In his final Amazon shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos shared a powerful mental model on maintaining your distinctiveness.
A thread on the fight against normalcy (in your career, startup, writing, or life):
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994.
In 27 years at the helm, he grew it into one of the largest and most influential companies in the world.
Today, it is worth almost $1.7 trillion.
Each year since its 1997 IPO, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.
In February, Jeff Bezos announced he would step down as CEO.
In his final annual shareholder letter, he covered his “create more than you consume” mantra and hit on climate and employee issues.
But its closing - on the fight against normalcy - held the most powerful lessons.
Bezos set the stage for his mental model with a quote from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker:
“The body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment...if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings.”
With the stage set, Bezos makes his point:
“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?...You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness...don’t expect it to be easy or free.”
This is a powerful mental model for thinking about distinctiveness.
If equilibrium with our surroundings - normalcy - is our natural state, we must fight to maintain distinctiveness.
Constantly, relentlessly.
Distinctiveness isn’t free - you have to pay your dues every day.
Once you internalize this framework, you will see it all around you.
You will see all of the ways that our systems and institutions are designed to keep you normal.
You will start to see how hard it is to be different - the true cost of distinctiveness.
One perfect example...
Education
Our traditional education systems look like the early Ford Model T assembly lines.
Standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum and arbitrary assessments of competency.
We leave kids behind, we hold back others.
We fail to foster innovation, ingenuity, and creativity.
Traditional education systems are designed to maintain equilibrium.
Conventional wisdom said it would be too hard to foster creativity at scale.
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Writing this thread, I was reminded of this awesome video from 2013 from @iamkidpresident@soulpancake. For anyone needing a good pep talk today!
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
- Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
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I’m excited to announce that my friend @Julian and I will be co-teaching a live sprint course on the art and science of audience building for Twitter and newsletters.
We will be teaching the sprint course in early June and will cover a variety of topics related to audience building.
It is designed to be tactical and provide course participants with everything @Julian and I wish we knew when we were getting started on our own creator journeys.
This course is for founders, creators, and builders looking to learn the ins and outs of audience building.
Participants will learn alongside a community of passionate, positive-sum individuals and have the opportunity to build circles to co-promote and grow.
Kaizen is a powerful concept for unlocking growth in your career, startup, business, writing, or life.
A short thread on what it means and the magic of continuous improvement...
Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning “improvement.”
In practice, the term is used to convey continuous improvement.
It is a dynamic process - ongoing, incremental, compounding daily improvements.
The origin of the concept of Kaizen is long, winding, and global in nature.
In the 1930s, Walter Shewhart - a Bell Labs engineer - had developed the Plan-Do-Study-Act System (PDSA) to assess the effectiveness of organizational changes in driving continued business improvement.