I've never thought of Jeff Bezos as a great, inspirational speaker.
He's obviously super smart, and his investor letters are generally good reads, but I don't remember seeing any great clips of him talking about running Amazon.
Yesterday, I saw this clip of Bezos via Twitter. I've watched it a half dozen times since. There's something inspiring and infectious to the way he speaks here.
He starts off by by facetiously joking that Amazon was half luck, half good timing, and the rest is "brains". (In other words, no brains need.)
Then he gets more serious and says that Amazon developed a thick skin early on because it wasn't profitable and people were skeptical about its success. He continues, saying...
"Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood," says Bezos. "You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time well-meaning people may criticize that effort, and when you receive criticism from well-meaning people it pays to say -- first of all, search yourself -- are they right? And if they are you need to adapt what you're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right then you need to have that long term willingness to be misunderstood."
The clip is from 2009, but looks like it was just posted recently.
Here's the clip:
