How to Sell with Confidence That Changes Everything!

Key Takeaways

people always ask you know what do I need to know to be successful if you can't sell you know you're so because you're always selling and when I say that you have to understand what sales means selling is not about convincing somebody to give you money for something they don't want selling is about knowing in your heart your mind your soul that the product or service you have can help anybody in your potential customer Universe your prospect Universe any Innovation any success came from the security of being able to make decisions that felt right to me in the moment and as I was saying earlier every mistake I've made has been either a choice that I made from my head where I didn't get silent or didn't get still or did get still and then still listen to what my head said instead of what my heart said anything you set your mind to you can do Von Bron said after the lunar Landing I have learned to use the word impossible with great caution and I hope you guys take that attitude about your lives hey it's EV car Michael and I watch these vide every day because I need them for motivation being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too it's like your morning coffee but for your goals kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity so here is a challenge for you try watching One video every morning for the next 30 days and let's find out together if they help you do great things too if you're in leave a # believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you so today let's get 50 years of Priceless business knowledge in just 3 hours believe people always ask you know what do I need to know to be successful if you can't sell you you're you know you're so you know because you're always selling and when I say that you have to understand what sales means selling is not about convincing somebody to give you money for something they don't want right selling is about knowing in your heart your mind your soul that the product or service you have can help anybody in your potential customer Universe your prospect universe and so you know whether I was selling baseball cards whether I was selling stamps whether I was selling you this new vodka drink I just invented that to try to get you trash um at my bar whatever it was this was the best thing you could ever possibly have for your life and the same thing applies to all my businesses now you know um you know I'm always selling because I believe in my products and I believe they can help and if I have something that I don't believe will help you then it's it's not a good product and so when people say well I'm not into sales well you know are you into helping your customers are you into you know telling people why your product or service is good because if you can't do that you're in the wrong spot you know when people say well I don't know if my business is working how do you know when to keep going or stop you know stop selling or or end your business if if you don't believe you can sell your product if you don't know this is a great product and you can you can convey that to anybody who might have an interest then it's time to close the doors because if you're not again I go back to what I say earlier there's never been a company that survived without sales ever ever did I say ever yeah ever and so you have to know how to sell or you're wasting your time for a long time many I mean hundreds of years thousands of years the idea of going to the moon was so impossible the people actually used it as a metaphor for impossibility and then in the 1960s we humans did it and what I would hope you would take away from that is that anything you set your mind to you can do Von Bron said after the lunar Landing I have learned to use the word impossible with great caution and I hope you guys take that attitude about your lives any innovation any success came from the security of being able to make decisions that felt right to me in the moment and as I was saying earlier every mistake I've made has been either M either a choice that I made from my ego head my head where I didn't get silent or didn't get still or did get still and then still listen to what my head said instead of what my heart said because when you allow allow the voice of God which is what your true in what your nature is that's your true nature since that's where you come from is the is is the creator that voice will speak through you if you allow it to it cannot speak to you if the voices of you allow the voices of the world to drown that out I think in general if you want to recruit people uh that are you know really talented and driven you have to say you have to State what the what's the mission what's the problem we're trying to solve and and uh and just be clearly willing to you know pour a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears into it um and have a convincing argument for why it matters um you know there's you say like there's three three major things for um you in terms of motivation uh it's like first of all somebody's got to look forward to coming to work in the morning like if they're like are they enjoying the the work itself intrinsically um that's very important um and uh the right work environment can really make make a big difference there I think the ideally is that they also feel like that their rewards will receive um Fair financial compensation like that they that you know the that the financial rewards are are are are good and fair uh and then third for the really for the best people in the world they'll want to know are they is what they're doing going to matter yeah like so uh if they spend 10 years doing this it will it make a difference to the world or you know will people notice what would it matter also to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video the worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them the worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results if you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video absolutely for free there's a link in the description below go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business