Hi people this is Binx here and Welcome back to the Website. Now since the past week, I've been reading this beautiful book written by Brad stone called “The store” and since I've started reading this book. I just couldn't stop obsessing over Jeff Bezos and Amazon and while I was reading this book I came to a realization that so many people around us are, so I much fascinated by Jeff Bezos his net worth and how he makes and spends his billions you know thanks to the billion-dollar pages that have been popping up lately. But on the other hand, none of us are deeply concerned about the habits that turned Jeff Bezos into the icon that he is today. We are never curious about what are the books he reads or how does he get these brilliant ideas because of which he's able to establish his company. As a monopoly in more than 13 sectors which is why in this episode today we're going to do a deep dive into some of the most amazing practices of Jeff Bezos himself and these are the practices that you can start practicing from tomorrow itself and hopefully, it will bring in some remarkable transformations in the way you think with that let's get started with this episode.
The first habit that we're talking about is his mindset of work ethic now people on average a corporate employee works for about 45 hours a week that's about 9 hours a day. But Jeff Bezos the CEO of a trillion-dollar company works only for 8 hours a day the question is in this fast-paced world of hustle and bustle. How does the CEO of a trillion-dollar company manage to work only for eight hours a day?
And that is because he functions with something called the manager's mindset now people typically if you look at it there are two ways in which we function while we approach any particular project.
- The first mindset is the worker's mindset and
- The second mindset is the manager's mindset
Workers mindset is when you measure the success of your work solely based on the time and efforts that you have put in. for example, if you end up working for 12 hours a day on a particular project you would consider that day to be successful it's called the worker's mindset because during the industrial revolution the value of a worker was solely measured based on the time that he could put in and the efforts that he could put in.
On the contrary, the manager's mindset is when you measure the success of your work solely based on the outcome that you have generated. For example, even if you end up working for say 15 hours a day. On a particular project and if you have not been able to generate a significant amount of output you would consider that day to be unsuccessful at the same time even if you work for only three hours a day and you were able to bring out the desired output you would consider that date to be successful.
Now the lesson that we all have to learn over here is that people we are no longer living in an age of slogging but about getting maximum work done in the shortest possible time and while the world is obsessed with this idea of the hustle and 16-hour work ethic we need to always be mindful that there is a thin line between genuine hard work and useless logging and that is our first takeaway for the day with that.
We move on to the second practice that is the importance of decision-making now people at the David Rubinstein show Jeff Bezos stated that as a senior executive your job is not to make thousands of decisions. But to make a few great decisions that will impact the future of the company, and he said that at no given point of time should you ever compromise on the quality of the decision just because you're tired or you're crouching.
Now the reason why I say this is important despite this being hammered to all of us hundreds of times by multiple sources is that we still take decision-making for granted a very simple example of that would be the decisions that we take related to our education. Now how many of you guys have actually sat down with the laptop to understand? How is the market going to change in the next 10 years and how is the engineering field or any other field that you're going to choose to go to equip you with the skillet which is relevant in today's world and will stay relevant after you have graduated. And I bet you that 99 of you have not done the research that is required the only question that we ask is guys field miss scope, and then we immediately jump into making the decisions that will potentially be changing our lives forever. This is the reason why being a YouTuber sounds like a stupid decision at the same time being an unemployed engineer sounds like a sensible decision.
We never think on these lines because we very easily submit to the rat race without realizing the fact that every single decision that we are making related to our career is irreversible and will change our lives forever.
Now in the context of business decision-making becomes even more important because now your decisions will no longer just affect you but it will also affect a bunch of other people in your team and because most people do not realize the importance of the decision-making leaders mess up all the time now there's an interesting toy that I read in my history textbook which tells you the importance of decision-making using a real-life example now this is a story of the 20th century Vietnam. Wherein the governor of Indochina Paul Dover came to Vietnam, and he decided to change everything in Vietnam by making it a more hygienic and more civilized society. He planned to transform the entire City of Hanoi into a city of urbanism order and renovation and these are the things that were considered to be civilized in France.
So the first step that he took was to eliminate filth by developing a sewer system for Hanoi and as soon as the sewer system was built everybody was applauding Paul dormer and it was considered to be a brilliant decision until the sewer system began to become a breeding ground for rats and rodents. Now during the 20th-century rats and rodents were perhaps the scariest creatures in a city because they were closely linked to something called the bubonic plague which was perhaps the deadliest plague at that time and ended up killing 25 million people in Europe alone.
So the french administration decided to tackle this problem by recruiting a bunch of Vietnamese vigilantes to go out there and hunt the rats but as it turns out the rats always ended up out populating the Vietnamese vigilantes and you know the more they killed the more rats came in so they decided to accelerate this program by coming out with a city-wide bounty program to kill the rats when they said that for every rat you kill you have to bring us the tail of the rats and we will pay you one cent per tail because they did not want to deal with the rat corpses because they were civilized you know so what happened was many many people began to you know kill rats and bring in dozens and dozens of tails this number of the tails which was supposedly representing the number of rats killed went up as high as 20 000. and as it turns out the problem was not being solved at all, so when the french administration started to do a deep dive into how this operation was actually being conducted. they understood that many of these Vietnamese vigilantes were not at all killing the rats they were only cutting off the tail and they were letting the rats go so that the rats could breed. and then produce more babies eventually giving them a great business outcome and some people even began to smuggle rats into the city and engaged in something called rat farming. and later in 1906 as it turns out there was a bubonic plague outbreak that ended up killing 263 people immediately after the rat bounty program was abolished and paul domer returned to France to never come back to Vietnam.
Now, this is a classy example to demonstrate the magnitude of repercussions that could be caused because of a low-quality decision so always remember people as leaders. your job is not to work hard but to think well so that the entire hard work of your team is channelized in the right direction and produces the desired output without backfiring like the case in Vietnam.
With that, we move on to practice number three that is about scheduling the day now people in the same David Rubinstein show jeff Bezos stated that he always schedules all of his high IQ meetings at 10 am and gets done with all of this high IQ stuff before lunch. Now the question is. why is that so?
As of now, I'll just give you a brief overview of what this is all about? so our brain has two kinds of functions the first is the function that is required for creative activities that are the ability to do creative thinking and the second is the ability to do laborious work which does not require any sort of critical thinking whatsoever. so from 9 am to 1 pm typically if you see your brain is highly capable of doing critical thinking so if you schedule all of your creative work from 9 am to 1 pm you will be able to work most efficiently. but at the same time if you postpone this work post-lunch you will become drowsy and the same work which will possibly take one hour in the morning will end up taking two to three hours post-lunch which will result in low quality work and absolute frustration and after you're done with all of your work I would say immediately after 6 pm shut down your laptop go home and chill with your family and that's because people you need to give time for your brain to rejuvenate itself. so that it can be ready for the next morning.
So once you begin to be mindful about these productive practices you will begin to strike a perfect work-life balance and for god's sake people please don't be a case ass and stay in the office. after 6 pm and also expect your colleagues to do so too.
That's all from my side for today guys. thank you so much for being with me. throughout the episode. I just hope you found immense value in the practices that I've told you about Jeff Bezos please try and apply these practices to your life because that's when you will begin to extract the true value of this content and if you're new over here, please, consider subscribing. thank you so much I'll see the next one.
