Lonely, Not Alone

What sets the most successful people apart?

In Invent & Wander — The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, one key insight stands out: they focus more on the value they deliver than on what they can collect.

Part 1 is a collection of his annual shareholder letters to Amazon investors. In those letters, Jeff talks about new features they’ve introduced over the previous year, and over and over, we see an obsessive focus on how those features improve the customer experience.

The company’s benefit in those early years almost feels like a secondary consideration.

The decision to display negative product reviews is an obvious example — a change that would appear borderline harmful to the company on the surface. Imagine you’re asked that quintessential interview question: “What is your biggest weakness?” But instead of you strategically answering, all of your past employers chime in. That probably wouldn’t put anyone at the top of the applicant list.

That emphasis on providing a level of value that can’t be found elsewhere is a big part of what sets people like Jeff Bezos apart, aside from having the foresight and grit required to create a commerce behemoth and internet cornerstone like Amazon.

Only a handful of people on Earth are operating on the scale of Mr. Bezos. But the principles that guided him in building Amazon apply broadly in all of our lives.

The question is: How can we do what we do in a way that sets us apart? That's where the magic happens.

Now let’s get to today’s Cookmarks!

🤝 In Search of: Friends
🦾 Elon “Autonomous” Musk
🥩 Why you need to improve your digital diet

— Collin, Cookmarks

“Believe in your ideas and have the courage to pursue them, even when others doubt you.”

—Dietrich Mateschitz

Today’s Cookmarks🔥

1. If you’re feeling lonely, you’re not alone.
   
   In the age of always-online social media, work-from-home, and touchless…everything (Sup, Amazon?) human-to-human interaction is at an all time low.
   
   We’re living in a time of hyperconnection, yet so many of us are feeling disconnected.

2. The EU is limiting its citizens’ access to rapidly advancing AI technology.

   
   As big a leap as AI represents, it feels like the EU is handicapping its ability to compete globally by resisting a massive, inevitable shift.

   
   On one hand, it makes sense to ensure checks and balances are in place to protect people’s privacy, but at this point, it feels like this could quickly become a disadvantage for those in the EU who could benefit from this emerging technology.

3. Another day, another influential person calling out the seismic shift in how we find information online with the advent of AI.
   
   Hopefully AI search engines will help us find some friends.

4. Is there anyone else in history who has driven as much technological progress as Elon Musk while facing so much hate? When you’re driving the level and velocity of change that he is, criticism comes with territory, and Elon is certainly getting more than his fair share.
   
   Tesla hosted We, Robot on Thursday, October 10th, where Elon announced:
   

   • Optimus — An autonomous robot for your home

   • Robovan — A fully autonomous shuttle/bus

   • Cybercab — A fleet of fully autonomous cars
   
   I don’t know if you’ve seen Will Smith’s hit 2004 science-fiction classic “I, Robot.” But Elon definitely has, and he seems to be on a mission to make it more biographical than fiction.

5. The remainder of Jay’s tweet: “Effects persisting for 6+ months and most people choose not to refollow the influencers after the study was over. Read the full paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/acbwg”
   
   Good news for Cookmarks subscribers!

   
   Seriously, your information diet is as important as your nutritional diet.

“In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

– Mark Zuckerberg

1 Key Ingredient 🧪

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“It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Sam Walton

CookMemes 🫡