Jeff Bezos once spoke at Italian Tech Week. He shared a story from the early days of building Amazon: “Put me in front of a whiteboard, and I can come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour.” Perhaps during one of these whiteboarding sessions, Jeff Wilke, one of Bezos’ senior leaders, came up to him and said: “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.”
Bezos was shocked. “What do you mean?” he asked Wilke. “You have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it,” the other Jeff told him. Wilke was a manufacturing expert, and he could see Bezos was clogging Amazon’s capacity.
“Every time I released an idea,” Bezos goes on in the interview, “I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction.” It’s the age-old question of diversification vs. focus—and even someone as brilliant as Jeff Bezos had to learn it the hard way. “This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious, at the time, to me.”
To his credit, Bezos actually took Wilke’s advice: “I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And then I also started figuring out: How can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas?”
As an entrepreneur, the tradeoff of breadth vs. depth might be the biggest challenge. You have to excel enough at one thing to make meaningful revenue, but once you do, you always have to think about your next source of income—or at the very least the next play to try and not lose the sales you’re currently making.
As an artist, I think focus is the obvious choice. You can only win on authenticity, and if you don’t put your heart and soul into every next piece, you’ll never succeed on a sea of mediocre work.
As a parent, the choice is different yet again. There are times to focus on individual relationships, when one kid needs more attention than the other, and times to make sure everyone is learning and growing broadly—while still trying to not spread yourself too thin either.
But whatever project sits in front of you right now, remember: Too many ideas will burn down the whole thing.
It’s great to be innovative. Write your innovations down. Put them in a drawer. Let them ripen. Each idea has its time. Be patient as you wait for that moment to arrive. And if it never does? That’s okay, too. At least you prioritized what mattered most. Giving up is also giving, and there’s more than one way to, in Jeff’s words, “release the work”—an idea which even Amazon’s founder admits “was very profound for me.”
