If you wanted to compare prices on a product, do you know where 9 out of 10 buyers go online to do so? Do you know which online seller sells more than 12 million products annually? Which online seller averages more than 200 million unique visitors per month? The answer to all three questions is Amazon.
In 2020, Amazon’s net revenue was more than $386 Billion.
Yes, that’s BILLIONS.
From an early age, Amazon’s founder & CEO, Jeff Bezos wanted to be known as someone smart. As a kid, his heroes included Thomas Edison, which makes sense, considering his dreams involved building something no one had ever seen before. To get there, he realized he had to be highly educated on multiple topics. With that in mind, he read profusely and drank in as much knowledge as he could. As a result, he became a top student at an elite university. Upon graduation, he worked for smart startups before eventually selling everything and heading for Seattle to try doing something entirely new all on his own.
With only $10,000 to start and a load of debt, Jeff and his wife began selling books online out of their garage. At the time, few paid any attention to them. After all, who would want to buy books online? Even his parents expected him to fail. To everyone’s surprise, the online bookstore, named after the longest river in the world, succeeded. Within 3 years, he’d made $54 million and wasn’t about to stop there.
Jeff Bezos saw how the world was changing around him. People were going to the internet for more than memes. Over the next several years, Jeff dipped his toe into many things, expanding Amazon to include everything from travel services to groceries. Not everything worked, the aforementioned travel services, for example. Yet other things took off like a rocket. Now, millions of people worldwide do their shopping for everything from above ground pools to zucchini on Amazon.
The exciting thing to learn here involves taking chances. When you look over the history of Amazon since its inception almost 27 years ago, you’ll find a lot of great ideas alongside some that weren’t great at all. (Anyone remember the Amazon Fire Phone?) Some of those mistakes cost the company millions. The point is that Jeff never gave up. He was willing to take risks. Which is how a company that entered the stock market at $1.96 a share in the 1990s came to be worth $3057 per share at the writing of this article.
What can you learn from Jeff Bezos?
Don’t be afraid to try. If you fail, it’s not a big deal. Get up. Try again. Keep trying until you make it. Keep trying until, like Jeff Bezos, you find what you’re good at and succeed.
