In the very early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos would sit on the floor of his garage putting books in boxes. Today it’s a very different story. Whether you love or hate Amazon there are huge lessons that can be learned from studying one of the richest people in the world. There are very few people in this world that you can point to as a perfect example of a human being. Every successful person I have learned from is flawed in some, often many, ways. That’s the thing with being human. We are flawed. There is good and bad in everyone.  So, while others say they don’t like that Amazon don’t pay tax or they detest how they sell things at a loss in order to destroy entire industries, the smartest business owners can remain objective and still look for the lessons.

If you’re looking for perfection, you will find very few people to learn from. The trick is not to negate the lesson or success principle because of some other flaw that you don’t like. The truth is you can learn something from everyone. When it comes down to it, every person and every behaviour is either an example of what to do or an example of what not to do.

In fact, in the book about Bezos, The Everything Store by Brad Stone, he writes “I don’t think there was anybody that Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.” Another observation was “He was constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down.” That’s something worth modelling about Bezos right there. Always look for what you can learn from everything that comes your way.

The book is well worth reading and while you’ll probably find the drive for Amazon to be the biggest and sell everything and take over the world a little off-putting, the other big theme in the book is a relentless focus on making everything as easy as possible for customers (so that they buy more). There is a lot to be gleaned about what a true customer service focus looks like.

However, what I want to highlight here is evolution. You don’t get to where Bezos is by just doing the same thing over and over. In the beginning, Bezos was doing everything. Processing orders, picking books, packaging them and driving them to the post office himself. Most business owners get stuck in the status quo far too soon. The key to creating the practice of your dreams, whatever that looks like for you, is that you continually evolve. That usually means you have to fire yourself from doing lots of tasks in your practice and allow other capable team members to grow. You then free yourself up to do more valuable work in your practice. And the most valuable work there is for all of us is strategy, leading the troops, marketing and attracting clients, and improving yourself. If anything you do on a daily basis looks or smells even remotely like ‘packing boxes’ then get rid of it immediately.

While everyone knows what a to-do list is, for years I have recommended to practice owners that they quickly get a “NOT allowed to-do” list. The way it works is when you put something on your ‘not allowed to-do list’ you tell your team that they now own this task. For example, ‘putting out the A-board signs in the morning’. You explain that as much as you would love to keep doing it, you are now not allowed to put the signs out. Blame me if you like. And explain to them that you are now counting on them to do it every time. Then the next day that you come in and see that the signs are not out for whatever reason, you resist the urge to do it yourself ‘because it would be easier to just do it yourself’ and instead you point out to the team their oversight and get them back on track. Don’t delegate something, and then start doing it again yourself even on occasion. That just confuses everyone. And then keep adding to your ‘Not Allowed To-Do’ list forever. Only by freeing yourself from the logistics of your business can you devote more time to doing the work that will evolve your business and create the vision you have for it.