I'll see you there I want you all to go into one of our retail stores in the next 8 10 weeks and just give one of the Apple retail store employees a hug a candid Steve Jobs my theory of of management is is the Beatles deflecting credit for Apple's success by citing his favorite but together they they helped amplify each other's really good Tendencies and that's true of any team and we got a really great team here at Apple thanking them for their work on the iPhone the day before its release and I think everybody who's worked on iPhone and made those sacrifices is going to feel that it's been worth it what are the keys to success a couple things one the easy easiest way to be successful is find something you love to do and be great at it because when you're great at something it's things get really really easy you know I I've realized that I got to be really really good at business really good at Tech and made it easy when I started a company that's one number two let's say you can't get there be prepared understand put yourselves in the shoes of the people or the businesses that you're working with the message that I just got on cyberdust is a perfect example if he would have put himself in my shoes it would be awes obvious that cyberdust is important to me I'm trying to push everybody to message using it I volunteered and Dave mentioned that hey I'm going to be answering questions long after this is over from you people from everybody sending me messages so cyberdust is obviously important to me and so if you're able to do something that reflects something that's important to me or whoever it is that you're working or trying to get a job with or trying to get an internship with we're trying to get an investment from if you can put yourself in their shoes and put yourself in context of what's important to them your chances of being successful increase 99% a thousandfold right and one other point I'll leave with you right if you're working for somebody the best way to be successful is by reducing the stress of those around you it's not about you I mean it's always about me but that's a different point but it's not about you it's about the people around you if you're reducing the stress of the people around around you those are the people those people start to gravitate towards you they want to work with you because you make go into work easier more pleasant you help them accomplish their goals you help put them in a position to succeed by reducing their stress so if you remember those three things and plus some of the other Things We Said Today selling Etc you will be successful then you just got to go out and do the work I think success is always a bit dangerous uh you know and you can think that whatever your success was was because you know you are magically uh uh gifted in understanding things whereas of course any success particularly a gigantic success is a huge number of factors including hard work and understanding but timing you know other people who came to work with you other people who might have done the same thing who somehow messed up uh in doing it and so often you'll you'll have too much confidence of about what you understand uh you know in science uh as feinan said the easiest person to fool is yourself uh and so you have to force yourself to go through uh you know again and again and think through is this the right thing to be doing you know will this work am I doing it because it would be exciting if it succeeded am I really looking at these factors in fact in polio several times we had to say to ourselves was it time to give up uh or really did we think there was a prospect of uh being able to move forward what are the greatest risk of being successful losing yourself in that is what I was saying earlier is like believing your own publicity um you know I work really consciously at staying conscious I work consciously at not at not being led by my ego I work consciously at not um losing sight of what is the real truth versus what everybody is saying and what people want and and and listen I have great empathy for you all living in the Instagram social media world because it is a lot tougher than it was when I was your age having to try to measure yourself against people you don't even know who are posting things that are not even real and then you all interpreting that and judging yourself against that you know so I have I I have regard for what you're up against but will say because you are up against a world that is judging you under false premises that is putting out things that are you know not real that it is more essential now than ever to understand the spirit and value of who you really are so your own personal identity is going to mean so much more to you in this world than even even when I I was coming up you don't necessarily get it right the fir exactly right the first time I mean the car leasing business you know basically you were competing on the cost of money to finance cars and and it's very hard to Delight a customer when you just give him the car and tell them to send you a monthly check for five years and you'll be back at that time so his talents were being wasted basically in that business but at the age of 40 with all of that experience behind him he found he he he found the golden key and he he took a very ordinary business and turned it into an absolutely extraordinary uh operation uh and just like Mrs B or Rose blumpkin did uh with furniture and the he didn't worry about whether the Federal Reserve was going to tighten or ease he didn't worry about whether the stock market was up or down yesterday you know he didn't he didn't worry about the things he couldn't change but he did worry he did focus on the one thing he could change and that was the customers experience and I have seen uh the one I did didn't The One That Got Away Enterprise I went down to Florida and tried to talk him into selling the burshire and he was smart enough not to do it probably the value of the company is quadrupled since I made that visit uh but he he was smart enough to see that he would find that business Henry Ford as you may know failed twice before he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903 