This picture of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in the 90’s will help you gain some much needed perspective
Girls and boys, what you see there is a giant in the making.
Notice that huge desktop monitor. The weird carpet everywhere. The hand painted logo hanging on the wall. Now that’s some hardcore, no bullshit 90’s entrepreneurship. Nothing like the fancy wannabes of today, flexing their cars and houses on Instagram.
But make no mistake, that man was destined — not by luck but by cheer willpower — and already on his way to change the world.
The Jeff Bezos we know today
Jeff Bezos just recently made headlines — as he does every other weeks— for becoming the richest man in history, surpassing Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at 150 billion USD.
Yes, there’s a lot of controversy surrounding him, as there usually is for anyone who has achieved so much. But even if you don’t agree with his methods, I’m sure you can find some inspiration in his work.
He’s built Amazon.com, basically shaping an entire industry over the course of two decades. Amazon is responsible for 0.50 cents of every dollar spent on e-commerce in the U.S.
They also branched into streaming, cloud hosting services, voice assistants, payment processing and so much more. Bezos is also competing with Elon Musk for the title of craziest billionaire that will save humanity.
But it didn’t look like that in the beggining
Looking at Bezos now is truly inspiring — just like looking at other living legends like Elon Musk, Marc Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Dwayne Johnson. Each of them on top of their game, a beast in their industries.
It probably isn’t fair, however, to compare yourself against that. Jeff Bezos was around 35 in the picture at the start of this post — taken from an interview on CBS New’s show 60 minutes, which you can watch below — and things have changed drastically since then.
When measuring ourselves against the legendary figures we aspire to surpass, we sometimes might feel unmotivated by how far we feel from them.
You look at your surroundings and it doesn’t feel anywhere as glamorous as what we thing their lives looked like. You’re hustling everyday, answering clients and making coffee, and you can’t imagine your idols living like that.
And Bezos, look at him! His life is so cool!
But at some point, his life might have been very similar to how yours is today. He probably was also broke at some point or maybe felt lost and clueless about his career. What made him change was pouring in absurd amounts of work into his vision and dreams and deciding that things were going to get different, no matter what.
We fail to see how much of our hero’s journeys we don’t know about, because it wasn’t a fun story for the media to report. Talking about the glamorous lives of entrepreneurs after 30 years in the making gets a lot more views than showing someone eating instant noodles everyday to afford working full time on their dream business.
For each person you admire, there’s decades of hard work you can’t see
You most likely only started hearing about Jeff Bezos in the last 5–10 years. That’s about when most people did, because it’s when entrepreneurship became sexy and because he had already accomplished incredible things.
But as you can see in the interview, we don’t get to see the real work it took up until that point. The decades when he was not admired by hundreds of millions of people. When his name was not recognized anywhere.
And that’s very unhealthy for anyone trying to replicate the success people like Bezos have had. A lot of us have unrealistic expectations about how fast you can grow a business or how much of your life you need to sacrifice in order to do so, because we prefer to consume stories of overnight success and making lots of money without any effort than facing the reality that our dreams require years of real effort.
Just recently, Dwayne Johnson was reported to be the highest paying actor in history. And at some point, he thought his career would be as a player in the NFL until a injury ended it and he decided to follow his father’s footsteps in wrestling, which eventually led him to realize his talent as an entertainer.
It’s absurd to see how much work the man puts in everyday when he has already accomplished so much. He stars in several movies every year, an HBO series, is absolutely amazing at creating content for social media and still finds time to work out. A lot.
The fact that people like Bezos and The Rock still work so hard after basically winning the game has to do with what drives them. They still have goals and ambitions, but they simply love the game too much to quit. A lot of people dream of retirement but that would probably be their worst nightmare.
Takeaways for your life
That’s all very nice but here’s what I want you to leave with:
- Your idols have probably put in A LOT more work than you have so far;
- For that reason, let them inspire you, but never feel intimidated by them;
- It will take an absurd amount of hard work and resilience to get to where they are;
- The only way you’ll put in that much effort is if you love the process.
That’s the point, really. You’ll only find in yourself strength to overcome all the obstacles you will find if your motivation is not the goal but the journey.
If you feel it’ll only be worth it when you have all the money and fame you aspire to, when you’re already competing and working with your idols, you’ll probably give up before getting there.
And it’s ok if you still haven’t found your true calling, something you love doing so much that you’ll want to be doing even when you don’t have to anymore. Just keep trying new things, going where your heart takes you, until you find it.
After all, what’s the alternative? Do something you don’t enjoy for 40 years then retire and do nothing for another 40 years?
Go do something you enjoy with your life. Give all of yourself to a dream. Remember that your heroes probably looked a lot like you at some point, so you might look a lot like them at some point.
Did you enjoy this article? Then leave a like or a comment and I’ll know I should write more piece like this one.
Thanks for reading!
