The Amazon founder in a recent interview explained how “mind wandering” can foster creativity at work. A vague definition of mind wandering would be thinking about things that have got nothing to do with the task at hand. Although one may perceive this as an excuse for procrastination but the Amazon founder believes it to be the secret behind the success of his business. According to CNBC, Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon, doesn’t schedule meetings like others, hence he has a different approach to planning his day.
The 60-year-old revealed a trade secret on the “Lex Fridman Podcast” about how he encourages creativity at work.
“I don’t follow a strict schedule,” he declared. “My belief in mind wandering means my sessions often last longer than I had anticipated.”
Bezos
A procedure he referred to as “messy meetings” has no end in sight. He gives himself and his groups a lot of time to think creatively.
“If we’re trying to solve a problem, I never know how long a meeting will last until I sit down. The truth is, we might have to go off track for a long time.
“I think there’s certainly nothing more fun than sitting in front of a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitting out and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth,” he said.
Bezos went on to comment that “many people feel that wandering is inefficient,” although research indicates that having a diverse mind can actually increase pleasure, creativity, and productivity. And research does indicate it, according to an article published by a group of researchers the most frequently mentioned advantage of mind wandering is that, during a period of creative incubation, letting thoughts wander encourages original thinking. This discovery has greatly helped the emergence of theories that explain the usefulness of mind wandering for adaptation, its functional significance and its possible mechanisms.
Jeff Bezos has property in conventional ventures, such as genuine bequest. He owns a165,000-acre Corn Farm in Texas. It was also used as the base of operations for his space company, Blue Origin, and serves as the test location for the vertical-landing, suborbital Unused Shepard rocket.
His homes incorporate multimillion-dollar property on the East and West Coasts in the Beverly Hills and Manhattan neighborhoods. Bezos’s presence in New York has detailed to have boosted Century Tower property values, with space offering for $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot. He too encompasses a lakeside property in Washington state, on which he went through $28 million to extend the living space to nearly 30,000 square feet.
In 2012, Amazon bought its claim South Lake Union central command building in Seattle for $1.5 billion, making it one of the biggest commercial property proprietors. Amazon took ownership of about a dozen buildings, nearly 2 million square feet of office space, and around 100,000 square feet of retail space.
Bezos is an active investor in Real-Estate and space domains and a clever one. Building a multi-billion-dollar empire is difficult but sustaining it takes real courage and commendable decision making skills shown by Bezos at many instances that makes him a unique from other billionaires the world has witnessed obviously all his investments are not public and tycoon of such level works with organizations at national level but the pattern of his investments unveils his interests in different fields and the most common thing which can be observed in the patterns of highly successful billionaires is their interest in space and future of the world. It could be established that being successful and being richest isn’t holding Bezos back from trying new ventures and earth is certainly not a limit for him.
To conclude I would say that Fridman hosted another brilliant and refreshing podcast session which has received much appreciation and Jeff Bezos has proved to be a most obliging guest and has been very generous with advice to the extent of revealing his “success secrets”. Although apart from everything else one wonders that if disorder and wandering is helping Jeff Bezos run a multimillion dollar business this author might just be featured in the next Forbes cover page then.