Quote of the day by Jeff Bezos: “People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has pointed out a quality that most people quietly admire in others but rarely practise themselves: the willingness to look at what you believed yesterday and decide it no longer holds up because it feels risky. In many professional and social settings, changing your mind is treated as inconsistency, even failure. The person who holds their position confidently, regardless of new information, is often the one who appears most authoritative. Jeff Bezos spent decades building one of the most successful companies in history, and his view on this is direct: that appearance is wrong. The people who are right most of the time are not the ones who commit to a position and defend it; They are the ones who update their thinking when the evidence calls for it. That idea, simply stated, quietly reorders a lot of assumptions about what good judgment actually looks like.
Quote of the day by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often”
What the quote is really saying
At first, the quote seems to run against common sense. Most people associate being right with being certain. Changing your mind, in that framework, means you were wrong to begin with. Bezos is proposing the opposite relationship. Being right, he suggests, is not a fixed state you arrive at and then defend. He says that it is an ongoing process of updating, and people who accumulate the best track record of sound judgment are not the ones who rarely revise their views, in fact, they are the ones who revise them regularly, precisely because they are paying close enough attention to know when revision is warranted.
Why changing your mind is harder than it sounds
If updating your thinking were easy, more people would do it more often. The fact that it is relatively rare, especially in public, especially under pressure — points to something real about human psychology. People become attached to their positions, especially the ones they have held for a long time or argued for publicly. Changing a view that you have staked something on does not just require updating a belief. It requires a small act of self-revision, and that is uncomfortable in a way that purely intellectual exercises rarely are.
The brain is not naturally inclined toward changing. It is inclined toward confirming what it already believes, filtering incoming information in ways that protect existing conclusions, and generating reasons why new evidence is less reliable than it appears. Bezos’ quote works against all three of those tendencies at once. It makes changing your mind not just acceptable but definitional to good judgment.
How this played out inside Amazon
Bezos did not arrive at this idea theoretically. Amazon's history is, in many ways, a record of a company that changed its mind repeatedly and at scale, and benefited enormously from doing so. Amazon began as an online bookshop. The decision to expand beyond books was itself a significant revision of what the company was supposed to be. Then came third-party sellers, which initially faced internal resistance. Then Amazon Web Services, cloud computing infrastructure offered to outside companies, which looked, to many observers at the time, like a strange distraction from retail. Then digital streaming, then hardware, then logistics infrastructure that had previously been handled entirely by outside providers.
None of these moves were inevitable and each required someone to look at a prior assumption about what Amazon was and what it should do, and decide the assumption needed updating. At the same time, certain core commitments stayed fixed: long-term thinking over short-term results, customer obsession, a willingness to tolerate losses on new ventures while they found their footing.
The distinction Bezos drew consistently was between positions that deserved revision and principles that deserved protection.
What this looks like in practice
In professional settings, this principle shows up in a specific and often underappreciated behaviour: the willingness to say, in a meeting, in front of colleagues, “I was wrong about that” or “that changes what I thought.” In practice, it is unusual enough that when it happens, people tend to notice. Leaders who do it consistently tend to earn a particular kind of credibility, not despite changing their minds, but because of it. They signal that their positions reflect actual thinking rather than performance, that they can be trusted to update rather than to defend.
The alternative — the leader who never changes their position regardless of new information, who treats every revision as a threat to authority — tends to produce a particular kind of organisational dysfunction. People stop bringing them real information. They learn to manage upward rather than inform upward. The leader ends up making decisions with a carefully filtered view of reality, and eventually the decisions reflect it.
Why this matters more now than it used to
The pace at which information changes, industries shift and conditions evolve has made this quality more valuable than it was in previous generations and more difficult to maintain. There is simply more information arriving faster than at any previous point in history. More data, more signals, more conflicting evidence, more smart people reaching different conclusions. The mental load of staying genuinely current and genuinely open is higher than it has ever been.
