How To Be an Inventor (The Day-One Mindset)

Nugget from Jeff Bezos

Hey Friend!

Today I picked a nugget (from 2 different sources) from Jeff Bezos on how to be a successful inventor (and entrepreneur).

Jeff argues that the key lies in developing expertise (on whatever you are doing) BUT not be trapped by that same expertise! Which means that you have to be an expert with a beginner’s mind.

👤 Author

💡Nugget

✦ Jeff Bezos

🟠 Source: Summit

If you want to be an inventor of any kind (e.g. inventing a new service offering for customers, or a new product or anything), it requires that you have to be a domain expert—because the world is so complicated.

Even if you're not at the beginning, you have to “learn learn learn” enough so you become a domain expert.

But the danger is, once you've become a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge.

Inventors have this paradoxical ability to have:

• That “10,000 hours of practice” and be a real domain expert.

• And have that beginner's mind—to look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain.

And that's the key to inventing. You have to have both.

And I think all of us have that inside of us, and we could all do it but you have to be intentional about it. You have to say… “Yeah I’m gonna become an expert and I'm gonna keep my beginner's mind”.

🟠 Source: Lex Fridman Podcast

Every day is day one.

Every day you are deciding what you're gonna do. And you are not trapped by what you were or who you were, or any self-consistency. Self-consistency (even) can be a trap.

And so day one thinking is kind of… We start 🍃 fresh every day. And we get to make new decisions every day about invention, customers, about how we're going to operate, even as deeply as what our principles are (it turns out we don't change those very often, but we change them occasionally).

When we work on programs at Amazon, we often make a list of tenets (they're a little more tactical than principles, kind of the main ideas that we want the program to embody). And one of the things that we do is we put: “These are the tenets for this program”. And, in parentheses, we always put: “Unless you know a better way”. And that idea “Unless you know a better way” is so important… Because:

• You never wanna get trapped by dogma.

• You never wanna get trapped by history.

  It doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it—there's so much value in what has worked in the past—but you can't be blindly following what you've done. And that's the heart of day one → Is you're always starting fresh.

Steve Jobs on the Beginner's Mind:

"I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." (Source: book.stevejobsarchive.com)

The next quote from Max Planck shows how hard it is for most experts to accept new ideas and adopt a beginner's mind:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” - Max Planck

💥 Stuff I Loved

(Highlight from Poor Charlie’s Almanack resurfaced on Readwise)

Wishing you a great first weekend of 💥 2024 💥

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!