Yachts, villains, titans, tenets 🛥️
If you’ve spent some time catching up on the scroll this holiday season, you may have noticed that Instagram has a lot of clips of Jeff Bezos, the founder and ex-CEO of Amazon.
Sometimes the clips are the current “swole”, suntanned, retiree Jeff giving business advice.
Sometimes, they are old interviews of the young, geeky Bezos talking about his vision for “Day 1 of the internet.” To give credit where it is due, while it’s clear that what he was saying was out there for the time, he successfully built an entire company around this tenet that it’s always Day 1.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, the idea roughly translates to:
What have you done for the customers and the company today? Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Today.
Beautiful in theory, understandably grueling in practice. It is also less easy to compliment, now knowing it turned him into a bridge-disassembling yacht villain.
But for those of us want to run successful businesses (yet not turn into yacht villains), or work in places where we can perform at a high standard without burning out, we can use it for our own ends. Namely, that:
