Jeff Bezos is one of the most well known and successful icons of the internet era, starting his company Amazon, on July 5, 1994 in Bellevue, Washington in his garage.

Amazon hired 500,000 employees last year and directly employs 1.3 million people and created $1.6 Trillion of wealth for shareholders around the world, with its inventions such as Prime, Alexa, and Amazon Web Service (AWS).

Earlier this year Jeff Bezos announced that he would be stepping down from his lofty position as CEO of Amazon moving into his new role as Executive Chairman of Amazon's board.

On April 15th, 2021 Mr. Bezos wrote his last letter to his shareholders, in it he covered a vast amount of topics regarding Amazon's impact on the world.

In this letter Mr. Bezos encouraged his employees and shareholders to “create more than you consume”, going on to say,

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. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out.

He's correct, our ability to be inventive and creative more than we consume our resources is key to our survival. Our companies in the tech space longs for the best and brightest but must continue to add support and value to it's inventors or else it will debilitate the source leaving it without strength to forge new concepts and ideas.

But then Mr. Bezos said something else that was truly remarkable and attention worthy, he prepared us for his mental model with a quote from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker:

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.

Bezos makes his point from this rich quote:

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?

The world tugs at our mental capacity to make us normal and just like everyone else, if we are not aligned perfectly on the same learning benchmark as student ["X"] then we are deemed incapable. This is true in the tech sector as well, just because one person isn't great at data structures and algorithms (yet), doesn't make that individual incapable of doing the job correctly.

Photo of Jeff Bezos

Be Distinctive

It's our ability to be distinctive in our characteristics that distinguishes us from others that makes us valuable.

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.

The Ability to problem solve and scale is in something that has to be nurtured and exercised starting at an early age. One such school is doing just that it's called Synthesis School co-founded by Joshua Dahn who was also the co-founder of Ad Astra School located on the campus of SpaceX from 2014-2020.

Elon Musk asked me to start an experimental school with him at SpaceX. The goal was to develop students who are enthralled by complexity and solving for the unknown. Synthesis is the most innovative learning experience from that school. It is designed to cultivate student voice, strategic thinking, and collaborative problem solving. - Joshua Dahn

photo of Joshua Dahn

Synthesis is a weekly, 1-hour enrichment program for students who want to learn how to build the future from ages 6 to 14. Thier goal is to train children now to be the thinkers and innovators of the future. So far they have gotten great reviews.

In Conclusion

You must never morph into normalcy, your value in tech or in (any space quite frankly) is better served by you bringing your innovative, intelligent, whole-self to any company. When we place real value on the individual as being priceless to our teams we all win. The next big idea isn't going to normal, Jeff Bezos isn't normal nor should you be.