Billionaire Jeff Bezos Has A Surprisingly Simple Secret To His Success

When Jeff Bezos opens his eyes in the morning, he wakes secure in the knowledge that he has over $180 billion to his name. That’s a hefty sum – in fact he’s famously the wealthiest man on Earth – but how does a person amass quite so much money? Clearly, some tough decisions had to be made along the way. Bezos has acknowledged as much, and he’s even revealed his secret for making the best possible choices that he can.

As the richest person on the planet, Bezos naturally has his fingers in many different pies. He’s active across a whole range of industries, whether that’s in the media or in space exploration. But of all his various business pursuits, it’s Amazon that really has taken Bezos to the top.

In the multinational’s infancy in the summer of 1995 Amazon only retailed books. But even in those early days, Bezos apparently expected his online company to expand and eventually begin selling other items, too. As the man himself envisioned it, Amazon would one day become “an everything store.”

Let’s face it, you’d have to have been completely cut off from civilization for the last 20-odd years not to know just how successfully Bezos’ plan came to fruition. Today Amazon is the biggest retailer on the planet, with millions and millions of people spending their money on the site every day. It’s grown to every corner of the world, making its founder an unfathomably large amount of money in the process.

But how did it all come to this? Just how exactly did this man from New Mexico come to create such a powerful business empire? Well, important choices most certainly had to be made. Everyone has their own approach to decision-making, of course, but perhaps Bezos’ own thoughts on the subject are especially worth considering?

Even as a kid, Bezos seemed eager to learn and make decisions. When his family relocated to Miami from Albuquerque during his teenage years, he became fascinated by computer technology. This was also around the time he first entered the business world, organizing a summer camp that he called the Dream Institute.

Bezos later attended Princeton to study electrical engineering and computer science, graduating in ’86. He then moved into the financial sector, taking up jobs on Wall Street with a few different companies. By 1990 he’d become the youngest ever person to serve as a vice president of investment company D.E. Shaw.

Bezos did extremely well on Wall Street, making a lot of money for himself. But after a few years, he decided to make a change. In 1994 he relocated to Seattle, where he hoped to break ground in the e-commerce sector. And in the mid-’90s online businesses were by no means a safe bet for financial success.

Sensing potential, though, Bezos set up an online store for selling books. He initially wanted to call this new company “Cadabra,” but he was talked out of it by a lawyer who suggested the word was too close to “cadaver.” Bezos also had a mind to call the business “Relentless,” but he eventually settled on “Amazon.”

On July 16, 1995, the website Amazon.com was launched. And it didn’t take long before business was booming. In fact, within a single month, Amazon had started selling books to people all over America and in 45 other countries, too. Another month on, it was making $20,000 every week. Things had gone better than even Bezos had expected.

In 1997 questions were raised when Bezos decided to go public with his company. Commentators weren’t confident that Amazon would be able to compete with its more traditional competitors.Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, these doubts seem ludicrous. Within a couple of years, Amazon had emerged as an industry leader as it started to widen its product base. Now it was selling items such as CDs, movie tapes, clothes and electronics.

As Amazon was really taking off, Bezos started to look into the space industry. In 2000 he set up Blue Origin, which aimed to make space travel an achievable possibility for consumers. For the first 16 years or so, this business didn’t really make headlines. But people eventually started to take notice and the firm is now one of a handful teaming up with NASA looking at planetary exploration projects.

Amazon, meanwhile, continued to diversify during the 2000s. By 2006 it had entered into the burgeoning streaming market, which, of course, would take off in a big way down the line. Amazon Studios arrived in 2013, with the company releasing its first feature movie in the form of 2015’s Spike Lee-helmed Chi-Raq.

In 2007 Amazon brought out its first Kindle, which allowed people to read their books digitally. The company stepped up four years later, though, with the release of its first tablet, the Kindle Fire. This was upgraded after another year, with the Kindle Fire HD attempting to rival Apple’s new iPad.

Bezos, meanwhile, became a serious media player in 2013 when he took over The Washington Post and its various affiliates. This was quite a surprising move at the time, as newspapers were largely considered to be a poor investment. But within a few years, the company was making huge profits under Bezos’ ownership.

Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Despite his immense success, Bezos has still made the wrong move at times. One of the big mistakes is generally considered to be the Fire Phone, which Amazon brought out in 2014. Industry experts slammed the product, which was pulled from production after just a year.

Unperturbed, of course, Bezos continued to look for new opportunities and ventures. A big one arrived in 2017 when Amazon took over the grocery company Whole Foods for the jaw-dropping sum of $13.7 billion. The internet giant soon started to integrate the food business into its rapid-delivery-on-demand online business model.

Over the years Bezos has also invested heavily in real estate, which isn’t a particularly surprising thing for a multi-billionaire to do. He has properties all over the United States, with highlights including a couple of mansions in Beverly Hills and a huge apartment in New York. The value of these places would make your eyes water.

With all those billions to his name, Bezos has made some pretty eccentric investments, too. The stand-out is perhaps the $42 million he put into the 10,000-Year Clock, which is basically a timepiece that ticks round only once every year – but will do so for the next ten millennia. Probably not a money-maker of a project; still, in terms of available finance, we reckon Bezos is good for it.

