Wellsbaum.blog

Writing about life and arts

The case for playing the long game

Jeff Bezos in 1990

Good things take time. If we all settled for immediate results, there would be no Apple, Amazon, or Tesla.

The world’s best leaders are visionaries. They work years ahead, having planted the seeds for what’s happening now to springboard them into the future.

When asked in 2018 what he thinks when analysts congratulate him on a “good quarter”, Jeff Bezos said:

“Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. Today I’m working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it’s probably been done for a couple years…If we have a good quarter it’s because of work we did 3, 4, 5 years ago. It’s not because we did a good job this quarter.”

Jeff Bezos

So what type of futurists should we be, the tortoise or the hare, the fox or the hedgehog?

Get ready to go years being misunderstood.

PS. Watch a young Jeff Bezos outline his vision for Amazon way back in 1997 right here.

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