Book
Invent and Wander
Walter Isaacson and Jeff Bezos
- Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative. That’s what makes someone a true innovator. And that’s why my answer to the question is Jeff Bezos. (Location 80)
- “I have no special talent,” Einstein once said. “I am only passionately curious.” (Location 88)
- “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.” (Location 89)
- A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. (Location 90)
- People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature. (Location 99)
- Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field, a phrase that was used about Steve Jobs and comes from a Star Trek episode in which aliens create an entire new world through sheer mental force. (Location 103)
- When his colleagues protested that one of Jobs’s ideas or proposals would be impossible to implement, he would use a trick he learned from a guru in India: he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid. You can do it.” It usually worked. He drove people mad, (Location 105)
- One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder. (Location 114)
- That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. (Location 126)
- Jeff was a voracious reader with an adventurous mind. (Location 144)
- At his Montessori preschool Bezos was already fanatically focused. “The teacher complained to my mother that I was too task focused and that she couldn’t get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me,” he recalls. “And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that’s still probably true today.” (Location 163)