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Lesson #2: Growth Happens in Bounds and Leaps – of Faith
Lesson #2: Growth Happens in Bounds and Leaps – of Faith
Jeff Bezos is a risk taker. There are no other words to describe the man who put everything he had into a venture that many said was doomed to failure, even calling it Amazon.toast for the company’s first five years. Bezos might not have known what the future held in store for him and his small garage-based start-up, but he was sure about one thing: “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
When Bezos first approached his boss about the idea for Amazon, his boss said, “Let’s go on a walk.” The pair went on a two-hour walk through Central Park in New York City. “You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me,” his boss said, “but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced Bezos to give the decision 48 hours of thought before doing anything drastic.
That night, Bezos went home to try and make one of the biggest decisions of his life. His wife was behind him whatever he chose to do, so the choice was one he had to make for himself. “The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called – which only a nerd would call – a ‘regret minimization framework’,” says Bezos. “So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.’” Bezos knew that whatever the outcome of Amazon.com, the only thing he ever would have regretted was not even trying it. “I knew that that would haunt me every day,” he says.
And so, Bezos took a leap of faith. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, especially since so few people during that time, including his major investors – his parents – even knew what the Internet was. In fact, Bezos claims that that “blank sheet of paper stage” at the beginning is one of the hardest stages for any company, seeing as “it’s really just you, and you can quit any time.” Bezos even told his parents that there was a 70 percent chance that they would lose their entire investment. “They did it anyway,” he recalls. Bezos’ parents were betting on their son, and so he bet on himself.
Taking that leap of faith not only required luck – or “planetary alignment” as Bezos puts it – but also a dose of realism. “It’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic,” he says. “So if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.”
Going in, Bezos knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, but that didn’t stop him. Today, Amazon continues that tradition of risk taking. “We are willing to go down a bunch of dark passageways,” he says, “and occasionally we find something that really works.”
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