When Jeff Bezos was a child, he dreamed of being the next Thomas Edison. Today, he's the multibillionaire founder and CEO of Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN)
, with personal ambitions geared toward outer space, financing a clock
that measures time for 10,000 years, and, perhaps equally ambitious,
supplanting Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) at the top of the retail food chain.
How did he go from being an admittedly accomplished child to one of
our generation's greatest (and richest) entrepreneurs? And, more
specifically, are there lessons we can draw from his experience to
increase our own chance at success in the future?
I believe the answer to the latter question is yes. As I highlight in
the following list of factors underlying Bezos' stratospheric ascent,
as recounted by Brad Stone in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,
while luck and genetics certainly positioned the Amazon founder for
success, other traits such as confidence, work ethic, and a fierce
independence are both critical to explaining his rise and largely
replicable by others.
1. LuckTo a certain extent, every great entrepreneur is a product of luck -- that is, of their specific time and place of birth.
"Shortly before or very shortly after 1840 were born nearly all the
galaxy of uncommon men who were to be the overlords of the future
society," Matthew Josephson wrote nearly 80 years ago in The Robber Barons,
a book about the scions of the Gilded Age. By coming into their own on
the heels of the Civil War, these men were uniquely positioned to
capture the wealth from the postwar industrial revolution.
The same can be said of Bill Gates, the founder and longtime CEO of Microsoft,
who was born on the eve of the computing revolution and attended a
private middle school that had only recently started a computer club.
"It was an amazing thing, of course, because this was 1968," Malcolm
Gladwell wrote in Outliers: The Story of Success. "Most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s."
Even Warren Buffett's current station in life can be attributed in
part to happenstance. Born in 1930, he was too young to be burdened with
memories of the Crash of 1929 or the Great Depression, yet old enough
to ride the epic wave of prosperity that followed World War II and
ignited one of the greatest bull markets in history.
Bezos is no exception here. Beyond his considerable intellect and
skill set, it simply can't be denied that he was of the age (late 20s)
and ability to exploit the Internet revolution of the mid-1990s.
2. IntelligenceThat Bezos has been lucky,
however, doesn't detract from his own talents and abilities. "A lot of
what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all," Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX ) CEO Howard Schultz wrote in Pour Your Heart Into It. "It's seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future."
To Schultz's point, of the roughly 4 million babies to be born in
1964, there was only one Jeff Bezos. Only one person thought of Amazon.
Only one person threw caution to the wind, abandoned a lucrative Wall
Street career, and drove cross-country to make his dream a reality. And
only one person had the emotional fortitude to stare down the likes of
Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble in order to see the vision through to completion.
What made Bezos "the one"? Perhaps more than anything, it's his
uniquely keen and "hyper-rational" intellect. He was a standout pupil in
elementary school, the valedictorian of his high-school class, and a summa cum laude
graduate of Princeton University. He sprinted through the ranks at D.E.
Shaw, one of the earliest and still most sophisticated quantitative
hedge funds on Wall Street.
Three decades ago, when a teacher of his was asked to estimate
12-year-old Bezos' grade level, she responded: "I really can't say,
except that there is probably no limit to what he can do, given a little
guidance."
3. Work ethicLayered on top of this intellect
has been a fierce work ethic that's propelled by Bezos' intense ability
to focus and strong underlying discipline.
At one point, Bezos announced to his high-school class that he
intended to be the valedictorian, Stone recounts. After that, it became a
race to be No. 2. "Jeff decided he wanted it and he worked harder than
anybody else," recalled a friend of Bezos' from the time.
At D.E. Shaw, he kept a sleeping bag in his office and a makeshift
mattress pad on his windowsill for nights that he chose to sleep at the
office. At Amazon, one of his guiding principles is that "you can work
long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't
choose two out of the three."
"He was excruciatingly focused," said the same friend. "Not like
mad-scientist focused, but he was capable of really focusing, in a crazy
way, on certain things."
[That's the main three. The other seven are somewhat redundant to me. For more, read Outliers.]
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