Jeff Bezos
Amazon and Blue Origin founder · Six-page memos and eight hours of sleep
Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, and the author of the annual shareholder letters that a generation of managers treats as a textbook. His day starts slowly on purpose: eight hours of sleep, a couple of hours of what he calls puttering, then the gym, then work. Most of the rest of his stack is about how decisions get made. Written memos instead of slides, a handful of high-quality calls a day rather than a hundred rushed ones, and a rule of acting on whatever is causing stress instead of sitting on it.
- Entries
- 20
- Does
- 16
- Recommends
- 4
- Discusses
- 0
Books
2 books in this stack
- BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
Invent and Wander
His own book: the collected writings, gathering the shareholder letters with speeches and interviews, published in late 2020. The puttering and eight hours of sleep remarks from the 2018 Economic Club talk are reprinted in it.
Source: CNBC Make It: Why Jeff Bezos sets aside time to 'putter' every dayView item: Invent and WanderOn record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it - BookRecommends$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
The Remains of the Day
CNBC reports that Ishiguro's novel is one of his favorite books and, citing Brad Stone's biography, that its treatment of regret fed into his regret minimization framework. Stone also has him saying he learns more from novels than from nonfiction.
Source: CNBC Make It: Kazuo Ishiguro, one of Jeff Bezos' favorite authors, wins the Nobel Prize in LiteratureView item: The Remains of the DayOn record from 1 of 62 tracked people: 1 recommends it
Supplements
1 supplement in this stack
- SupplementDoes it$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.
Caffeine
Coffee is the first thing in his morning routine. He drinks his first cup while puttering, before the gym and before any work.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginView item: CaffeineOn record from 14 of 62 tracked people: 10 do it, 1 recommends it, 3 have discussed it
Protocols
10 entriesStructured routines and practices with a defined method.
On a good day he does about forty-five minutes of weightlifting, rotating a pull day, a push day and a leg day. Almost every day includes some lifting, and he says he can tell on the days he skips it because he feels less alert.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginHe says eight hours makes a big difference to how he feels, and that he tries hard to make it a priority. Decision quality beats decision volume for him. So cutting sleep to gain a couple of extra hours buys productivity that, in his words, might be an illusion.
Source: Thrive Global: Jeff Bezos: Why Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Is Good for Amazon ShareholdersAround half an hour of cardio most days, done alongside the weights. Some mornings he does not want to be in the gym at all, and says the motivation that works is knowing he will feel better about four hours later.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginSets his first meeting at ten and does what he calls his high-IQ meetings before lunch. By five in the evening, he told Rubenstein, he cannot think about a hard problem any more and pushes it to ten the next morning.
Source: Economic Club of Washington, D.C.: Jeff Bezos in conversation with David Rubenstein, 2018 (transcript)Says a senior executive is paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions, and that three good ones a day is enough. He cites Warren Buffett, who is happy with three a year, and points out that the important decisions are about things two or three years away.
Source: Economic Club of Washington, D.C.: Jeff Bezos in conversation with David Rubenstein, 2018 (transcript)Writes that he disagrees and commits all the time, and gives the example of greenlighting an Amazon Studios show he had doubts about. Told Lex Fridman that he would often tell a direct report he thought they were wrong but would gamble with them anyway.
Source: Amazon 2016 Letter to ShareholdersUsed it to leave Wall Street for Amazon: he projected himself to eighty and asked which choice he would regret. He knew he would not regret failing but would regret never having tried, and says the exercise cuts through the daily confusion.
Source: Academy of Achievement: Jeff Bezos interview, 2001 (transcript)Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin open with a six-page narrative memo, then a silent study hall of about thirty minutes. Slides, he thinks, are built to persuade: easy for the author, hard for the audience. A memo, he thinks, does the reverse.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginTwo-way doors are reversible, and he says individuals or small teams should make those calls fast. One-way doors are not. Those deserve slow, senior attention. The 2016 letter adds that you should make most decisions with around seventy percent of the information you wish you had.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginArgues in the 2018 letter that wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency: not random, but guided by hunch and curiosity, and the likeliest route to the outsized non-linear discoveries. The same letter credits years of wandering, with failed first attempts along the way, for AWS products such as SageMaker.
Source: Amazon 2018 Letter to Shareholders
Habits
7 entriesRecurring behaviors recorded in public statements.
Gets up early, in his words just naturally, and told Rubenstein in 2018 that he goes to bed early and gets up early. The early start is what makes room for the slow morning before a first meeting at ten.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginTakes what he calls little thinking retreats to focus on problems, though he says he can focus all day and does not keep a strict schedule. His meetings often run long because, in his words, he believes in wandering.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginTrains with a trainer he says he loves, who pushes him harder than he would push himself. He calls that really helpful.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginTreats stress as a warning flag that something has been noticed but not acted on. As soon as he identifies it and makes the first phone call or sends the first email, he says the stress drops sharply, even before the problem is solved.
Source: Academy of Achievement: Jeff Bezos interview, 2001 (transcript)Describes getting up and puttering: moving slowly, reading his phone and the newspapers, chatting with Laura and drinking his first coffee, for the first couple of hours. He admits he is less productive in that window than people assume, and says he believes in wandering.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue OriginPrefers the word harmony to balance, because balance implies a strict trade-off. His version is a loop: happiness at work makes him a better husband and father, and happiness at home sends him into work with more energy.
Source: Thrive Global: Jeff Bezos: Why Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Is Good for Amazon ShareholdersReads the newspapers each morning, but the case he makes is for books: reading a book is a long-format thing, while most of what a phone does shortens attention spans. He stops short of calling that proven, and says it is important to spend some of your time and some of your life on long attention span things.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
In their own words
Checked word for word against the linked source
“My routine on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about forty-five minutes of weightlifting, resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who I love who pushes me, which is really helpful.”
Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin (opens in a new tab) · 14 Dec 2023 “I slowly move around. … I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while. I chat with Laura and I drink my first coffee. So I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early just naturally, and then I exercise most days.”
Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin (opens in a new tab) · 14 Dec 2023 “Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. … For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read.”
Lex Fridman Podcast #405 transcript: Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin (opens in a new tab) · 14 Dec 2023 “Eight hours of sleep makes a big difference for me, and I try hard to make that a priority. For me, that’s the needed amount to feel energized and excited.”
Thrive Global: Jeff Bezos: Why Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Is Good for Amazon Shareholders (opens in a new tab) · 18 May 2018 “Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. … you can be working incredibly hard and loving it”
Academy of Achievement: Jeff Bezos interview, 2001 (transcript) (opens in a new tab) · 4 May 2001
Stack notes are paraphrased. Anything in quotation marks is a short excerpt copied from the transcript it links to. Not medical advice. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by anyone listed. How this works.