April 21, 2021
The Universe Wants You to be Typical
Dear Lucca,
Reading is a superpower. I really hope you pick up the habit earlier than your Dad did. I didn’t start reading outside of what was demanded from me in school or business until I was almost 30 and had moved to NC. There is so much wisdom out there from the world’s greatest teachers if you just take the time to seek it out.
One great source of knowledge is reading the shareholder letters of great business leaders. I have built many compilations of these shareholder letters over the years - from Jamie Dimon at JPM (which was your Dad’s first employer after graduation), to Larry Page & Sergey Brin co-founders of Google, to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. There are too many to note here but someday, if and when you are interested, I will share all of this with you. For now, I wanted to highlight an excerpt from a special letter.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. In twenty years, it grew to the largest company in history. In the meantime, he created Blue Origin to “build a road to space” as a Side Hustle. Watch THIS. Simply incredible.
But this note isn’t about space travel (I digress). It’s about something Bezos said in his last letter to shareholders (he’s stepping down as CEO this year to focus on “more important things”). Well, it’s two things, I suppose.
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The first piece of advice is to Create More Than You Consume. “If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with.” This is something your Dad struggles with every day. And it’s something I hope to instill in you at an early age. It’s why I always feel guilty for letting you stare at the screen all day. It’s one thing if you’re in front of the device “creating” … it’s another if you’re just passively, consuming. I hope you do a better job of this than I have. I hope you create beautiful things for this world.
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More importantly, I hope you will always be you. You do this better than anyone I know, now. There is nothing that has made me and your Mom happier than watching you grow up and not giving a single fuck about what other people think. You have always been you. And I hope that never changes. As Bezos explains in this last letter to shareholders, Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical.
Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical
This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon, and I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart.
Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins’ (extraordinary) book The Blind Watchmaker. It’s about a basic fact of biology.
Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.
While the passage is not intended as a Metaphor, it’s nevertheless a fantastic one, and very relevant to Amazon. I would argue that it’s relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?
I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship. Not infrequently, the husband looks at the wife with faux distress and says to her, “Can’t you just be normal?” They both smile and laugh, and of course the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something he loves about her. But, at the same time, it’s also true that things would often be easier – take less energy – if we were a little more normal.
This phenomenon happens at all scale levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If we stopped doing all of the continuous hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny.
We all know that Distinctiveness – Originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.
You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.
The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.
As always, I attach our 1997 shareholder letter. It concluded with this: “We at Amazon.com are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement.”
That hasn’t changed a bit. I want to especially thank Andy Jassy for agreeing to take on the CEO role. It’s a hard job with a lot of responsibility. Andy is brilliant and has the highest of high standards. I guarantee you that Andy won’t let the universe make us typical. He will muster the energy needed to keep alive in us what makes us special. That won’t be easy, but it is critical. I also predict it will be satisfying and oftentimes fun. Thank you, Andy.
To all of you: be kind, be original, create more than you consume, and never, never, never let the universe smooth you into your surroundings. It remains Day 1.
The world wants you to be typical. To be a little more normal. Don’t ever let that happen. Don’t ever forget - we will always want you to be you. Love, Dad
Love,
Dad