Highlights from The Everything Store about how Amazon was built: “If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”

Brad Stone’s The Everything Store was a good book about Amazon’s journey. Like most long and successful journeys, the details are messy, but Brad is evenhanded and thorough at reporting and analyzing the facts.

Below are some of my favorite highlights, copied verbatim from the book, which I also bought from Amazon, and read on my Kindle app lol.

HIGHLIGHTS:

They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.

As Amazon’s growth accelerated, Bezos drove employees even harder, calling meetings over the weekends, starting an executive book club that gathered on Saturday mornings, and often repeating his quote about working smart, hard, and long.

“There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he said in that month’s quarterly conference call with analysts, coining a new Jeffism to be repeated over and over ad nauseam for years.

Kim Rachmeler shared a favorite quote she heard from a colleague around that time. “If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”

He gave Blue Origin a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, which translates to “Step by Step, Ferociously.” The phrase accurately captures Amazon’s guiding philosophy as well. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.

He simply refused to accept Amazon’s fate as an unexciting and marginally profitable online retailer. “There’s only one way out of this predicament,” he said repeatedly to employees during this time, “and that is to invent our way out.”

Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.

Bezos was clearly nervous about Netflix’s gathering momentum. With its recognizable red envelopes and late-fee-slaying DVD-by-mail program, it was forging a bond with customers and a strong brand in movies, a key media category. Bezos’s lieutenants met with CEO Reed Hastings several times during Netflix’s formative years but they always reported back that Hastings was “painfully uninterested” in selling

“Jeff does a couple of things better than anyone I’ve ever worked for,” Dalzell says. “He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time. “The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion.”

“When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers,” he said

Target had outsourced its online operations to Amazon in 2001 but the relationship was far from perfect, with joint projects frequently falling behind schedule. “We had no resources to build infrastructure for Target,” says Faisal Masud, who worked on the Target business at Amazon. “It was all about Amazon first and Target next.”

He told business-development vice president Peter Krawiec not to spend over a certain amount to buy Quidsi but to make sure that Amazon did not, under any circumstances, lose the deal to Walmart.

“For different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers.” On the other end of spectrum, he added, companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and ExxonMobil tended to be feared.

Regret, that formidable adversary Jeff Bezos worked so hard to outrun, hangs heavily over the life of his biological father.

The entire company is scaffolding built around his brain—an amplification machine meant to disseminate his ingenuity and drive across the greatest possible radius. “It’s scaffolding to magnify the thinking embodied by Jeff, to the greatest extent possible,” says Jeff Wilke when I bounce that theory off him. “Jeff was learning as he went along. He learned things from each of us who had expertise and incorporated the best pieces into his mental model. Now everyone is expected to think as much as they can like Jeff.”

It is easy to draw a straight line from the vision he had back then to the Amazon of today. There were a few little wobbles and detours in places, but really I don’t know any other company that has created such a juggernaut that is so consistent with the original ideas of the founder. It is almost like he fired an arrow and then followed that arc.

“The Internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie,” he said. “You know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy.”

Dieter Ram’s 10 Principles of (Life) Design

You could probably replace “Good design is…” with “A Good Life is…” in the list below and retain most of the meaning and use…

  1. Good design is innovative
  2. Good design makes a product useful
  3. Good design is aesthetic
  4. Good design makes a product understandable
  5. Good design is unobtrusive
  6. Good design is honest
  7. Good design is long-lasting
  8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
  9. Good design is environmentally friendly
  10. Good design is as little design as possible

“The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity”

Thanks to Tanay (@tanayj) for sharing the anecdote below. Because of it, I’ve begun to read Art & Fear (Amazon). The book is inspirational and reads like a softer version of “The War of Art” (which I thoroughly enjoyed and wrote about here).

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
— From “Art and Fear”

It also reminds me of this quote:

“Quantity is a quality all its own.”

The source?

Joseph Stalin.

A whole buncha notes from Shonda Rhimes’s Masterclass on screenwriting for TV

The best Masterclass I’ve watched to date. Shonda’s lessons are practical and detailed and really get into the nuts and bolts of how to create a TV show, how to pitch it, and how to write scripts.

If you haven’t heard of Shonda: Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and a grip of other network hits.