I mean the the test isn't whether you get the greatest business idea in the world the first time out the test is whether you keep learning as you go along what your strengths are and what you can do for your customers what you can bring especially to the party and to do that uh you need you need the education that that I know you've received uh through 10,000 small businesses but you need a genuine a genuine desire day in day out to Delight the customer I've never I've never seen a business and I've seen a lot of businesses but I've never seen one that Delights the customer that that doesn't succeed I mean what you want is that customer the next day when they think do I want to rent a car or do I want to buy some furniture what goes through their mind you know it's the place where they've had a great experience I don't know what I paid for this type actually probably somebody gave it to me but for the purposes of the speech I will say I I have no idea but what I or the shirt I'm wearing or this but I do know I will remember how I was treated when I bought it I mean you long forget about the price but you never forget whether you had a good experience or a poor experience uh with the purchase experience recently you shared in a press conference that one of Facebook's focuses for the next decade is that it is more important to be understood than be liked will you just share what you meant by that yeah I mean look it's let's be real here I'm not I'm not like communicating is my best thing right um you know I came out here been planning for this I'm excited about it and then I messed up the name of our data center within 30 seconds so so I mean look when when I got started with Facebook I was 19 and um and I there were so many parts about building a company that I didn't know right I didn't I didn't know anything about hiring or managing or building a company and I certainly didn't really know that much about you know how to communicate about what we were doing with the world I me I'm I'm an engineer by training right I I I I love coding I like Building Products that's that's kind of the background um and uh you know my experience you know kind of growing up and running the company is you went out talked about what we did say some stupid things get called out for it and get like kind of go into a into a shell right and and uh end up being really cautious about how we communicate so you know it kind of it worked out okay for a while for the company because we we built products that a lot of people really like and you know we weren't winning because we were communicating well we were winning because the products were working well I think in spite of the fact that we were communicating quite poorly about what we were doing but broadly speaking for a long time uh the basic approach was okay let's try to not like do anything that's going to be too offensive right and and we'll kind of explain what we're doing in Broad strokes and talk about the mission of what we're doing which is is something that I really believe in helping to build community and and and bring people closer together but you I think we we just shied away for a long time talking about some of the things that um some of the principles that we believe in that that um that are increasingly controversial in the world and I I just think that we for one don't have that luxury anymore um for two uh I I think that that kind of LED for a while to a sentiment towards the company that was positive but fairly shallow because if people if if if you're not kind of out there standing for things that uh that people care about then you know it's not possible for people to feel that strongly about what you're doing but so now you know I I've just I've tried to change our approach more recently you know I went out and I in Georgetown last year I gave this speech around our principles around free expression and you know that's just one of the areas that I really feel like is under attack right now 10x has made my life better yeah not harder 2x is difficult how do you 2x like how how do you actually double something and then and then when do you pull it back so the 10x concept is this I'm here and I'm going to go up here and it's going to be so impossible that it causes you to think different it's not that you achieve this it causes you to think different strategize different look at different assets look at different uh mechanisms change your way of thinking see most people try to do this they're trying to go from something from here to something logical and the problem with that is only logic can be used in this evaluation but when you start thinking about 10 times your income let's say let's say you're making 100,000 PBS a year and you're like and 100,000 is hard and you're like man I just hit the 100,000 level and you're like oh my God I can't believe I'm doing 100,000 this is amazing my parents think I'm the and I've cracked the code right so what the the individual does now is he's like man if I could just do that again next year okay and he's trying to m maintain what he did there's no creating that there's no new Solutions there's no new ideas in that so you start thinking about 10x it makes you it forces you to think different than what got you right here you got to study man you've got to study okay I study you can ask my friends I study constantly you study constantly constantly every day I'm on you every day all day okay I'm reading books studying this I'm talking to call talk to my friends and all this okay I'm not looking for a job I'm not working for money that's why the one book is Rich Dad Poor dead second book is cash flow quadrant third book is Rich dad's Guide to Investing I put it all in there you can read that then I created the cash flow board game okay and if you play the cash flow board game the reason is better than going to school it's about a financial statement you see my Bankers has never once asked me what my grades were my Bankers never ask me what college I went to my banker wants to see my financial statement my financial statement is my report card right when I grow up that's right most college professors Never Grow Up