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Time pressure is external. Focus comes from inside you, where no one else can control it. Time creates distractions. Focus blocks them out. Time tells you to hurry. Focus tells time to STFU. When you’re managing time, all you can see is how long it will take. When you’re managing focus, you don’t care. Time is about others. Focus is all about you.
“Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn’t otherwise contemplate,” Jeff wrote. “Long-term orientation interacts well with customer obsession. If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that that need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution.”2 Key word: patiently. Many companies will give up on an initiative if it does not produce the kind of returns they are looking for within a handful of years. Amazon will stick with it for five, six, seven years—all the while keeping the investment manageable, constantly learning and improving—until it gains momentum and acceptance. The other key is frugality. You can’t afford to pursue inventions for very long if you spend your money on things that don’t lead to a better customer experience, like trade show booths, big teams, and splashy marketing campaigns. Amazon Music and Prime Video are examples of how we kept our investment manageable for many years by being frugal: keeping the team small, staying focused on improving the customer experience, limiting our marketing spend, and managing the P&L carefully. Once we had a clear product plan and vision for how these products could become billion-dollar businesses that would delight tens, even hundreds of millions of consumers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
It was a very significant occasion for me. I was a three-time election winner (which made some admire me, and some resent me—especially on the left, since they took the view that a progressive leader who won elections was therefore almost certainly unprincipled); I was, after Iraq, a divisive figure; I had not got Britain to join the euro. Though my general posture was pro-European, I took care not to go beyond what was reasonable for British opinion. This meant I was slagged off by the right for being pro-European and by the left for being insufficiently so. But it allowed me to govern and to move things forward where I could.
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