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Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc., listens during an Economic Club of Washington discussion in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018.
Between Amazon and space company Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos — currently worth $134.5 billion according to Forbes — obviously has a lot of work to do.
So Bezos has a system to organize his time.
"I try to organize my personal time so that I live mostly about 2 to 3 years out," Bezos said at the Yale Club in New York City in February, according to a transcript from Business Insider.
Bezos has enormous goals: He wants Amazon "to be Earth's most customer-centric company," according to his 2018 annual letter, and wants Blue Origin to help create a way for the solar system to support 1 trillion people ("then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins," he said at the Yale Club).
And "vision is absolutely important," he said. But "we've got to get started."
Vision, he says, "doesn't deserve your day-to-day attention. You need a vision, then, that's a touchstone: It's something you can always come back to if you ever get confused. But mostly, your time should be spent on things that are happening today, this year, maybe in the next 2 or 3 years," Bezos said, according to the transcript.
While there may be a few goals five to seven years in the future that are on Bezos' mind, he sets his day-to-day schedule based on what he is looking to happen in two to three years.
His top leaders at Amazon also work on a similar timeframe.
"We'll announce our Amazon quarterly results and [people will say], 'Great quarter, congratulations!' And then I say, 'Thank you,'" Bezos said. "But what I really think about is [how] that quarter was kind of baked and done 2 or 3 years ago, and right now the senior executives at Amazon are working on a quarter that's going to happen in 2021, 2022."
"I would always encourage people to hold, powerfully, a vision and be so stubborn of it. Don't let anybody move you off of your vision," Bezos said. "But put the vast majority of your energy and attention on things that are in a kind of 2- to 3-year timeframe."
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