Quotes About Adaptation

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

Life is a series of abandonings.

Build what you need as you need it, aggressively refactoring as you go along; don't spend a lot of time planning for grandiose, unknown future scenarios. Good software can evolve into what it will ultimately become.

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change the tools, and the tools change us.

We start with the customer and we work backward. We learn whatever skills we need to service the customer. We build whatever technology we need to service the customer.

The physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

Strip malls are a symbol for marginal, low-experience stores that nobody really wants to go to. Over time, say within 10 years, maybe 15 percent of commerce will move online. Will that have a big impact on the physical world? Absolutely. What will that effect be? It will force stores to get better. The ones that don't get better will go by the wayside.

My approach to criticism and what I teach and preach inside Amazon -- is when you're criticized, first look in a mirror and decide, are your critics right? If they're right, change. Don't resist.

There's a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting--stick with what you're good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set.

Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

Strip malls are history.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

In life and in movies, it's a similar challenge, where you have expectations, and you end up in situations that are not meeting your expectations.

To me, this book is sort of like a snakeskin. A snakeskin is something you might find on the side of the road and make something out of—a belt, say, or a hatband. The snake itself heads off doing more snake stuff—getting it on with lady snakes, eating rats, making more snakeskins, et cetera.

As the Dude says, New shit comes to light, and when it does, you'll pick it up again.

The greatest enthusiasm in the world won't make up for a business plan that doesn't work.

Soetsu Yanagi, in the "Unknown Craftsman", writes, "Man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs." For example, for optimal productivity, a carpenter needs woodworking tools and an environment conducive to his work, not a steam shovel or army tank.

Each of us was born in an era when complexity has become the hallmark of our existence.

Today, merely being born guarantees that you will face a never-ending stream of complexity within your home, on the highway, at work, and everywhere in between.

One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.

we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We're not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.

Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today's Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

When people have to pay more and own more of the risk themselves, their decisions about where and how they live will change.

It was ironic—the great socialists could only survive by becoming capitalists." But