Immediately upon moving to Seattle, engineers rather than retail-distribution veterans. He wrote down a list of the ten smartest people he knew and hired them all, including Russell Allgor, a supply-chain engineer at Bayer AG. Wilke had attended Princeton with Allgor and had cribbed from his engineering problem sets. Allgor and his supply-chain algorithms team would become Amazon’s secret weapon, devising mathematical answers to questions such as where and when to stock particular products within Amazon’s distribution network and how to most efficiently combine various items in a customer’s order in a single box.1 Wilke recognized that Amazon had a unique problem in its distribution arm: it was extremely difficult for the company to plan ahead from one shipment to the next. The company didn’t store and ship a predictable number or type of orders. A customer might order one book, a DVD, some tools—perhaps gift-wrapped, perhaps not—and that exact combination might never again be repeated. There were an infinite number of permutations. “We were essentially assembling and fulfilling customer orders. The factory physics were a lot closer to manufacturing and assembly than they were to retail,” Wilke says. So in one of his first moves, Wilke renamed Amazon’s shipping facilities to more accurately represent what was happening there. They were no longer to be called warehouses (the original name) or distribution centers (Jimmy Wright’s name); forever after, they would be known as fulfillment centers, or FCs.
He then applied the process-driven doctrine of Six Sigma that he’d learned at AlliedSignal and mixed it with Toyota’s lean manufacturing philosophy, which requires a company to rationalize every expense in terms of the value it creates for customers and allows workers (now called associates) to pull a red cord and stop all production on the floor if they find a defect (the manufacturing term for the system is andon). In his first two years, Wilke and his team devised dozens of metrics, and he ordered his general managers to track them carefully, including how many shipments each FC received, how many orders were shipped out, and the per-unit cost of packing and shipping each item. He got rid of the older, sometimes frivolous names for mistakes—Amazon’s term to describe the delivery of the wrong product to a customer was switcheroo—and substituted more serious names. And he instilled some basic discipline in the FCs. “When I joined, I didn’t find time clocks,” Wilke says. “People came in when they felt like it in the morning and then went home when the work was done and the last truck was loaded. It wasn’t the kind of rigor I thought would scale.” Wilke promised Bezos that he would reliably generate cost savings each year just by reducing defects and increasing productivity. He told his general managers that on each call, he wanted to know the facts on the ground: how many orders had shipped, how many had not, whether there was a backlog, and, if so, why. As that holiday season ramped up, Wilke also demanded that his managers be prepared to tell him “what was in their yard”—the exact number and contents of the trucks waiting outside the FCs to unload products and ferry orders to the post office or UPS. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Your thoughts are at the root of all that you are. You have anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts that run through your mind on a daily basis. And, for many people, most of those thoughts are negative thoughts. They are fear-based thoughts that include nervousness, anxiety, resentment, guilt, and many other thoughts that don’t serve them. These negative thoughts elicit negative emotions in the body. So, if one day you burst into an uncontrollable fit of tears, it’s those subconscious thoughts that drove you there.
The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. Train yourself to flinch forward.10/27/2013
In times of stress, whatever pattern you’re used to taking emerges. If you’re used to running, you run. If you’re used to getting defensive, the same thing happens. It’s how you act under pressure.
So you need to start recognizing your fight-or-flight response. Every alternative you develop is highly valuable because it opens your options dramatically. You can train yourself into new patterns, and you’re not the first to do so. The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. You can’t will this to happen—it requires wider exposure. If you’ve been punched in the face, you won’t worry as much about a mugger, for example. If you face the flinch in meditation, you don’t worry about a long line at the bank. Build your base of confidence by having a vaster set of experiences to call upon, and you’ll realize you can handle more than you used to. Doing the uncomfortable is key. It widens your circle of comfort. Second, rework the pattern of threat response. Learn habits that move you out of a fight-or-flight choice and into another pattern that’s more effective. But the real trick is to do what the professionals do. They use the speed of the flinch—they use its intensity—to their advantage. Instead of flinching back, they flinch forward—toward their opponent, and toward the threat. When you flinch forward, you’re using the speed of your instincts, but you don’t back off. Instead, you move forward so fast—without thinking—that your opponent can’t react. You use your upraised hands as weapons instead of shields. You use your fear to gain an advantage. Train yourself to flinch forward, and your world changes radically. You go on offense instead of defense. Any fight you want to win, a habit of pushing past the flinch can make it happen. Most people rarely get in the ring for what matters. Instead, the fight gets fought by other people, elsewhere. Everyone talks about it like they want to be involved, but it’s just talk. The truth is that they can’t handle the pressure. They’re not in the ring because they aren’t ready to do what’s necessary to win. The Flinch by Julien Smith The watchwords were discipline, efficiency, and eliminating waste.
Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty. There are some four thousand products in the average Costco warehouse, including limited-quantity seasonal or trendy products called treasure-hunt items that are spread out around the building. Though the selection of products in individual categories is limited, there are copious quantities of everything there—and it is all dirt cheap. Costco buys in bulk and marks up everything at a standard, across-the-board 14 percent, even when it could charge more. It doesn’t advertise at all, and earns most of its gross profit from the annual membership fees. “The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it’s reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else,” Sinegal said. “It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.” Costco’s low prices generated heavy sales volume, and the company then used its significant size to demand the best possible deals from suppliers and raise its per-unit gross profit dollars. Its vendors hadn’t been happy about being squeezed but they eventually came around. “You can fill Safeco Field with the people that don’t want to sell to us,” Sinegal said. “But over a period of time, we generate enough business and prove we are a good customer and pay our bills and keep our promises. Then they say, ‘Why the hell am I not doing business with these guys. I gotta be stupid. They are a great form of distribution.’ “My approach has always been that value trumps everything,” Sinegal continued. “The reason people are prepared to come to our strange places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value constantly. There are no annuities in this business.” The Monday after the meeting with Sinegal, Bezos opened an S Team meeting by saying he was determined to make a change. The company’s pricing strategy, he said, according to several executives who were there, was incoherent. Amazon preached low prices but in some cases its prices were higher than competitors’. Like Walmart and Costco, Bezos said, Amazon should have “everyday low prices.” The company should look at other large retailers and match their lowest prices, all the time. If Amazon could stay competitive on price, it could win the day on unlimited selection and on the convenience. That July, as a result of the Sinegal meeting, Amazon announced it was cutting prices of books, music, and videos by 20 to 30 percent. “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he said in that month’s quarterly conference call with analysts, coining a new Jeffism to be repeated over and over ad nauseam for years. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone How then can we explain the individuality?
Consider a highway. The United States has one of the most extensive and complex ground transportation systems in the world. There are lots of variations on the idea of “road,” from interstate freeways, turnpikes, and state highways to residential streets, one-lane alleys, and dirt roads. Pathways in the human brain are similar. (The bigger pathways are similar in each of us.) It’s when you get to the smaller routes—the brain’s equivalent of residential streets, one-laners and dirt roads—that individual patterns begin to show up. Every brain has a lot of these smaller paths, and in no two people are they identical. The individuality seen at that level of the very small, but because we have so much of it, the very small amounts to a big difference in individuals. It is one thing to demonstrate that every brain is wired differently from every other brain. It is another to say that this affects intelligence. Rule #3 Every brain is wired differently. • What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it. • The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. • No two people’s brains store the same information in the same way in the same place. • We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don’t show up on IQ Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina The first step towards free will is to understand the underlying principles. Belief: An understanding about a given area of life or a situation. Reaction: How you ''choose'' to react in different circumstances and to different experiences in life. Your reactions are completely determined by the kind of beliefs you have running in the background. Justification: This is the story you build around a given reaction and your justification explains why you did what you did. In 9/10 cases your justifications are NOT the real reason why you reacted as you did, your beliefs are. Let's look at some practical examples of how this model works in relation to your limiting beliefs, so that we don't get too caught up in the theory.
You think you are in control, but in reality your beliefs are controlling everything. This isn't problematic in and of itself, because no matter what you do, your beliefs are always going to be in control If we couldn't rely on our beliefs as a means of operating in daily life, we would never evolve or grow, because we would constantly have to learn the same thing over and over again. But how are we going to become the master of our experience, if our beliefs are always going to be in control? We are going to do so by choosing the beliefs we want to operate with. The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai Your thoughts are at the root of all that you are. You have anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts that run through your mind on a daily basis. And, for many people, most of those thoughts are negative thoughts. They are fear-based thoughts that include nervousness, anxiety, resentment, guilt, and many other thoughts that don’t serve them. These negative thoughts elicit negative emotions in the body.
