Jeff Bezos Thinks All Successful People Should Be “Waking Up Every Morning Terrified”

When the world’s richest person offers a nugget of life advice, we’re inclined to take it to heart.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and incidentally the world’s richest person, has been advising his top level employees to wake up terrified for years.

"I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified," Bezos wrote in a 1999 shareholder letter. "Our customers have made our business what it is," he continued, "and we consider them to be loyal to us -- right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service."

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It may sound intense and unrealistic, but when you take a step back, Bezos’ suggestion actually makes a whole lot of sense. Being stagnant in business and life, whether you’re the top company in the world or otherwise, does not give way for success and innovation.

In fact, becoming too comfortable with anything is a sure fire way to breed complacency and lose your edge and innovation.

[Read about the way Jeff Bezos is redefining work-life balance]

"To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment," Bezos wrote in a 2016 shareholder letter. "Failure and invention are inseparable twins."

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It turns out that Bezos' ethos isn't far from the truth. According to Harvard Business Review, a certain type of fear is important -- worrying about opportunity costs, personal finance security, or ability to obtain funding for a given venture are all positively associated with an entrepreneur's persistence in pursuing their goals.

“It just makes me more aggressive to get this thing going as fast as I can,” one HBR interviewee commented.