35 short lessons from Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

Invent and Wander is a unique book:

Part 1 is every shareholder letter Jeff wrote.

Part 2 contains edited transcripts of Jeff's speeches.

The result is a book that makes it easy to learn Jeff's philosophy on company building in just a few hours. (The hardcover is on sale today on Amazon for $3.43)

I rewrote my highlights from this book into 35 short ideas:

1. Take pride in operational excellence.

2. Obsess over customer experience.

3. Think longer term than your peers.

4. Choose boldness over timidity.

5. Spend company resources carefully.

6. You never own a customer. They leave when you stop serving them.

7. Find a large and growing market where the technology serving that market is improving.

8. There’s more time to enter a market than you think. The ship has not sailed.

9. Avoid medium. Be big or small.

10. Don’t take your eyes off the customer.

11. Ancient industries are well served. If you are going to jump in you must be different.

12. The confidence you gain from turning a small idea into a big business is a competitive advantage.

13. New businesses should be high potential, innovative, and different.

14. Don’t clean. Eliminate the source of the dirt.

15. Self service is an antidote to gatekeeping.

16. Invent before you have to.

17. Build automated systems that uncover poor customer experiences.

18. Signs of a great business:

-Customers love it

-It can grow to very large size

-It has strong returns on capital

-It's durable in time with the potential to endure for decades

If you find one don’t let it go.

19. Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom.

20. It’s important to be bold. A big win pays for a lot of experiments.

21. The process is not the thing.

22. It’s harder to be kind than clever.

23. Your life story depends on your choices.

24. Build self reliance.

25. Sleep. You get paid for a small number of key decisions.

26. It is not easy to do hard things well.

27. You don’t want mercenaries in your company.

28. Perks are not culture.

29. If you make slow decisions good people leave.

30. Bad execution is not good failure.

31. Experimental failure is good failure.

32. You want unfair fights.

33. You have to make the most important decisions with instinct.

34. Ask “What's not going to change over the next ten years?" and build around that.

35. It might take 50 attempts.