Two-Way Doors in Decision Dynamics

Jeff Bezos categorizes decisions into two types: two-way doors and one-way doors. Two-way doors are reversible decisions—you go for it, explore a bit, and if it doesn't work out, you can step back and try another path. Hence, those decisions should be made quickly by a single individual or small team. On the other hand, one-way door decisions are consequential and expensive to reverse, demanding deliberate consideration where Jeff Bezos often became the "chief slowdown officer".

Cultivating Truth in Decision-Making

In the podcast you learn what an importance Jeff places on truth-telling. It is detrimental to him. He sets up meetings where the most junior start to speaks leading up to the most senior person, ensuring that everyone can speak their mind freely. Jeff Bezos speaks last. This stops any unfair influence and makes sure all voices are heard.

In other scenarios, truth-telling will mean enduring pain. Sometimes data and the feedback you get from customers don’t align. Since there is often some truth behind any input, the data could be flawed. In his example, the data said customer wait times were under 60 seconds, but complaints showed they were longer. Jeff tested it himself, which meant sitting in silence in the meeting for 10 minutes waiting in line, making way to fix the data collection approach.

Disagree and commit, do not compromise or be stubborn.

Jeff Bezos’s approach "disagree and commit" recognizes that not everyone will always agree. This is the case in situations that involve uncertainty, where the full truth is not yet ready to be discovered. Since a decision is needed nevertheless to move forward, one party decides, often the one closer to the topic. The other commits and fully supports the execution afterwards. 

Instead, if there is certainty to the correct answer, such as the height of a ceiling, Bezos believes compromising or letting the more stubborn “win” by exhausting the other first is not the way to go. Even though humans in nature seek out comfort, we need to bring up the energy to get a ladder and a measuring tape and measure the height of the ceiling, because it is possible to know the actual truth.

Document-Driven Meetings

At Amazon, meetings begin with participants silently reading a detailed six-page memo. The author is forced to organize their thoughts in a narrative and make the topic very clear so meetings can be about the “questions that nobody knows answers to”. Writing the memo may take two weeks, requires vulnerability, and thinking in depth about ideas, and is difficult for the author but saves the audience time.

On the other hand, Bezos believes Presentations make room for:

• Weak reasoning, hiding behind vague bullet points

• More senior executives might interrupt the presenter asking questions that will be answered in a slide that follows

• Persuasion and selling

In practice, this method ensures that everyone in the meeting has engaged with the same detailed well-thoughtout information, reducing misunderstandings, unnecessary questions, and streamlining decision-making.

Side project by Bezos: 10,000-year clock

The clock ticks once a year, chimes every hundred years, and a cuckoo comes out every 1000 years. It is a symbol for long-term thinking. The human species affects each other and the planet tremendously, sometimes badly in unintended ways, such as the carbon that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. Hence, we need to train ourselves to think longer.

Parting Inspirational Quote to Ponder

Notion Handbook