Here are some edited and simplified notes from the course. Most notes are verbatim, even if they aren’t in quotations…

Notesies

  • Understand the difference between procedural and serial shows (procedure is like Law & Order; serial is like Breaking Bad)
  • A movie has an ending; a TV show could go on for 7 years
  • When deciding on an idea: “It’s like a song that you can’t get out of your head”
  • The key is “compelling characters with compelling dilemmas”
  • For Grey’s Anatomy, the a key was finding the sort of gut wrenching cases that center each episode, that people would talk about over dinner the next day
  • Plan as much as you can upfront – especially episode ideas; once the show gets going, you’re not gonna have time
  • For every one of her shows, the title came at end; usually they’re written and shot as “Untitled Shonda Rhimes project”
  • “I don’t think [the name] matters” – that’s left to the marketing gods
  • Even character names change due to legal clearances (her broader point is, “don’t get too attached to any of your ideas”)
  • The key for her characters is to act and sound TRUTHFUL
  • Characters are like a band – it’s not individual perfection but group harmony
  • For the main character, you need them to have a confidant, and you need someone to tell them when they’re wrong
  • The importance of specific and small character details, like each character in Greys Anatomy having a favorite drink
  • in GA, she used Wizard of Oz tropes in a rough way (Izzy wanted a brain, George wanted courage, Christina wanted a heart, etc)
  • What makes a bad pitch: No structure, No sense of arc, Too much stuff / too long
  • The best pitches focus on character – Why do we care about this or that character?
    • Paint the picture, but don’t get too specific – let their imaginations do the work
    • Have a clear way to market the show – eg, Grey’s was “Sex and Surgery” (from Sex and the City)
  • A 1 hour drama has 5 acts
    • ~55 pages
    • Sometimes an opening teaser
    • Act 1 – introduce characters and world in an exciting way; present problem; setoff A and maybe B stories
    • Act 2 – things escalate, expand world, meet more people
    • Act 3 – the center, middle 11 pages, things start to peak, worst / exciting, start a ticking clock (or Act 2)
    • Act 4 – story turns in different direction, in procedural it’s a new piece of evidence, or ticking clock, or real character reveals
    • Act 5 – moment of victory, reveal / cliff for next ep
    • Each act should end make the viewer lean forward, end on a “wow” moment, each act break should “turn the story”
  • “You don’t want a flat show” – have plenty of ups and downs
  • There is usually an A story, a B story, and a C story (the “runner”)
    • A is usually but not always bigger than B; C is very minor
    • A story – usually 2-3 scenes an act
    • B story – one scene an act
    • C story – 3 scenes total in episode
  • If you make it about character, people will buy anything
  • Stuff that gets cut is usually from Act 1 and 2 – the setup stuff
  • Show a person’s emotional reaction instead of hearing them say what they’re feeling / thinking
  • Shonda tries to limit stage directions, emotional reactions, let actors do the job – give them room for interpretation
  • I can tell in the writers room, if there are a lot of fights about a scene…that scene’s interesting and it’s gonna work
  • Episode 2 is Episode 1 all over again; this helps you build trust and familiarity
  • Make the studio your partner, not your keeper – include them in the creative process
  • Get to know your line producer well; let them know what you do and don’t know
  • The set is all about the CREW – it’s their team, their domain, their expertise
  • Shonda’s routine
    • Only checks email once a day
    • Closes her office door when she needs to focus
    • No emails or phone calls after 7pm
    • Writes on weekends – writes every day
    • Wakes up at 5am (!)
  • If you’re not the showrunner, you’re working for someone else – even if you’re the creator

Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more advice or notes on writing and screenwriting, here’s an even longer blog post.

Daily Habits Checklist #101 (February 25 to March 31): “Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.”

Another five solid weeks, and more of the same realization: If I start the day early (before 7am, preferably), I have both the momentum and time to finish all – or most – of the habits. But if I get started at, say, 9am (whether from poor sleep, or a mild hangover, or sheer laziness), then the rest of the day is an uphill battle.

I’m also trying to be more cognizant of the habits that energize, too: for example, Reading. If I can read articles or books for even 30 minutes in the middle of the day (as opposed to, say, getting all my reading done while lying in bed at the end of the day), the very act of reading tends to stimulate and energize me, providing a little boost for whatever activity comes after. It can be hard to just stop what I’m doing, sit on the couch, and open Pocket / Kindle and quietly read for 30 minutes, but the payoff is usually worth it.

Currently thinking: “Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.” – Steven Wright

Currently watching: Food Wars aka Shokugeki no Soma, a sweet and funny anime about ambitious teenagers accepted to an elite cooking academy slash prep school.

Hope everyone’s doing well. It’s already April :) You can do it!