Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently shared some life wisdom in a conversation with his younger brother Mark at the gateway Summit Series in Los Angeles, as TechCrunch reports.
Bezos, now the richest man in the world, took a risk when he started the behemoth that is now Amazon. He was working as a software engineer on Wall Street, and in 1994 he left his job despite concern from his boss about leaving to start his own company. But Bezos didn’t want to look back wondering what would’ve happened if he didn’t pursue his vision: “The best way to think about it was to project my life forward to age 80,” he told his brother about deciding to start Amazon. He wanted to make a decision that “minimized my regrets. You don’t want to be cataloguing your regrets,” he said, adding that if his project did fail, “I would be very proud when I was 80 that I tried.”
And for someone who heads a platform built on the web, Bezos is surprisingly thoughtful about how he uses his phone. His brother Mark noted that Jeff is “rarely distracted by his phone,” according to TechCrunch. “When I have dinner with friends or family, I like to be doing whatever I’m doing, I don’t like to multitask,” Bezos said.
Another thing Bezos doesn’t like: the idea of work-life balance. Bezos shared this sentiment with Thrive Global a year ago, writing, “I think work-life harmony is a good framework. I prefer the word ‘harmony’ to the word ‘balance’ because balance tends to imply a strict tradeoff.” He reiterated these statements at Summit, telling his brother that being a valuable and cooperative coworker makes his life outside the office better, and vice versa: “If I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss.”
Read more of his comments on TechCrunch.