I spent thousands of hours in meetings with Jeff Bezos. I learned so much about the modes of thinking he applies to problems and opportunities. One of his most remarkable modes of thinking is a longer time scale than most humans. Here’s an example:
Jeff is funding the construction of a 10,000-year clock.
It’s being built inside a mountain in West Texas, and it is designed to tick once a year. It’s powered by thermal energy and solar synchronization. It has a hand that moves once a century and a chime that rings once every thousand years. It’s called “The Clock of the Long Now.”
But why would anyone build something that most of us will never live to see in motion?
Jeff has a remarkable capacity for long-term thinking.
While most businesses chase quarterly metrics, Jeff operated on a timescale that extends beyond quarters and years.
At Amazon, this mindset is what drove decisions to invest heavily in initiatives like AWS, Prime, and Kindle. These projects took years to produce any profit, but they changed entire industries and positioned Amazon as a company of the future, not just the present.
Thinking in years and decades is a requirement for meaningful innovation and long-term growth.
For most business leaders, long-term thinking seems risky because it can put near-term objectives like sales and profit at risk. But short-term thinking in business is like eating a donut—it produces brief rewards in the present but yields poor long-term outcomes.
I will never claim to know what or how Jeff thinks, but I am pretty sure that he doesn’t think in days, months, or years like most of us do. He thinks in decades, centuries, millennia and decamillennia.
