Key takeaways
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy doesn’t have many regrets—but the decisions where he didn’t see something through are the ones he feels “a little bit of remorse about.”
- Jassy added that most things worth doing take a lot of hard work.
- He also said that people should focus on the things they can control, rather than the things they can’t control.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently spoke to employees and said he hasn’t regretted a lot of the decisions he’s made in his life—but the regrets he has all have one thing in common: They’re things he didn’t see through. He spoke about when he helped start Amazon Web Services. “While we were excited about what we were building, I would not say that we were filled with unbridled confidence,” Jassy said. “There was a lot of uncertainty as we were building. People inside the company thought it was nutty."
“I haven’t regretted a lot of the decisions I’ve made in my life,” Jassy said. “I feel like you make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time, and you don’t have perfect information. But the ones I’ve looked back on and felt a little bit of remorse about have been the decisions where I left something where I felt like I really didn’t see it through. Maybe it could have been successful, it could have worked out, it was really hard, and I left.
“And that doesn’t mean you should always stay in everything you’re doing. But there are a lot of times when you have uncertainty and it’s new ... where you’re uncomfortable. Where, if you can just hang in there, if you can just stay in the boat, you may find that you build something remarkable with a group of people.
“And so, I made the decision that I was going to see it through," Jassy said of AWS. "When the team and I got to a point where we started thinking about how do we control what we can control, we can't control whether people will use this new form of computing, we can't control how fast it'll grow, we can't control if it's a successful business, but we can control what we define, and we can control what we build, and we can control who we hire, and we can control the speed at which we operate, and we can control who we target as customers, and we can control pricing it, so that we build something long term.
“Once we started focusing on controlling what we could control, we got to a much better spot," he said. "I think the business has worked out reasonably well. We have a ton of work to do, obviously moving forward."
He went on to say that it’s very rare that you “catch lightning in a bottle, where you have an idea, you launch it a few days and it’s a home run.”
“Almost always it takes a lot of hard work. It takes time that we are uncertain, it takes decisions that you made that didn't quite work out, that you had to adjust, it takes resilience and persistence, and everything that's worth doing, I think, virtually everything that's worth doing, takes that type of persistence and resilience, and so that was a great lesson for me.”
