67 All-Time Favorite Jeff Bezos Motivational Quotes

Jeffery Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur who is the founder, president, and CEO of the e-commerce giant Amazon (a multi-national technology company). Born on January 12, 1964, he is the only person who has a net worth exceeding $200 billion. He played a vital role in the growth of e-commerce business across the world.

Amazon

After completing his degree in electrical engineering, Jeff Bezos headed toward the field and took a series of jobs. He also worked in New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & CO. After quitting Shaw & CO, he moved to Washington to open a virtual book store. Working from a garage, he hired a handful of employees and Bezos began to build the software for the company. Amazon.com was named after a South American river.

The company sold its first book in 1995 (July). The user-friendly website was open 24 hours and got public attention rapidly. The success of the virtual store provoked other business owners of the same niche to give it a go which tip Bezos to bring variation in the products available on Amazon.com.

In 2006 Amazon launched its video-on-demand service and released the Kindle E-Reader in 2007. Other major achievements of Amazon include Amazon Drones, Fire Phone, and Whole Food.

Personal Life

Jeff got married to one of his colleagues from Shaw & CO in 1993. His wife played a vital role in the foundation of Amazon.com and was the first accountant of the company. They had 3 sons and a daughter from the marriage. Their marriage ended up in divorce in 2019 because of an extramarital affair.

Being one of the most successful men on earth, Jeff Bezos has a lot to say about his experiences of life. Let’s go through some of his amazing quotes that would be surely an inspiration for all the entrepreneurs.

18 Jeff Bezos Motivational Quotes on Business

Jeff is a tycoon in the world of business and his quotes would certainly reflect his larger than life experience.

1. “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.”

2. “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.”

3. “You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter. Nobody will watch.”

4. “Your margin is my opportunity.”

5. “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.”

6. “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.”

7. “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.”

8. “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.”

9. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

10. “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.”

11. “We’ve done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don’t do that, because we believe — and we have to take this as an article of faith — that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.”

12. “If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.”

13. “A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.”

14. “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis.”

15. “Sometimes we measure things and see that in the short term they actually hurt sales, and we do it anyway.”

16. “We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.”

17. “There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you are good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backwards, even if it requires learning new skills.”

18. “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.'”

15 Jeff Bezos aspiring quotes on innovation

1. “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.”

2. “When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they’re thinking about how they’re going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we’re thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.”

3. “Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said, ‘No, thank you.'”

4. “I do get asked, quite frequently ‘What’s gonna change in the next 10 years?’ I’m rarely get asked, and it’s probably more important — and I encourage you to think about this — is the question what’s not going to change? The answer to that question can allow you to organize your activities. You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come.”

5. “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”

6.  ”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.”

7. “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”

8. “You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”

9. “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

10. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.”

11. “One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is ‘one-size-fits-all’ decision making…The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”

12. “To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.” –

13. “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.”

14. “If you’re watching your competitors, you’re unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.”

15. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time.”

Jeff Bezos provoking quotes on taking risks

1. “We take risks all the time, we talk about failure.” “We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don’t, we’re not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that’s okay.”

2. “We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.”

3. “The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

4. “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon.”

5. “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.”

6. “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake don’t do anything new.”

7. “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.”

8. “We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double-down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.”

9. “When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.”

11 Jeff Bezos on life and career

1. “When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever.”

2. “You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.”

3. “If you can somehow figure out how to have a calling, you have hit the jackpot, cause that’s the big deal.”

4. “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.”

5. “Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.”

6. “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.”

7. “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. People who are right a lot change their mind without a lot of new data. They wake up and reanalyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases.“

8. “Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.”

9. “In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”

10. “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.”

11. “If I have three good decisions a day, that’s enough,” he said. “They should just be as high quality as I can make them”

7 Jeff Bezos on customer service

1. “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.”

2. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

3. “The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.”

4. “We don’t focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers.”

5. “We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience – importantly – even in those areas where we are already the leader.”

6. “One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to.”

7. “Great innovations, large and small, are happening everyday [at Amazon] on behalf of customers.”

7 Jeff Bezos Quotes on customer obsession

1. “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

2. “Obsess about customers, not competitors.”

3. “If your customer base is ageing 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.”

4. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

5. “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.”

6. “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”

10 Best Jeff Bezos Quotes Images in 2022

Check out this fantastic collection of Jeff Bezos quotes wallpapers below:

Summary

Jeff started his entrepreneurship from the garage of his home and build an empire. He became the world’s richest person in 2017. His life and success story is truly an inspiration to millions who are thinking of have stepped into entrepreneurship. He is the mentor of millions and Jeff’s quotes are food for entrepreneur souls. My favorite Jeff Bezos quote is, “You don’t choose your passion, Your passion chooses you”.

Which is your favorite quote of Jeff Bezos?