they're little kids yet I got a I got a PhD I got a PhD I got a PhD yeah I got a financial statement so what happened in 2008 when the markets crashed I borrowed $300 million okay you know why because all the real estate had crashed okay so we bought took my financial statement showed it to the banks how how much money do you want tax-free money we bought we bought almost a billion dollars worth of real estate because it crashed so when I when I tell people the market is crashing I get excited right because everything goes on sale you know that that that's that's like Ferrari saying we put our cars at Half Price oh no no I don't want to pay half price for a Ferrari that's how stupid people are you know they get a soccer player make millions of dollars and they want to pay full price for a Ferrari that's right stupid stupid stupid poor man with nice car you cut to feed this a lot of people here are incredibly focused on selling so they like Google AdWords cuz it converts better lower funnel conversion based marketing right the reality is that's great selling is important that's how a business Grooms but when you are building brand when people care about you you or your business that is the ultimate form of selling there is no affiliate there's no portal there's new no Google ads that are more powerful than building a brand apple does not sell Nike does not sell most of their product through Google AdWords or affiliate marketing they sell most of their products because they built brand the number one goal from every single person here and every business here is to build a brand when you build a brand you don't have to sell it comes to you one time you know as you know I went to Indiana and in Dallas in the mid 90s you know when when we had a good basketball team we we literally would when we wanted to listen to our big games like Indiana Purdue goers um we would call somebody in Bloomington who would put a radio next to a speaker phone and dial us and we sit on the other side listening over a speaker phone drinking beer and whipping it up or doing whatever and the internet was just starting to happen and now I'm a tech geek and I'm like into all of it and we're like there's got to be a better way to do this and so one of my buddies from Indiana Todd Wagner was like look we've been thinking about this and I'm like no I'll figure it out I'm a networking guy now and so we look for ways to um stream Indiana basketball we called it net casting back then over the brand new internet and so I went out and bought a packer bell 90 MHz computer and an ISDN line and downloaded all this software and I said you know what I'm going to figure it out and lo and behold by oh golly early 1995 we had figured out a way to um we would we took these 8 Hour VCRs and connected it to a local radio station record them we bring them back go through this process called encoding and put it up on this website we call it audionet and then I'd go to any online Forum AOL Prodigy comp you serve uunet whatever it was or you use use uset and I like if you're interested in Dallas Sports at all because we had gotten to Indiana yet if you're interested in Dallas Sports go to this website audionet and back then you had a dialup modem you had to download this software called tcpip and you had to have software from your internet provider which meant that so few people knew how to use it we had no idea if it would work or not but all of a sudden audionet went from 10 people a day to 100 people to a thousand people a day and as we added radio stations they're getting calls from all over the world from people who are listening to their shows on demand not even line and then we worked with a company that put together live software company called zing and we made it live and then everything changed and that's really when streaming was born and we just grew that and then in 1998 we got into video changed the to broadcast.com went public and it was the biggest IPO in the history of the stock market at the time um and then we sold it to to Yahoo my approach to criticism and what I teach and preach inside Amazon is when you're criticized first look in a mirror and decide are your critics right if they're right change there are two kinds of critics uh there are well-meaning critics um who uh uh you know they they're worried it's not going to work but they do want it to work and so it could be I can give you example customer reviews would be one of those um when we first did customer reviews 20 years ago Publishers were some book publishers were not happy about it because some of them were negative and so it was very controversial practice at that time but we thought it was right and so we stuck to our guns and and and and had a deep heal on that and didn't didn't didn't change um but uh there's a second kind of critic which is the self-interested critic and they come in all shapes and sizes you know they're um so they can be any kind of institution competitors um of course and so when you are doing something in a new way and if customers embrace the new way what's going to happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not going to like you and they're going to be self-interested critics and so you do need as you're looking yourself in the mirror to try and those two things apart you need to work if depending on how well you want to do and particularly if you're starting a company you need to work super hard so what what does Super heart mean um well when my brother and I were starting our Post company uh in instead of getting an apartment we just rented a a small office and we slept on the couch um and we we showered at the the YMCA and uh we're we're so hot up we had just one computer so the the the the website was up during the day uh and I was coding at night seven days a week all the time um and I I uh s briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she have to sleep in the office so uh work hard like it I mean every waking hour that's that's the the thing I would I would say if if you particularly if you're starting a company um and I mean if you do the simple math say like okay if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100 uh