Jeff Bezos was baptized by fire.

After quitting his six-figure job in 1994, he started Amazon as an online bookstore in his garage. Today, Amazon is worth more than $1.7 trillion, making it the second-most valuable company in the U.S., trailing only Apple.

He’s also the richest person in the world with a $200 billion fortune.

Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos offers hidden in plain sight lessons for Amazon's success. It’s a trove of information for entrepreneurs and investors, and further explains Amazon’s core values.

Today, many tech companies have a core ethos:

• Google: “Don’t Be Evil”
• Apple: “A Computer for the Rest of Us

Tech companies are so powerful that they need a code of law. A religious dogma that all the Silicon Valley folk can worship.

One of the first commandments for Amazon is: Determine who’s a missionary and who’s a mercenary.

Are you a Missionary or a Mercenary?

Mercenaries are ruthless. We all know one. They’re cold, task-oriented killers who will do whatever it takes to destroy the competition. They’re that co-worker no one invites out to the bar.

Mercenaries are often successful. But their success has a cap on it.

Once they’ve killed everyone off and burned several bridges with their cut-throat, do-whatever-it-takes attitude, there is no one left who will stand by them. Mercenaries can create businesses, but they will never create empires.

Missionaries, on the other hand, can change the world.

This is what Bezos has to say about them:

“I’m always trying to figure one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or mercenary,” Bezos writes on the first page of his book.“The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service.”

“By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money.” — Jeff Bezos

He added in another interview that he believes being a missionary is vital to being a successful entrepreneur. In fact, it’s the people who care who win, he says.

Entrepreneurs think like a good quarterback. They know they’re only one piece in a larger game. So they put the right people around them who will make the team win. Or in Bezos’s case, make the team filthy rich.

Embrace Failure

The life of a missionary isn’t easy. Many people will spit in your face. Some people will crap all over everything you do. But you can’t let these people get to you.

Embrace failure, and the fact that your kindness will not always be received well by others. Focus on the long game, and don’t let some butthead ruin your life as a missionary.

Bezos himself has fallen on his face plenty of times. Many people laughed at him as he climbed his way to the top. For example, skeptics doubted that customers would pay $79 a year for Amazon Prime when it launched in 2005.

Today, the service has 126 million subscribers worldwide.

“We need big failures if we’re going to move the needle” — “billion-dollar scale failures,” Bezos said at Amazon re:Mars. “And if we’re not, we’re not swinging hard enough.”

You Could Be a Mercenary And Not Even Know It

A lot of us like to think we’re missionaries like Bezos, but in fact, we’re mercenaries, and we don’t even know it:

• We ignore our friends or never take five minutes to call them up.
• We get lazy and decide not to respond back to an email with a potential opportunity.
• We use lame excuses like “we’re too busy” to cover up for not reaching out to valuable connections.

Mercenaries are all around us, and you may be one of them. Venture capitalist John Doerr explains that even petty jealousy is a mercenary attitude.

“Mercenary companies are paranoid, obsessed with the competition, and have managers who are bosses of wolf packs rather than mentors and coaches of teams.”

Going back to our earlier quarterback analogy, there’s always the guy who’s too self-absorbed to realize he’s ruining the team. I think Johnny Manziel, Tim Tebow, or pre-New England Patriots Cam Newton.

These may be great guys off the field, but during the game make it all about themselves. They don’t elevate the team around them. It‘s likely untintentional. They were mercenaries assassinating their own success without even knowing it.

Takeaway

To close out 2021 I’m doing what Tim Ferriss recently recommended on Twitter: “A Past Year Review.” Look back on the times you were a missionary and the times when you were more mercenary.

For me personally, I was able to run 30 miles straight and become an ultramarathoner with the help of my friends. We planned it out, they tracked me, filmed the whole thing, and brought me two bottles of Gatorade for the last five miles.

I couldn’t have done it without them. As a team, we went beyond something I never thought I was capable of.

Be more like a missionary and your success will be boundless.

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” — Jeff Bezos