Q: How do you deal with stress, with pressure, with setbacks, with disappointments?

Jeff Bezos:

Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. What it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first e-mail message, or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that situation even if it's not solved--the mere fact that We're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.

People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion. Stress doesn't come from hard work. For example, you know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it, and, likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that.

So, and likewise, if you kind of use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work but you're going through you know, a disciplined approach of, you know, a series of job interviews and so on, and working to remedy that situation, you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.

Q: How do you deal with stress, with pressure, with setbacks, with disappointments?

Jeff Bezos:

Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. What it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first e-mail message, or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that situation even if it's not solved--the mere fact that We're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.

People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion. Stress doesn't come from hard work. For example, you know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it, and, likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that.

So, and likewise, if you kind of use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work but you're going through you know, a disciplined approach of, you know, a series of job interviews and so on, and working to remedy that situation, you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.