you'll get twice as done as much done in the course of a year as the as the other company we've also had a lot of requests from companies to Port next step to other platforms and we're talking to some of those companies right now now Sun we got a lot of requests from Sun customers to Port next step to Sun so a lot of them are saying look we we may not want to buy them any more but we already bought 500 and we don't want to throw them in the bay so can we put your software on them because Sun's falling behind in software now sun says they'd rather stick needles in their eyes than help us do this that's a and um so we're evaluating right now which will be worse for sun if we Port it or if we don't Port it and since we're fairly since we're fairly customer-driven we'll probably end up doing what the customers ask us to do because we want to make them happy I think having some self-confidence uh is different than finding your passion from a young age ideally you'll have adults in your life uh preferably your parents as part of that some of your teachers uh people around you who uh who like you and they're behind you and they'll back you uh no matter what goes on and that gives you enough confidence to go off on a quest and during that Quest you try different things out if you're lucky when you're very young you find something you're passionate about uh I did when I was 13 years old I found computers and software uh took me another 5 years to figure out that was my uh life's uh primary work uh but that's a a lucky thing other people you know get out into their 20s or even later before they find uh what they're passionate about but proceeding with a certain set of self-confidence that there are people who care for you you care for them that you succeed in their eyes by your uh uh how you treat them I think that's that's pretty basic and it gives you the platform on which to try out new things to fail you know first you're not going to succeed in in various things so self-confidence is primary and then finding your passion is a uh an adventure a quest that that may take time and it may switch uh over the time time of your life but those deep relationships will let you uh pursue it with bger you have over a hundred billion dollar of cash um Burg does that maybe you do Berkshire has over 100 billion in cash and you say that you always want this company to be a fortress so how much cash should an ordinary investor have on a percentage basis do you think it it depends on their personal situation it it uh if if you if if you're working in something where you're you're living off your your your paycheck from from week to week you want to have a little cash around and and you certainly don't want to have a credit card that's maxed out or anything like that uh but if you know if if your house is paid off if you don't have big living expenses you got a portfolio of of decent Diversified businesses uh you don't really need any cash there's probably stuff you can say about some insight that you had early on and you thought to yourself aha nobody else knows this except us but we have this we have this great this great trick do you remember any of them well Peter teal was really focused on network effects and he had this model that I think is right for making decisions that as the complexity of the company grows every day you're going to be faced with a hundred things that you could potentially go do and your job is to pick the one thing that actually matters because out of those 100 things it's really only actually going to be one or two things that actually matter and that was pretty informative to me at the time because I had intuitively like I had a lot of um some self-direction intuitively but but as soon as I started getting all these people around me um who all had reasonable perspectives on things it was very hard for me to balance that and um Peter was always very useful for for that um we were focus he was good at saying here's the one thing that matters like focus on the one thing that matters well partially that and partially just the meta lesson of figure out the one thing that matters and do that but he also you remember what the one thing that mattered like if someone everyone as quickly as possible because I mean Network effects were a massively important part of this one of the the stories when say connecting everyone as quickly as possible you don't mean specifically getting more signups you mean getting people to friend one another faster yeah how did you do that um well we built a lot of tools to enable people to do what they already wanted to right you can't like push uphill on this stuff right it's it's um we were solving a problem that people had and we just needed to remove as much friction as possible dud saving money is stupid it is like it is ridiculous the only thing that ever happens to people to save money is they end up losing it and it's end up getting lost it ends up getting stolen it ends up getting burnt or it ends up going down in value but it's never going to get bigger you save money at the bank it ain't getting bigger period who does that benefit we've all been told save your money save your money save your money who does that really benefit I remember I read the the Blackjack book how to play blackjack right I knew that book I knew every card to hit and then I realized everybody at the table had read the same damn book everybody's staying on 16s then this Chinese dude comes in and this freaking guy's banging 16s against nines like like or 16s against sevens sixes and fives and fours everything he shouldn't do he's doing he's splitting tens and I'm like and he's making all the money he was the only one not playing by the book and and so I just think that there's everybody should buy a house maybe not maybe not okay because the wealthy guys never talk about the house they bought Warren Buffett owns one house so I got a lot of those little things that you know that that that I have just observed in my own life that that are just they're just not true man period in order to be complete and that's when you really have a 100% chance at being successful when you have a complete situation that means