Business Lesson & Habits Learned from Jeff Bezos
Inception
For the past week, I’ve been reading the beautiful book everything store written by Brad Stone. Since I’ve started reading this book, I couldn’t stop obsessing over Jeff Bezos and Amazon. In this article, you will learn the lessons and habits of Jeff Bezos that you can apply to accelerate your business.
At the same time, I was reading this book. I realized that so many people around us are so fascinated by Jeff Bezos how he earns and spends his billions.
There are billion-dollar pages that have been popping up lately. Still, on the other hand, none of us is deeply concerned about the habits that turned Jeff Bezos into the icon, and we are never curious about the books he reads or how he gets these brilliant ideas.
Know how to build new habits and change old ones? Read this article.
Created Monopoly
With these brilliant ideas and his life rules, he can establish his company as a monopoly in more than 13 sectors. So this is why in this article, we are going to do a deep dive into some of the most extraordinary practices of Jeff Bezos.
These are the practices that you can apply, and hopefully, they will bring in some remarkable transformations in the way you think. With that, let’s get started.
Habits of Jeff Bezos:
Habit 1: Mindset
The first habit is his mindset of work ethic. Nowadays, people, an average corporate employee works for about 45 hours a week. That’s about 9 hours a day, but Jeff Bezos, the CEO of a trillion-dollar company, works only for 8 hours a day.
The question is, in this fast-paced world of the hustle and bustle, how the CEO of a trillion-dollar company manages to work only for eight hours a day. It is only due to the functions with something called the manager’s mindset.
Worker and Managers Mindset:
While approaching a particular project, people function typically in two ways. The first mindset is the worker’s mindset and the second mindset is the manager’s mindset.
A workers mindset is when you measure the success of your work solely based on the time and efforts you have put in.
Example:
You end up working for 12 hours a day on a certain project. You would consider that day to be successful. It’s called the worker’s mindset. During the industrial revolution, the value of a worker solely measured based on time.
How much the efforts he put in, on the contrary, the manager’s mindset is when you measure the success of your work solely based on the outcome. For example, even if you end up working for, say, 15 hours a day on a particular project, and if you have not generated a significant amount of output.
You would consider that day to be unsuccessful. At the same time, even if you work only for three hours a day and you were able to bring out the desired output. You would consider that date to be successful.
The lesson here that we all have to learn about getting maximum work done in the shortest possible time. At the same time, the world is obsessed with this idea of the hustle and 16-hour work ethic.
We need always to be mindful that there is a thin line between genuine hard work and useless logging.
Everybody has great ideas, but they can rarely execute them. Without execution, a good idea is useless. To know how to execute ideas in just four steps read this article THE 4 DISCIPLINES OF EXECUTION
Second Habit: Decision Making
The second habit or practice is the importance of decision making. At the David Rubinstein show, Jeff Bezos stated that your job is not to make thousands of decisions but to make a small number of significant decisions as a senior executive, which will impact the future of the company.
He said that at no given point in time should you ever compromise on the quality of the decision just because you’re tired. The reason why I say this is essential despite this being hammered to all of us hundreds of times. By multiple sources is because we still take decision making for granted.
Example:
An elementary example of that would be the decisions that we take related to our education. How many of you guys have sat down with the laptop to understand how the market will change in the next ten years.
How will the engineering field or any other field you choose will equip you with the relevant skillset in today’s world? It will stay relevant after you have graduated, and I bet you that 90 percent of you have not done the required research.
The only question that we ask is what the scope is, and then we immediately jump into making the decisions, which will potentially be changing our lives forever. We easily submit to the rat race without realizing that every decision we are making related to our career is irreversible and will change our lives forever.
In the context of business, decision making becomes even more critical. Because now your decisions will no longer affect you, it will also involve many other people in your team.
Story: About decision Making
Most people do not realize the importance of decision making. Leaders mess up all the time. There’s an exciting story that I read in a history textbook. Through this, you will know the importance of decision making using a real-life example.
It is a story of 20th century Vietnam. Wherein the governor of indo-china Paul Domer came to Vietnam. He decided to change everything in Vietnam by making it a more hygienic and more civilized society.
He planned to transform the entire city of Hanoi into a town of urbanism order, and renovation and these are the things considered to be civilized in France. So the first step that he took was to eliminate filth by developing a sewer system for Hanoi.
As soon as the sewer system built, everybody was applauding Paul dormer. It was considered a brilliant decision until the sewer system became a breeding ground for rats. The rodents during the 20th-century rats and rodents were perhaps the scariest creatures in a city.
At that time, rats were closely linked to something called the bubonic plague, which was perhaps the deadliest plague and ended up killing 25 million people in Europe alone. So the French administration decided to tackle this problem by recruiting a bunch of Vietnamese vigilantes to go out there and hunt the rats.
But as it turns out, the rats always ended up populating the Vietnamese vigilantes, and you know, the more they killed, the more rats came in. So they decided to accelerate this program by coming out with a city-wide bounty program to kill the rats.
When they said that for every rat you kill, you have to bring us the tail of the rats. We will pay you one cent per tail. They did not want to deal with the rat corpses because they were civilized. What happened was many people began to kill rats and bring in dozens and dozens of tails.
This number of the tails supposedly representing the number of rats killed went up as high as 20 000. As it turns out, the problem was not being solved at all. So when the French administration started to do a deep dive into how this operation was being conducted, they understood that many of these Vietnamese vigilantes were not killing the rats.
They were only cutting off the tail, and they were letting the rats go so that the rats could breed and produce more babies, eventually giving them a great business outcome. Some people even began to smuggle rats into the city and engaged in something called rat farming.
Later in 1906, as it turns out, there was a bubonic plague outbreak, which ended up killing 263 people immediately. The rat bounty program abolished, and Paul Domer returned to France to never come back to Vietnam.
It is a classy example to demonstrate the magnitude of repercussions caused by a low-quality decision. So always remember people as leaders. Your job is not to work hard but to think well.
So the entire hard work of your team is based on the right direction and produces the desired output without actually backfiring like the case in Vietnam.
Habit 3: Scheduling The Day
It is about scheduling the day. In David Rubinstein show Jeff Bezos stated that he always schedules all of his high IQ meetings at 10 am and gets done with all of this high IQ stuff before lunch.
Now the question arises why before lunch, as our brain has two kinds of functions. The first is the function required for creative activities that are the ability to do creative thinking.
The second is the ability to do laborious work, which does not require any critical thinking. So from 9 am to 1 pm, typically, if you see your brain is highly capable of doing critical thinking.
So if you schedule all of your creative work from 9 am to 1 pm. You will be able to work most efficiently. But at the same time, if you postpone this work post-lunch, you will become drowsy.
The same work, which will possibly take one hour in the morning, will take two to three hours post-lunch, which will result in low quality work and absolute frustration.
After you’re done with all of your work, I would say immediately after 6 pm, shut down your laptop. Go home and chill with your family. That’s because you need to give time to your brain to rejuvenate itself.
Once you begin to be mindful of these effective practices, you will start to strike a perfect work-life balance.