Becoming known as reliable, detail-oriented, and relentlessly hardworking is what builds the foundation for everything that comes next, the 58-year-old said.
“You just have to be a learning machine,” Jassy said.
Fortune reached out to Amazon for further comment.
Jassy’s own career is evidence that the path up rarely runs in a straight line.
Despite his long tenure at Amazon, he didn’t start out with any clear destination in tech or e-commerce. Growing up in New York as a devoted Giants fan, he dreamed of becoming a professional athlete—he even played soccer at Harvard before accepting that elite athletics wasn’t in the cards.
After graduating, he pursued sportscasting, sports production, and coaching. Later came stints as a paralegal, explorations of investment banking, and a brush with entrepreneurship.
“It’s great to have an idea,” Jassy said. “But it’s very useful to try a lot of different things to figure out what you don’t like and what you do like.”
“You never know which things you’re going to like. In my lifetime, I have not predicted the things that I have loved.”
The pressure to pick the right lane early, and stick with it, has never felt higher. Jassy’s own 22-year-old son’s friends, he said, already feel enormous pressure to know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives.
Escaping that mindset, he said, can be a career accelerator.
“If you can get over the idea that every time you’re being exposed to somebody new, that it’s a pass-fail referendum on your competence, you’re going to be better off,” Jassy said. “It just puts undue pressure on people, and it’s just not the way the real world works.”
The same goes for setbacks. Rather than treating failure as a verdict, Jassy said it needs to be accepted as simply part of the process—something that happens to everyone who’s genuinely trying.
“There’ll be a lot of times where things don’t work out the way that you’d hoped,” he said. “You are going to face adversity and you are going to fail and things aren’t going to work out, and you just have to realize it’s okay. It happens to everybody. You wake up the next day and you start over.”