that you have developed your body meaning your health your strength your energy and all of that makes you much more positive right because that's when you wake up when you feel strong and you feel fit and you ride the bicycle in the morning ah you know the whole world looks much more bright so that the training of the body extremely important the training of the Mind extremely important this why I say to people I say you got to educate yourself you got to read something every day you got to learn a new language you got to just always improve and look at what can you do to improve your business or your life in general so to develop the mind and then to develop the spiritual side and the Soul extremely important also so if we put those three things together we have total completion and this is why the physical training and I'm not talking about wanting to win Mr Olympia no we're talking about just take some light weights and do your reps pump up the body you know and get some blood in there then go and run go and run the stairs go and exercise go to a yoga class um do some weight training or when you have kids go out and play sports you know just you know go football playing and go soccer playing and Tennis playing and this whatever you can that is what creates kind of life in you and there for more enthusiasm and you have a much more positive outlook in life my my advice to Young Indians is this is the best investment in the world today is called Silver okay and the reason I say that is because I'm I I study history a lot this here is fake money I would never work for this stuff it's good as toilet paper so the biggest investment today is this this is 35 us and I think everybody in the world can afford this today and I tell people every day you should buy this no I save this you see they don't know the difference between this is fake money this is real money and this here is gold real money fake money so the Yen the rupee the dollar the pesel all fake so when I was N9 or 10 years old I started fting that out I said how come they don't teach us money at school well they don't want you to know it's fake the one reason that most people don't do entrepreneurship is they do fear failure and I think a lot about fear and failure I think one of the great things that happened to me was I did love sports which meant I lost a lot and then with school I was losing so much in fourth fifth sixth seventh grade that by the time I was 14 I was used to losing I would argue I loved losing I think it's why I love being a Jets fan I'm being serious I'm being serious I think that is a characteristic of an entrepreneur and that was a huge characteristic of mine I think a lot about the kids that I see now that run away from playing something cuz they're scared to lose for me I was the reverse I would play and play and I would cry I cried a lot when I was a kid if you want to know about me I cried a lot at 9 10 11 12 but I would just get get up again and play and get up again and play and I think we've done a terrible job in our society on demonizing losing when we give kids eighth place trophies we we confuse them you understand we start to tell them as parents losing is bad so we have cuz they know I promise all the parents in here when your kids eight and they get an eighth place trophy they know it's weird and when we give them that trophy we're telling them losing is so bad we need to like cuddle your feelings and we're going to give you this [ __ ] Trophy and what ends up happening is it doesn't set them up for real life because real life happens and it doesn't work that way the winner in AI controls the world China puts together a future plan saying you know whoever dominates in Ai and they're subsidizing you know tensan Alibaba Etc yeah right and right they're they're that's the they know it's a race it is a race we cut our office of technology and science to one person who was an assistant to Peter teal that's where we stand so when we talk about infrastructure jobs you know robots are built in Germany and they're getting bought by Chinese companies in some respects and I think some Japanese companies bought as well we don't build robots here very well right I just invested in my first robotics company High robotics that puts robots into companies um they're in Kansas City I think it is now um but they they lease and rent and sell robots into all these different types of circum IR stances to replace people huh right but I had to learn I'm not saying it's a good thing or bad thing it's going to happen with or without me but I wanted to learn what was going on those building up a robotics um industry here investing in our AI industry here that's the new infrastructure yeah because if we don't do it and China or Russia win those Wars we're so right we're we're out of luck right and so when we talk about the price of assets going up when if you're hiring you know if you're talking about intellectual assets if you're hiring like we were just saying the price is skyrocketing people are you know Montreal has become the the center of the universe for computer vision um it's not us-based schools that are dominating any longer in those areas we've got a lot of smart kids in MIT all different schools right and kids are starting to realize it's a place for them to go and I'm out there telling people the first trillionaire is going to come from somebody who who comes up with something really unique AI I picked books because there were more items in the book category than any other category and so you could build Universal selection there were 3 million in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together the the the 3 million different books active and in print at any given time and the largest physical bookstores only had about 150,000 different titles and so I could see how you could make a bookstore online with universal selection every book ever printed even the out of print ones was the original vision for the company and so that's why books and when did you know that Amazon is going to be some going to be something way bigger than just a bookstore well I knew that the books strangely because I was very prepared for this to take