Another of Bezos’ more peculiar moves was the F-1 engine retrieval project. Basically, the businessman hoped to find the engines from Apollo 11 that had landed in the ocean after helping to propel the famous rocket towards the Moon. The project was largely successful, with enough of the wreckage reclaimed to exhibit at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

If nothing else, the F-1 engine retrieval and 10,000-Year Clock projects illustrate that Bezos can sometimes make some unexpected decisions. But given his immense wealth, one has to presume that he knows what he’s doing. After all, you don’t get to be the world’s richest man without having a knack for making the right choices.

In November 2020 a collection of essays written by Bezos himself was published. Titled Invent and Wander, the book promised to offer an insight into how the businessman’s mind worked. In particular, he wrote about his methodology for making the very decisions that have made him so rich.

Bezos first explained that his mornings are quite calm, writing, “I like to putter in the morning. I get up early. I go to bed early. I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. So my puttering time is very important to me.”

With that in mind, Bezos explained that he doesn’t take any meetings before 10 a.m. Then, though, he organizes the most difficult ones first. That way, he goes into them with his mind still at its sharpest. Later in the day, when he’s more tired, he’ll do the more mundane stuff.

At the end of a working day, Bezos makes an effort to get a good night’s rest. Explaining why, he wrote,“I prioritize sleep unless I’m traveling in different time zones. Sometimes getting eight hours is impossible, but I am very focused on it, and I need eight hours. I think better. I have more energy. My mood is better.”

Bezos appears to be strict with himself when it comes to getting the right amount of sleep. And the reason for that, as he explained in Invent and Wander, is that he needs to be at the top of his game when making decisions. As he sees it,his job isn’t about making choices all of the time; it’s about making the right call on key big choices.

Bezos is probably wise to be so mindful of his capacity for decision-making. After all, psychologists have suggested that human beings are only capable of making a certain number of choices within the course of a day. Once that limit has been hit, a phenomenon known as “decision fatigue” can set in.

According to the Invincible Robots website, decision fatigue is something of which many high-powered businesspeople are wary. It’s why, the website claims, Mark Zuckerberg always wears grey shirts. Similarly, Steve Jobs supposedly always wore his black turtleneck to avoid decision fatigue. Having the same outfit every day means that there’s one fewer choice to make when you get up in the morning.

Like his peers, Bezos is also clearly obsessed with decisions. In fact, that’s why he tries to get so much sleep each night. His thinking appears to be that if he slept less, then while he’d have more time in a day to make decisions, the quality of those choices would be lower.

As for the types of decisions he has to make, Bezos always has his mind on the future. As he tries to emphasize to his employees, all decision-making should involve thinking ahead. Spelling it out clearly in his book, he wrote, “None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter.”

In Invent and Wander, Bezos claimed that any present-day successes have actually been planned long ago. He wrote, “When I have a good quarterly conference call with Wall Street, people will stop me and say, ‘Congratulations on your quarter,’ and I say, ‘Thank you,’ but what I’m really thinking is that quarter was baked three years ago.”

Bezos went on, “Right now I’m working on a quarter that’s going to reveal itself in 2023 sometime, and that’s what you need to be doing. You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make 100 decisions today? If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high-quality as I can make them.”

The Amazon chief then elaborated on what he views as the two sorts of choices that one can encounter. He first mentions “one-way doors, or Type 2 decisions,” which he classifies as extremely important and unalterable. These choices, naturally, need to be considered with tremendous care whilst always looking for alternatives.

The other type of decision, as Bezos calls it, is a “two-way door.” This is a choice that ultimately can be reversed, if necessary. As such, it should be taken quickly by a team or even an individual with a good track record. If a mistake has been made, it can be rectified.

Bezos also emphasized “the principle of disagreeing and committing,” which is something he tries to cultivate within his company. This is basically for avoiding nasty conflicts in a business, where an argument is settled only after an extended period of disagreement. This will only end when one side relents, usually only because of fatigue. This is something that Bezos hopes to avoid.

The solution, Bezos claimed, is to bring the issue to one’s superiors as swiftly as possible. He wrote, “When your team is really at loggerheads, escalate – and escalate fast. And then you, as the more senior person, hear the various points of view, and you say, ‘Look, none of us knows what the right decision is here, but I want you to gamble with me. I want you to disagree and commit. We’re going to do it this way. But I really want you to disagree and commit.’”

In a scenario where the conflict is between a boss and his subordinate, Bezos believes it’s frequently the person in charge who should show flexibility. He explained, “It’s often the case that the more senior person should disagree and commit. I disagree and commit all the time. I’ll debate something for an hour or a day or a week. And I’ll say, ‘You know what? I really disagree with this, but you have more ground truth than I do. We’re going to do it your way. And I promise I will never tell you I told you so.’”

In his book, Bezos claimed that this system can bring a certain composure to the decision-making process. According to the businessman, it gets people to think about their co-worker’s reasoning skills and intuition. If the other person has a positive decision-making record, then perhaps it’d be wise to listen to them?

This is all well and good, of course, but perhaps we should take Bezos’ words with a pinch of salt. After all, he might claim to listen carefully to his workers during a disagreement, but he’s also reportedly got a reputation for being short with his employees. In fact, rumor has it that he once sought leadership training to help keep a bottle on his temper and sarcasm.

All in all, though, Bezos’ decision-making faculties must be functioning pretty well. He’s presently the richest person on Earth, after all, even as he gets ready to stand down as Amazon’s chief executive. At some point soon, he’ll take on a less important position at the company. Still, his retirement should be fairly comfortable…