Prashanth Narayan

Because customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf.

As you play you can deliberately try inventing these random juxtapositions, and then use your intuition to tell you whether any of them seem to have significance for you. That's the bit the computer can't do. It can produce millions of new connections, but it can't tell which one smells interesting.

“the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.” ~ Emerson

• B, boundaries. There is no trust without boundaries.


• R, reliability. I can only trust you if you do what you say you're going to do. And not once.


• A … Huge. Accountability. I can only trust you if, when you make a mistake, you are willing to own it, apologize for it, and make amends. I can only trust you if when I make a mistake, I am allowed to own

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Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating.

Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone.

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me.