#72 Create and Differentiate
This post is a summary of Jeff Bezos's last (2020) letter to shareholders as the CEO of Amazon. I hope he continues to write the annual letter as Chair of Amazon. I have summarized letters from 1997-2018 here.
He highlights that creation is the key to running a successful business or leading a successful life - create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. If you don't create value for your customers, you will not survive as a business for long. He states that invention is the root of all real value creation. Value created is best thought of as a metric for innovation.
He urges us to embrace our distinctiveness and originality as it is valuable (as individuals and as a business). He quotes a passage from Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker - to highlight the work put in by all living beings to stave off death. For example, the human body needs to work hard to maintain its body temperature. Likewise, we need to consciously put in the effort to maintain our distinctiveness and originality. The world around us is exerting pressure to make us typical. Defaults, convenience, algorithms (in the online world) constantly push you towards the typical. If you don't actively resist this pressure to become more typical, you become less valuable (as an individual and as a business).
He highlights that the common advice of "be yourself" seems to connote that this is easy or natural to do so. He stresses that the opposite is true - you need to put in a lot of energy (on a continuous basis) to be yourself. You need to work against a lot behavioral and thought patterns. He made a similar argument in his 2016 letter urging companies to always maintain the vitality of a new company - Day 1 (failure to maintain this mentality results in stasis - which eventually leads to the death of a company)
Spend your time and money on embracing your distinctiveness. Use this distinctiveness to create something valuable.