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Why Do High Performers Feel Bad at Amazon?

Ethan Evans says Amazon talked about the hours in euphemisms. Jeff Bezos's line was that he did not like "work-life balance." He preferred "work-life harmony." If you enjoy the work, working a lot can still be a life in harmony. Evans heard that as a polite way to say: forget balance, and put the hours in.

Bezos would also say they work long, hard, and smart, and that two out of three do not count. A good idea was not permission to go home at three. Write it down, and bring another by seven and another by ten. The company said a career has seasons, and that if you have kids and you want to see them, Amazon may be the wrong season. The alternative on offer was to go home at six, put them to bed, and get back on at eight until midnight. The line Evans says people repeated is that Amazon is where high performers go to feel bad about themselves. The bar moved up after you cleared it.

Transcript

Ex-Amazon VP tells us what it’s really like working with Jeff Bezos ·

My First Million

More from this episode

  1. Why Did Jeff Bezos Only Give Criticism?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos was not mean, but he was demanding, and he almost never said anything good. He would hear an idea and name the three things to fix.
  2. Why Did Jeff Bezos Ship the Fire Phone?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos fell into the flaw of every great man.
  3. Why Did Jeff Bezos Call a Team the B Team?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos once stopped a meeting and asked whether the A team for the project was available, because the people in the room were clearly the…
  4. Why Did Jeff Bezos Trust Anecdotes Over Data?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos kept his Amazon email open to the world.
  5. Why Did Jeff Bezos Send Question Mark Emails?Ethan Evans says a question mark email was how Jeff Bezos scaled customer obsession when he was too busy to investigate every complaint.
  6. What Does Strategically Patient Mean to Jeff Bezos?Ethan Evans says "strategically patient, tactically impatient" was a Jeff Bezos idea. Important things take a long time.
  7. How Much Did Ethan Evans Make at Amazon?Ethan Evans says his target pay in his last year at Amazon was $900,000. The stock usually did better than the target, so he tended to make a low $1 million.
  8. Did Jeff Bezos Want Amazon to Become a Bank?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos always declined pitches to turn Amazon into a bank. People kept pitching finance because Bezos came from D. E.
  9. Who Invented Amazon Prime?Ethan Evans says two people claim Amazon Prime. Charlie Ward, then a principal engineer and later a VP, says he invented it.
  10. Why Does Amazon's Website Look Ugly?Sam Parr uses Amazon as the example of bad design beating good design. A fashionable designer thinks good design means colors and a flat layout.
  11. Who Did Jeff Bezos Quote About the Stock Market?Ethan Evans says the person Jeff Bezos quoted a lot was Benjamin Graham, the investor Warren Buffett also follows.

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