In that environment, the instinct to plant a flag and stop updating is understandable. It reduces cognitive load. It provides a sense of stability. It feels, from the inside, like confidence. But Bezos' observation holds regardless of the comfort that fixed positions offer. If the positions are not responsive to evidence, they are not assets. They are liabilities wearing the costume of conviction.
Quote of the day by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often”
What the quote is really saying
At first, the quote seems to run against common sense. Most people associate being right with being certain. Changing your mind, in that framework, means you were wrong to begin with. Bezos is proposing the opposite relationship. Being right, he suggests, is not a fixed state you arrive at and then defend. He says that it is an ongoing process of updating, and people who accumulate the best track record of sound judgment are not the ones who rarely revise their views, in fact, they are the ones who revise them regularly, precisely because they are paying close enough attention to know when revision is warranted.
Why changing your mind is harder than it sounds
If updating your thinking were easy, more people would do it more often. The fact that it is relatively rare, especially in public, especially under pressure — points to something real about human psychology. People become attached to their positions, especially the ones they have held for a long time or argued for publicly. Changing a view that you have staked something on does not just require updating a belief. It requires a small act of self-revision, and that is uncomfortable in a way that purely intellectual exercises rarely are.
The brain is not naturally inclined toward changing. It is inclined toward confirming what it already believes, filtering incoming information in ways that protect existing conclusions, and generating reasons why new evidence is less reliable than it appears. Bezos’ quote works against all three of those tendencies at once. It makes changing your mind not just acceptable but definitional to good judgment.
How this played out inside Amazon
Bezos did not arrive at this idea theoretically. Amazon's history is, in many ways, a record of a company that changed its mind repeatedly and at scale, and benefited enormously from doing so. Amazon began as an online bookshop. The decision to expand beyond books was itself a significant revision of what the company was supposed to be. Then came third-party sellers, which initially faced internal resistance. Then Amazon Web Services, cloud computing infrastructure offered to outside companies, which looked, to many observers at the time, like a strange distraction from retail. Then digital streaming, then hardware, then logistics infrastructure that had previously been handled entirely by outside providers.
None of these moves were inevitable and each required someone to look at a prior assumption about what Amazon was and what it should do, and decide the assumption needed updating. At the same time, certain core commitments stayed fixed: long-term thinking over short-term results, customer obsession, a willingness to tolerate losses on new ventures while they found their footing.
The distinction Bezos drew consistently was between positions that deserved revision and principles that deserved protection.
What this looks like in practice
In professional settings, this principle shows up in a specific and often underappreciated behaviour: the willingness to say, in a meeting, in front of colleagues, “I was wrong about that” or “that changes what I thought.” In practice, it is unusual enough that when it happens, people tend to notice. Leaders who do it consistently tend to earn a particular kind of credibility, not despite changing their minds, but because of it. They signal that their positions reflect actual thinking rather than performance, that they can be trusted to update rather than to defend.
The alternative — the leader who never changes their position regardless of new information, who treats every revision as a threat to authority — tends to produce a particular kind of organisational dysfunction. People stop bringing them real information. They learn to manage upward rather than inform upward. The leader ends up making decisions with a carefully filtered view of reality, and eventually the decisions reflect it.
Why this matters more now than it used to
The pace at which information changes, industries shift and conditions evolve has made this quality more valuable than it was in previous generations and more difficult to maintain. There is simply more information arriving faster than at any previous point in history. More data, more signals, more conflicting evidence, more smart people reaching different conclusions. The mental load of staying genuinely current and genuinely open is higher than it has ever been.
In that environment, the instinct to plant a flag and stop updating is understandable. It reduces cognitive load. It provides a sense of stability. It feels, from the inside, like confidence. But Bezos' observation holds regardless of the comfort that fixed positions offer. If the positions are not responsive to evidence, they are not assets. They are liabilities wearing the costume of conviction.
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