Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

"“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.”"

"A DREAMY BUSINESS OFFERING has at least four characteristics. Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time—with the potential to endure for decades. When you find one of these, don’t just swipe right, get married."

"When his colleagues protested that one of Jobs’s ideas or proposals would be impossible to implement, he would use a trick he learned from a guru in India: he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid. You can do it.”"

"“I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” That’s not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”"

"There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering?"

"To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.”"

"Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success."