Jeff Bezos Quotes

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.

I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.

So long as your desire to explore is greater than your desire to not screw up, you're on the right track.

You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.

I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

What I have learned about Metallica is that it's all about taking chances and challenges.

There's a lot of songs and songwriters out there - you have to make something stand out to pitch songs. Sometimes you have to be bold and just try something different. And just stick with it - don't give up if nothing happens.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

I think when you're really passionate about something, and maybe not every person is like this, but I think there's a large group that feels deep inside, I want something different, I want something more, I want to go on my own path. It's being comfortable being uncomfortable. Because to do that, you're going to have to jump outside of the comfort zone and it isn't going to be perfect. It's going to be scary. And to me, that's when great things happen.

What makes me smile is a movie where I feel like it is dangerous, or there's that fresh idea there. It's about learning and growing and trying new things and tinkering, all of those things that keep you excited. But if you're not nervous, if you're not on that boundary of the unknown, I don't think you're getting better. I think you're kind of sitting back, and I don't think you're advancing the form.

Where do you put the fear when you choose to innovate? The fear is there, but you have to find a place to put it.

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

I think it's very important to keep being frightened - if you're not frightening yourself, you should take a break. You need to keep experimenting. You also need to take time - that's how you do good stuff - layering and depth of knowledge.

I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

I think that we, as writers, get excited by risk. When we are feeling comfortable and familiar, I wouldn't say that we get bored, but the energy in the room gets flat. When we're most excited and when the show is the most fun, it's when we're duking things out.

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.

It's better to stay too long than to leave too soon.

I think we had to push forward to make sure it was different, do something that we had never done before and yet still have the consistency to stay in the same world. This was our chance to do all the things we didn't get a chance to do before. We've been working on these movies [Kung Fu Panda] for twelve years and we have to keep things exciting for us in order for us to devote that many years of our lives to do this.

Let's think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it's okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea... well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you're not gonna get people coming up with ideas.