a really long time I knew that the books um business was going to be successful in the first 30 days I was shocked at how many books we sold we were ill prepared um you know I had we had all the we had only 10 people in the company at that time and most of them were software engineers and so everybody including me and the software were all like packing boxes we didn't even have packing tables and down we were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes and at about you know 1 or 2 in the morning I said to one of my um software engineering colleagues I said um you know Paul um we uh this is killing my knees we need to get knee pads and Paul looked at me and he's like Jeff we need to get packing t tables and and I I was like oh my God that is such a good idea the next day I bought packing tables and it doubled our productivity and probably saved our backs and our knees too I have always known this about celebrity the real power of being somebody that somebody knows and I really think that the only difference between being famous and not is that more people know your name so the only difference between understanding that is understanding that what Selma has done what Susan has done what Anna has done Rebecca has done what Jim has done what I've done you too can do because true philanthropy comes from living from the heart of yourself and giving what you have been given how will you do that how will you use your personality the energy of your personality to serve that which is your Soul's Calling I know this for sure any life no matter how fantastic it is how glorious it seems how much attention you receive how much square footage you have any life and every life is enhanced by the sharing and the giving and the opening up of the heart space your life gets better when you can find a way to share it with someone else so what we've done you can do the real empowerment comes when every person leaves this room and makes a decision makes a decision maybe that decision is that you will write a check and support some of the wonderful organizations you've heard here today but the true decision is how will you use yourself how will you use everything that you have been given to serve that which is greater than yourself how will you use that to become truly authentically empowered now it is a beautiful thing to receive an award and to be on the cover of variety thank you very much it's a beautiful thing but the true reward is in the lives that you are able to touch and the people who you know you have impacted when trying different things you got to have some acceptance of failure uh as you alluding to earlier failure must be an option if failure is not an option it's going to result in extremely conservative choices and you may not may get something even worse than lack of innovation things may go backwards um so um if what you really want is uh risk risk to to you want reward and Punishment to be to be proportionate to the actions that you seek so if uh if if what you're seeking is innovation then you should reward success in Innovation um and only there should be minor consequences for lack of minor consequences for for trying and failing there should be minor um with significant rewards for trying and succeeding minor consequences for trying and not succeeding um and big and and and major negative consequences for not trying treating people equally is not is not the same is not recognizing who they truly are and taking advantage of their skills you know and i' I've learned that through sent I've learned that through all this and you know like s and I talk we'll be a much better organization I'll be a better exec I'll be a better investor I'll be a better um shark um because I recognize that you know treating people equally is not the same as treating them recognizing their skills and their differences and for this for this audience it's it's critically important you know and I think there's an opportunity now and I know hopefully you know people like me will recognize that the old white guys now newly old white guys that are in positions of power that there are things that you can do that I can't do that I there are things you see that I don't see there are opportunities that you can create that I can't create you know we were trying to to the the black community Through the Mavs with multiple white men we were trying to sell to moms with multiple white men it's not that they're not capable it's not that they're not skilled it's just everybody brings something different to the table and as an entrepreneur you have to recognize what the differences are that you bring the table and you have to be brutally honest with yourself right you can't lie to yourself like we all lie to ourselves as entrepreneur nor but those differences can be part of your unique skill set like I talked about earlier and now I'm finally starting to recognize those things and you know the one thing I know it's going to make me a load more money things are packages of of emphasis some things are emphasized in a product some things are not done as well in a product some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product and so different people make different choices and uh if the market tells us we're making the wrong choices we listen to the Market we're just we're just people running this company we're trying to make great products for people and so we we have at least the courage of our convictions to say we don't think this is part of what makes a great product we're going to leave it out some people are going to not like that they're going to call us names it's not going to be in certain companies vested interests that we do that but we're going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers and we're going to instead focus our energy on these Technologies which we think are in their ascendency and think are going to be the right Technologies for customers and you know what they're paying us to make those choices that's what a lot of customers pay us to do is to try to make the best products we can and if we succeed they'll buy them and if we don't they won't and it'll all work itself out yeah certainly during the time