Why Jeff Bezos Is My Role Model

I have an entire YouTube playlist of Jeff Bezos.

Interviews. Old clips. Amazon stories. Shareholder meetings. Random five-minute videos where he explains how he thinks about decisions.

I've probably watched some of them more times than I'd like to admit.

And it's not really because he's rich.

Obviously, building one of the largest companies in the world is impressive. But there are plenty of extremely wealthy people I don't particularly care about.

What fascinates me about Bezos is how he thinks.

Over the years, I've picked up a bunch of ideas from him that have slowly become part of how I think about business, work and life.

Day 1

This is probably my favourite Bezos philosophy.

Amazon has talked about maintaining a "Day 1" mentality for decades. Bezos described the alternative, Day 2, as eventually leading to stagnation and decline. His prescription for avoiding it included customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends and making decisions quickly.

I love the idea behind it.

Imagine you started your company yesterday.

You wouldn't sit around thinking about how successful you already are.

You'd be hungry.

You'd experiment.

You'd talk to customers.

You'd ship things.

You'd probably break things.

And you'd constantly be asking:

What can we do better?

Then companies become successful and slowly start protecting what they've already built instead of creating what comes next.

I think people can become Day 2 as well.

You get comfortable with what you know.

You stop being curious.

You start saying "I'm just not good at that."

You stop taking risks because now you have something to lose.

I don't want that.

I want my life to permanently feel a little bit like Day 1.

Regret Minimization

One of the Bezos ideas that affected me most isn't even really about Amazon.

When deciding whether to leave his career and start Amazon, Bezos has famously described thinking about the decision from the perspective of himself at 80.

Would he regret trying and failing?

Probably not.

Would he regret never trying?

Probably.

I love that framework because it completely changes how you think about risk.

We normally ask:

What happens if I do this and fail?

But there's another question:

What happens if I never try?

Failure is visible.

Regret isn't.

You can fail at a company and everyone knows.

Nobody sees the company you wanted to start but never did.

Nobody sees the person you wanted to talk to but were too scared to approach.

Nobody sees the country you wanted to visit, the thing you wanted to learn, or the idea you wanted to build.

Those failures happen silently.

And I think I'm much more afraid of those.

One-Way Doors and Two-Way Doors

This might be the Bezos idea I use most practically.

He separates decisions into roughly two categories.

Some decisions are one-way doors.

They're difficult or expensive to reverse, so you should think carefully before walking through them.

But most decisions are two-way doors.

You make the decision.

It doesn't work.

You walk back through the door.

Bezos has argued that organizations get slow when they start treating reversible decisions like irreversible ones.

I think individuals do exactly the same thing.

We spend three weeks thinking about something that could have been tested in three hours.

Should I start the project?

Build it.

Should I learn this technology?

Try it for a week.

Should I publish this?

Publish it.

Should I try this business idea?

Find one customer.

A surprising number of decisions aren't nearly as permanent as they feel.

Make the decision.

Get information.

Adjust.

Customer Obsession

This one became much more meaningful to me after running my own company.

Businesses naturally think about themselves.

How much money are we making?

How do we increase margins?

How do we beat competitors?

What technology should we use?

Bezos flips the starting point.

Start with the customer and work backwards.

Amazon's own description of its Day 1 culture says that customer obsession and working backwards from customer needs have been central principles from the beginning.

It's incredibly simple.

But simple doesn't mean easy.

I've caught myself thinking:

"How much can I charge for this?"

when perhaps the better first question is:

"How valuable can I make this?"

That's a very different way of building a company.

Think Long Term

This might be the thing I admire most.

Amazon's original shareholder philosophy explicitly emphasized long-term market leadership over short-term profitability considerations.

That's difficult because the world rewards visible short-term progress.

You want money now.

Results now.

Growth now.

Recognition now.

But some of the biggest things you can build require being comfortable looking stupid for a while.

A company.

A career.

A skill.

A body.

A reputation.

Knowledge.

Relationships.

Most compounding looks unimpressive at the beginning.

That's something I have to remind myself of constantly.

High-Velocity Decision Making

I have a tendency to think a lot.

Sometimes that's useful.

Sometimes it's just procrastination wearing glasses.

One thing I admire about Bezos's philosophy is that speed itself matters.

You don't need perfect information for every decision. His Day 1 framework explicitly emphasizes maintaining high decision velocity rather than letting organizations become paralyzed by process.

I've increasingly started thinking:

Can I just test this?

Instead of spending a week deciding whether an idea is good, build the smallest version.

Instead of wondering whether someone wants something, ask them.

Reality gives much better answers than imagination.

I'm still terrible at following this sometimes.

But I'm getting better.

Why Bezos?

I don't agree with everything Jeff Bezos has ever done.

And I don't think having a role model means trying to become a copy of someone.

That's boring.

What I want to steal are the mental models.

Day 1.

Regret minimization.

Long-term thinking.

Customer obsession.

One-way and two-way doors.

Experimentation.

Making decisions with incomplete information.

Thinking bigger than what initially seems reasonable.

These ideas have influenced how I think about Pixels and Grids, my career, the things I build and increasingly how I think about my own life.

That's why I keep watching those interviews.

Sometimes I'll be working, open YouTube for some completely unrelated reason, see an old Bezos interview in my playlist and end up watching the same story I've already heard five times.

And somehow I still enjoy it.

Maybe one day I'll look back and realize I was completely wrong about some of these ideas.

That's fine too.

Day 1, right?