Jeff Bezos: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. And he describes in all kinds of different ways, Walter Isaacson does, that creativity combined with childlike wander that you’ve maintained still to this day, all of that combined together. If you were to study your own brain, introspect, how do you think? What’s your thinking process like? We’ll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon. But when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high-dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward, is there something you could say about that process? It’s such a good question, and I honestly don’t know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering, so when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don’t know where I’m going. So, to go in a straight line… To be efficient… Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because real invention, Not incremental improvement… Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I’m talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, and they feel like wandering is inefficient. And when I sit down at a meeting, I don’t know how long the meeting is going to take if we’re trying to solve a problem, because if I did, then I’d know there’s some kind of straight line that we’re drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there’s really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spit balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So, sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth, and both things are really pleasurable. And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea. And maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea. I’ll maybe pull at that string. Because I don’t think good ideas come fully-formed.…

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