When you have beliefs buried deep down inside of you, which remain covered and secret, your ego can use those to control you. It can do what it wants to help shroud your true inner feelings from coming to light. It knows that as soon as those feelings come to light, it won’t be able to hide anymore, but until they do, you’ll continue experiencing huge amounts of internal conflict and strife. You must take control of your thoughts, so that you can take control of your emotions. If you can’t control your thoughts, then you’ll find yourself slipping back into old and destructive patterns that don’t serve you. If you overspend your money on shopping, travel, or general entertainment, it’s your thoughts that are feeding the emotions that drive that spending. It all starts in the mind, and if you’re going to have a millionaire mentality, you have to eradicate the negative thoughts from your mind. The key to doing this is creating new affirmations. Affirmations are statements that you repeat over and over again, until you mind accepts them as truths. Since everything in this world is merely a construct of our minds, building an affirmative set of thoughts that’s repeated over, and over again, can literally change the course of your life. This doesn’t mean you get to ignore your problems; it means that you have to replace your negative patterns of thinking, with positive ones. Negative thoughts won’t get you anywhere, which is why you always hear the saying the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It’s because like begets like. Rich experiences build onto rich thoughts, and poor experiences build onto poor thoughts. Both types of individuals have a certain set of beliefs, experiences, and thoughts that create the foundation of their viewpoints. If you want to override those thoughts that are filtered by your beliefs, change your thoughts and your beliefs, then build up new experiences to support your new beliefs. The Millionaire Method: How to get out of Debt and Earn Financial Freedom by Understanding the Psychology of the Millionaire Mind by R.L. Adams Your task as a creative thinker is to actively explore the unconscious and contradictory parts of your personality, and to examine similar contradictions and tensions in the world at large. Expressing these tensions within your work in any medium will create a powerful effect on others, making them sense unconscious truths or feelings that have been obscured or repressed. You look at society at large and the various contradictions that are rampant—for instance, the way in which a culture that espouses the ideal of free expression is charged with an oppressive code of political correctness that tamps free expression down.
In science, you look for ideas that go against the existing paradigm, or that seem inexplicable because they are so contradictory. All of these contradictions contain a rich mine of information about a reality that is deeper and more complex than the one immediately perceived. By delving into the chaotic and fluid zone below the level of consciousness where opposites meet, you will be surprised at the exciting and fertile ideas that will come bubbling up to the surface. Mastery by Robert Greene This is exactly what we are constantly doing in our lives, we are in a constant mode of comparing with others and it drains a lot of our energy.
We compete with others in order to prove that we are better and we often forget what we really want in the heat of trying to ''win''. I see people working 80-hour work weeks because they are stuck in beating their competitors. In reality, they would rather come second or third and spend more time with their family. I am not saying there is anything wrong with working hard. I am saying it is important to be aware of why you are doing something so you don't spend your whole life chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Are you doing it to become a better you or are you doing it to become better than someone else? If you are in it for the actual journey, and you are enjoying yourself along the way, great. Just don't expect to reach a final destination where you are going to finally be content because you are now better than others. There is always going to be someone who is more attractive, wealthier, more intelligent, etc. It is a game you can't win and, by playing in a way where you can be better than someone, you are also playing in a way where you can be worse. Everything is constantly shifting and if your worth is based on external conditions, your sense of worth is constantly going to go up and down. Isn't this how most people live their lives? The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformationn by Mateo Tabatabai Decisions and interpretations made by you as a 5 year old are affecting your life right now.10/13/2013
Your whole upbringing was nothing but a formation of beliefs and, while you learned a lot of things that are useful in your life, you also learned many constructs that are currently causing you to suffer. Often times the beliefs that are currently controlling large parts of our lives started with rather insignificant events/thoughts that continued getting reinforced. We humans have the ability to take a very small event, interpret it, create an entire world around it and then carry it around with us everywhere we go. What most people don't understand however, is that when you do this, you are no longer carrying around the actual event as it took place. What you are now carrying around is your interpretation of an external event.
Do you really think that all of our negative beliefs magically disappeared just because we grew bigger and started calling ourselves adults? Who you ''are'' is based on meanings that are running in the back of your mind and, at the same time, you had no real say in what are. This means that decisions and interpretations made by a 5 year old brain are affecting your life right now. It means that interpretations you made when you were 13 are still running your life to this day. Do you really want the limiting beliefs of a teenager running your life? Most people never sit down and choose who they want to be. This is what I am urging you to do! It is time to make a conscious decision about your beliefs. and choose which interpretations of the world you want to keep and which ones you feel are no longer serving you. It is time to realize that you are the master of your universe. That your power as the interpreter of external events allows you to create any meanings you choose. The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai |
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