Austin Carr, Fast Company:

And team members simply could not imagine truly useful applications for Dynamic Perspective. As far as anyone could tell, Bezos was in search of the Fire Phone’s version of Siri, a signature feature that could make the device a blockbuster. But what was the point, they wondered, beyond some fun gaming interactions and flashy 3-D lock screens. "In meetings, all Jeff talked about was, ‘3-D, 3-D, 3-D!’ He had this childlike excitement about the feature and no one could understand why," recalls a former engineering head who worked solely on Dynamic Perspective for years. "We poured surreal amounts of money into it, yet we all thought it had no value for the customer, which was the biggest irony. Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘Because Jeff wants it.’ No one thought the feature justified the cost to the project. No one. Absolutely no one."

This is the exact type of client I hate working with. The type that fixates on specific features instead of focusing on building solutions or achieving goals.

Jason Fried retelling Jeff Bezos's observation of successful people:

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

Great advice.

I believe that the wisest people aren't the ones who have all the answers. Rather, they are the ones who constantly ask the right questions. And it's these same questions that should be asked not just once, but continually over time.

Never pigeonhole yourself into the "I'm going to do this this way because that's the way I've always done it" mentality. What holds true today may no longer hold true tomorrow.