Staying in Day 1 Mentality
Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s best thinkers. He’s the richest man in the world and has transformed a once bookstore into a $314.9 billion company. How? — Jeff has Day 1 mentality + understands what it takes to be anti-complacent. In this article, I broke down the shareholder letter Jeff sent out a few years ago on the power of Day 1 mentality.
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” -Jeff Bezos
This is the most notable quote in the letter and it represents the importance of not getting complacent. Complacency trains us to be satisfied with the results, disregarding the path of growth, feedback, and improvement. In my experience, day 2 mentality leads down a path of anti-hustle and actually slows down our rate of completing tasks because we feel as if we don’t have anything to chase after.
Jeff’s starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.
Customer obsession — This is a sustainable strategy that compounds over time because customers are the sole thing that leads to success in a company. Great product, employees, office, etc don’t mean anything if you don’t have a customer. Companies in day 2…
