Inefficiency is key onto innovation
(00:23:11) I think a lot of people, and they feel like wandering is inefficient. And when I sit down at a meeting, I don’t know how long the meeting is going to take if we’re trying to solve a problem, because if I did, then I’d know there’s some kind of straight line that we’re drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there’s really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spit balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So, sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth, and both things are really pleasurable.
Wandering
Jeff Bezos(00:22:26) It’s such a good question, and I honestly don’t know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering, so when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don’t know where I’m going. So, to go in a straight line… To be efficient… Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because real invention, Not incremental improvement… Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I’m talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander.
1 of 100
Jeff Bezos(00:20:53) Well, that’s very kind. I’m an inventor. If you want to boil down what I am, I’m really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions. And then, I can create 100 such atypical solutions for something, 99 of them may not survive scrutiny, but one of those 100 is like, “Hmm, maybe that might work.” And then, you can keep going from there. So, that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of inventiveness in a high-dimensionality space where the search space is very large, that’s where my inventive skills come… I self-identify as an inventor more than anything else.