Only people who are willing and able to see the most challenging tasks through to the end are capable of “building something remarkable,” according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
“Virtually everything that’s worth doing takes that type of persistence and resilience,” Jassy recently told Amazon employees, identifying the two traits he believes are key ingredients of success, according to a company blog post published on Dec. 2.
Many other experts agree that persistence and resilience are necessary traits for pushing past inevitable obstacles and bouncing back from unexpected failures. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is adamant that everyone needs to encounter, and overcome, “pain and suffering” in order to develop the character necessary to achieve “greatness.”
Mentally resilient people are more likely to recover from challenges and persist in spite of them, helping them take calculated risks to solve problems and live a happier life, according to Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant.
“I don’t think there’s any skill more critical for success than resilience,” Grant told CNBC Make It in June 2017.
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Instant success without any significant setbacks is extremely rare, making persistence and resilience necessary to avoid giving up at the first sign of trouble, said Jassy, according to the Amazon blog post.
“Almost always, [success] takes a lot of hard work,” he said. “It takes time that we are uncertain, it takes decisions that you made that didn’t quite work out, that you had to adjust.”
For a specific example from his own career, Jassy pointed to his previous role leading Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing unit. Today, AWS is one of Amazon’s most successful business units, generating $33 billion in revenue on its own in the most recent quarter.
But when Jassy’s team started building the cloud computing platform in 2003, “people inside the company thought it was nutty” to focus on anything other than Amazon’s core e-commerce business, he said. “While we were excited about what we were building, I would not say that we were filled with unbridled confidence … Once we started focusing on controlling what we could control, we got to a much better spot.”
Of course, persistence can sometimes lead to stubbornness, like when you continue to stick with something long after it’s become clear it won’t work. The importance of persistence and resilience “doesn’t mean you should always stay in everything you’re doing,” Jassy noted.
If you’re unsure about whether you’re being stubborn or persistent, try seeking outside feedback from someone who can offer a fresh perspective, leadership expert Scott Mautz wrote for CNBC Make It on April 22. Then, realistically evaluate all of your options and make an informed decision, even if you have to set a personal deadline to avoid putting off a difficult choice, he recommended.
Leaders especially need to recognize when it’s time to make adjustments, seek out a new direction or cut bait entirely when a project reaches its breaking point. Success requires the ability to take in constructive feedback and research, and then make any necessary changes in direction, entrepreneur and author James Sherman said in November 2023.
If your research and feedback tells you that avoiding failure completely is unavoidable, that’s also not the end of the world, according to Jassy. Every failure, no matter how disappointing, is also a learning opportunity, the Amazon CEO said in a separate blog post published on March 21.
“The key is not to fall apart over [a mistake], but to learn what didn’t go right and be self aware,” Jassy said, according to the March blog post. “Take the things that did go well and the things you could have done differently and then apply them to the next thing you do.”
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