Jeff Bezos Quotes

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

When you have a lot of opportunities, which I am blessed to have had in terms of my work, you get into the habit of not paying attention to certain specifics. And as we get busy, anything we do is the same thing.

Write down the most important things you have to do tomorrow.

As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

We also have to ask if we focusing on the most important priorities.

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

If you spend your time thinking about competition, you're not accomplishing much.

Don't get too comfortable. We are here for a certain period of time, and how much of your life are you gonna choose to spend with distractions? How do you make your choices? What is important?

Keen at the start, but careless at the end.

It's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy - very busy - without being very effective.

It takes an extraordinary amount of attention to manifest any ambition. But life intervenes - distractions and obligations pull us away from the ambition we originally had.

We become so caught up in the busyness of our lives. Were we to step back, however, and take a good look at what we’re doing, we may find that we have immersed ourselves in the “thick of thin things.” In other words, too often we spend most of our time taking care of the things which do not really matter much at all in the grand scheme of things, neglecting those more important causes.

Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren't. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren't applying themselves.

Its easy to lose sight of what you want when you think you want everything.

What distracts us will begin to define us. We don't need to swing at every pitch.

It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

If you pursue two hares, both will escape you.

Do not spend the day in gathering flowers by the way side, lest night come upon you before you arrive at your journey's end, and then you will not reach it.

He who wants to do everything will never do anything.

It doesn't really matter what time it is if you haven't determined what to do with your time.

Person who chases two rabbits catches neither.

The easiest thing to do in the world is to neglect the important and give in to the urgent.