Know Your Author - Jeff Bezos #Invent & Wander
Hey guys, welcome back to another Know Your Author Series with Discovery Shoppe Book Club 😁😇 - Episode 4
I bet we all enjoyed Episode 3 on Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success.
Our book for July was Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos with an introduction by Walter Isaacson. It's a memoir containing a collection of his writings.
Considering that Jeff Bezos is the planet's richest man, you'd think we'd be hard-pressed to find out some new things about him right? Let's dive right in and take a look for ourselves. Sit tight to Know Your Author!
As usual, we observed that it is more interesting to read a book and finish it 😅 when you know a thing or two about the author(s). It allows you to read from their perspective, experience, background and even with their tone. So here it goes. Have fun! We hope you enjoy reading this post as much as we enjoyed writing it.
Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. Bezos is the founder and CEO of the multinational technology company Amazon, and owner of 'The Washington Post.' With a net worth of more than $200 billion as of June 2021, he is the richest person in the world according to both Forbes and Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. The Jorgensens were married less than a year. Bezos has no recollection of his biological father and, yup, has never seen him before. His biological father didn't even know that his son was the owner of Amazon until a reporter approached Ted at his small bike repair shop in Glendale, Arizona in 2012. He didn’t also know whether his son was alive or dead before that. Sadly, Ted passed away in 2015, without ever meeting his adult son. His mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant when Bezos was 4 years old, and Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. PS: Did Bezos start university studying something else and later switch courses? Yes - read Invent & Wander for the full gist.
At three, Bezos was found trying his hand at dismantling his own crib with a screwdriver. Apparently, I think what young Jeff wanted was to rebuild the crib as a much bigger bed. Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child. He even rigged an electrical alarm to keep his two siblings away from his room and during the summer holidays, he would work in his grandfather's ranch repairing caterpillar tractors.
Bezos moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. He also came up with the idea of Amazon on a cross country road trip when he worked with a Hedge Fund. Though surprisingly, he'd initially wanted to name Amazon 'Cadabra.'
But all of that's common knowledge, correct? Do you know that in the 1990s, Bezos came under heavy criticism because his business practices projected a public image of prudence and parsimony with his own wealth and that of Amazon (I mean, he was a multi-billionaire who drove a 1996 Honda Accord, so they thought him stingy: to himself and his company). Throughout the early 2000s, he was perceived to be geeky or nerdy. And then, during the early 2010s (quite suddenly, if you ask me), Jeff Bezos started to wear tailored clothing; he weight trained, pursued a regimented diet and began to freely spend his money. In 2014, Bezos topped the World’s Worst Bosses poll conducted by the International Trade Union Confederation (IUTC). He and eight other bosses were the candidates, with the total number of votes cast exceeding 20,000.
Bezos does not schedule early morning meetings and enforces a two-pizza rule—a preference that meetings are small enough for two pizzas to feed everyone in the boardroom. Also, he meets with Amazon investors for a total of only six hours a year. Finally, in early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called "Amazon Prime Air," using drones to provide delivery services to customers. He said these drones would be able to carry items weighing up to five pounds and be capable of travelling within a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution center. The first Prime Air delivery took place in Cambridge, England, on December 7, 2016. Oh, and by the way, he also had a 500ft tall clock, with a 10,000-year lifespan built on his personal mountain, near Van Horn, Texas. He also reportedly bought a boat, though that word feels inappropriately sensible for the monstrosity going to Captain Bezos: a 417-foot superyacht that's so massive it has its own "support yacht" with a helipad, according to Bloomberg. The estimated cost, not including the boat's support boat, is $500 million (that's half a BILLION dollars, people).
Journalist Walt Mossberg dubbed the idea that someone who cannot tolerate criticism or critique shouldn't do anything new or interesting "The Bezos Principle". Truly, Bezos has had his share of criticism over the years, but that hasn't stopped this passionate business tycoon from attaining his lifelong dream: to lead in the colonization of the space frontier.
Conclusion
You can find out more about Jeff Bezos by reading his book - Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos with an introduction by Walter Isaacson. There you'd get to know how he runs his company (Amazon and Blue Origin), what he is passionate about (space, energy use, homelessness, etc), and his personal philosophies and values like his Day 1 philosophy, customer obsession, work-life harmony, and more.
Also, look through the following links:
Till next time
Remain Cheerful,
Onyedikachi Nwachukwu
#Invent&Wander #memior #knowyourauthor
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