I was at Harvard I wasn't sure what I was going to do uh the idea that software was this field that uh was the opportunity was unbelievable that became more obvious during the 3-year period I was here uh but my dad had been a lawyer I thought of mathematics you know like doing well in the puam that was the coolest thing uh and the computer software I didn't think those people were as smart as the math people so it's was like well am I going to go into the easy field uh or this really hard field but uh anyway math uh was fantastic when I finally picked and decided to go go to Microsoft then I got into a period from age uh 19 uh to about 40 where I wasn't able to look at the latest on you know how tornadoes work or how mitochondria work I was pretty monomaniacal and when I was able to ask Steve this is the year 2000 Steve Balmer uh he he mist L graduated uh but then he started at St uh but I was trying to hire him but his parents told him you're supposed to graduate which was fine but then he started at Stanford Business school and he was in his first year and I thought this is perfect I'll get him to drop out of Stanford Business School uh so in a certain sense he is a Dropout uh uh and he was very key to the sucess of Microsoft I mean uh he knew a lot of things but during that period I didn't get to do much at Harvard you know I took all these courses because it was just so amazing that people were interested and talking about them and uh I I have to say I never went to a lecture during reading period or any anything because the courses that I was actually signed up for I finally started to work on those uh so I was in Hell the minute would open to the minute would close during reading period trying to catch up on on that other set of courses so people say I'm a drop out which is literally true but because I like college courses the online college courses there's a company called The Learning Company that I buy uh tons and tons of their stuff and I do you know at least four or five courses a year in a sense I like uh going to college more than anyone uh so know I sort of made my job certainly post Microsoft uh that I get to spend my time meeting with s scientists uh learning new things you know seeing what the hard problems are and some cases giving money to people to take on uh those very very hard problems I was wondering how you define success personally well I I can certainly define happiness because that's what that's what I am I mean I I and if that if that I mean I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year and I get to do it with people I like and I get to I get to I don't have to associate with anybody causes my stomach to churn at uh uh and uh the only thing in my job I don't like and this only happens about every three or four years occasionally I have to fire somebody and I don't like that's the only thing other than I I tap dance to work and I get down there and I think I'm supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling you know or something like my I mean that's the way I feel and I and and it it it it doesn't diminish it it's it's tremendous fun so uh you know if uh uh they say that uh uh success is uh uh uh getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get well I don't know which one applies in this case but I I do know that I I wouldn't be doing anything else I mean that uh uh I do advise you you know when you go out to work go go to work for an organization that you admire people you admire because it'll it'll it'll turn you on and and and uh uh you ought to be happy where you are working and I always worry about people who say you know I'm I'm going to do for 10 years I really don't like it very well then I'll do 10 more years of this and I mean that's a little like saving up sex for your old age I mean not not a very good idea so get right recommend that get right get right into get right into what you enjoy you know and and and you'll be successful at it you really will I mean you won't be able to miss and uh um you know that's uh uh I don't regard what I do as the most important thing in the world at all but it's right for me I mean I happen to be wired in a certain way that what I do Works in this if I had to do what you know Bill does I mean it last about 10 minutes and uh that's true of a lot of things but I luckily I kind of stumbled into the thing that I I do best and and that you know that it's worked out well in running a company for you know almost 20 years now one of the things that's been pretty clear is when you have a team that's cohesive you can get almost anything done and you know you can you can run through super hard challenges um you can make hard decisions and push really hard to to do the best work even you know and kind of optimize something super well but when when there's that tension I mean that's that's when when things get really tough and you know when I talk to other friends who run other companies and things like that I think one of the things that I actually spend a disproportionate amount of time on in running this company is just fostering a pretty tight core group of of people who are running the company uh with me and that to me is is kind of the thing that both makes it fun right having having you know friends and people you've worked with for a while and new people and New Perspectives but like a pretty tight group who can who you can go work on some of these crazy things with um but to me that's also the most stressful thing is is when when there when there's tension um you know that's that that weighs on me I I think the you know just it's it's it's maybe not surprising I mean we're like a very people focused company and it's the the people is the the part of it that that um you know weighs on me the most to make sure that we get right but yeah that that that I'd say across everything that we do is probably the the big thing some things look I am very financially motivated I've never denied it I say it probably one time a day extremely financially motivated I love the idea measuring thing based on financial windfalls um when we did the Miami Marlin stadium it had nothing to do with money it was 34,000 people they're