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12 pieces of advice from Jeff Bezos, from dealing with failure to shunning the phrase ‘work-life balance’
Bezos has offered nuggets of advice throughout his time as Amazon’s CEO, from dealing with failure to the 4 key attributes of a “dreamy business.”
Failure is important.
“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments,” Bezos wrote in a 2018 letter to shareholders. “If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”
Bezos noted that the infamous Fire phone was a failure for Amazon, but that the company was “able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa.”
Work and life shouldn’t be a balancing game.
“I get asked about work-life balance all the time, and my view is that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict trade-off,” Bezos said during an April 2018 awards event hosted by Axel Springer, Insider’s parent company.

