“Literally put me in front of a whiteboard, and I can come up with 100 ideas in an hour.” That’s what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told a gathering of technology entrepreneurs last month in Italy. Bezos’s restless mind rates extra thought on Thanksgiving.
While Thanksgiving is a national holiday decreed by government, it’s important to remember that the abundance Thanksgiving embodies is a tribute to the doers like Bezos who can’t sit still. With Amazon, Bezos quite literally brought the plenty of the world to the doorsteps of the world.
Notable about Bezos’s monumental achievement is that he hasn’t stopped, nor can he stop. Entrepreneurs can’t not do. But as the article from which the opening quote comes from further indicates, Bezos long ago had to be restrained from within, by Amazon employees. Not only were his voluminous ideas at times a distraction, the cost of trying was of the substantial kind such that they threatened Amazon’s long-term existence.
It tells us something about Bezos’s many ideas, then and now. The individual who came up with one of the greatest, most life-enhancing commercial concepts ever has a head mostly populated with duds. Which makes Bezos like most entrepreneurs, then and now.
Henry Ford failed twice before getting it right with Ford Motor Co., but continued to stumble once he made cars accessible to the masses owing to a failure to pivot that opened the door to General Motors. After Steve Jobs died, Nick Schulz published an admiring piece at National Review Online about the numerous stumbles of the “world’s greatest failure.” Fast forward to the present, Elon Musk has more than once stared bankruptcy in the face given the constantly outlandish nature of the ideas that enter his own mind.
Bringing it back to Bezos, it can’t be said enough that the bad ideas are wealth personified. If all of Bezos’s notions work every time, then by extension we can conclude that he’s confirming knowns (wealth that already exists) as opposed to creating all new wealth through the discovery of what saps it in the near term. In other words, the history of Amazon is of Bezos failing repeatedly on the way to success.
It’s a reminder that the path to wealth is paved with costly errors. Which requires thought relative to taxation of individuals, corporations, investors, and the government consumption that follows the taxation. It speaks to the problem of government whether run by Democrats or Republicans.
It’s not just that governments create no information with their consumption (those spending the money of others are not real consumers), it’s that they’re constantly in pursuit of knowns. There’s no progress in that, and there’s much less abundance. And that’s not a partisan statement.
It’s just a comment that when politics informs the allocation of resources, central planning replaces decentralized experimenting. Translated, simple minds replace the restless minds of people like Bezos, with the opposite of abundance revealing its cruel self.
It’s useful to think about on Thanksgiving. That Bezos created abundance for us with Amazon goes without saying, but what of the myriad ideas that never made it off of Jeff Bezos’s whiteboards solely due to the costs associated with trying, and that are bigger than they should be thanks to taxation and the growth-sapping government consumption that follows it?
Originally posted to Real Clear Markets.
