According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, only those who are willing and able to complete the most difficult tasks can “build great things.”
According to a company blog post published on Dec. 2, Jassy recently told Amazon employees that “virtually anything worth doing requires that kind of tenacity and resilience,” citing two traits he believes are key ingredients for success.
Many other experts agree that tenacity and resilience are necessary traits to overcome inevitable obstacles and bounce back from unexpected setbacks. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asserts that everyone must encounter and overcome “pain and suffering” in order to develop the character necessary to achieve “greatness.”
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton University, says mentally resilient people are better able to bounce back from challenges, persevere despite challenges, take calculated risks to solve problems, and live happier lives.
“I don’t think there’s any skill more important to success than resilience,” Grant told CNBC Make It in June 2017.
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Instant success without major setbacks is extremely rare, and it takes persistence and resilience to not give up at the first sign of trouble, Jassy said, according to Amazon’s blog post.
“Most of the time, (success) requires a lot of effort,” he said. “Our uncertainty takes time and the decisions you make may not work out or need to be adjusted.”
Jassy cited his previous role leading Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, as a specific example from his own career. Today, AWS is one of Amazon’s most successful business units, generating $33 billion in revenue alone in its most recent quarter.
But when Jassy’s team started building the cloud computing platform in 2003, “people at the company thought it would be crazy” to focus on anything other than Amazon’s core e-commerce business, he said. “We were excited about what we were building, but I can’t say we were filled with unbridled confidence. Once we started focusing on controlling the things we could control, we got to a much better place.”
Of course, persistence can sometimes lead to stubbornness, as when you persist in something long after you know it won’t work. The importance of persistence and resilience “doesn’t mean you have to keep doing everything you’re doing all the time,” Jassy points out.
If you’re not sure if you’re stubborn or clingy, try seeking outside feedback that can provide a fresh perspective, leadership expert Scott Mautz wrote on CNBC Make It on April 22. And he recommended realistically evaluating all options and making informed decisions, even if it means setting personal deadlines to avoid putting off difficult choices.
Leaders especially need to know when to make adjustments, explore new directions, or cut bait entirely when a project reaches a breaking point. Entrepreneur and author James Sherman said in November 2023 that success requires the ability to take constructive feedback and research and make necessary changes in direction.
According to Jassy, even if research and feedback show that avoiding failure altogether is inevitable, it’s not the end of the world. Every failure, no matter how disappointing, is also a learning opportunity, the Amazon CEO said in another blog post published on March 21.
“The important thing is not to fall apart[because of a mistake]but to learn and realize what went wrong,” Jassy said in a March blog post. “Think about what went well and what could have been done differently and apply it to what you do next.”
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