There is a certain comfort in knowing how something will turn out. When a decision has worked for someone else, the risks seem easier to judge and the next step feels less uncertain. At work, in business or even in everyday life, people often prefer choices that come with some evidence behind them. Trying something unfamiliar is different. There may be no guarantee that the effort will pay off, and sometimes the safest-looking option feels like the sensible one. Yet choosing only what is already proven can also mean passing up possibilities that have not had a chance to reveal themselves.
Bezos made the remark during a 2008 WIRED interview while discussing Amazon’s approach to experimentation and the company’s A9 search project. Many opportunities begin as ideas that are difficult to assess from the start. They may succeed, fail or lead somewhere unexpected. That tension between certainty and possibility sits at the centre of a widely quoted observation from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos about knowing what will work and what might be worth trying.
When Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, internet retail was still a relatively unfamiliar concept. Amazon opened its online bookstore in 1995. Because their results are already visible, established methods are easier to justify. Because nobody has tested it properly, a new product, service or business may look uncertain precisely. Waiting until the outcome becomes obvious can therefore create a strange problem: by the time an opportunity is proven, much of the uncertainty has already disappeared and others may have noticed it too.
At its simplest, Bezos is pointing to the cost of excessive certainty. If a person agrees to do something only after knowing that it will work, the number of available choices becomes quite small. New ideas do not have that advantage. He had been working at D.E. Shaw in New York when he became interested in the rapid expansion of the internet. He eventually left the firm and moved to Seattle, where he began building an online business. Amazon initially concentrated on books. The choice was practical in some ways: there were millions of titles, while physical bookshops could only carry a fraction of them. But the larger proposition convincing people to buy books through a website was still unproven. The company would later expand into many other areas, but the early decision illustrates the kind of uncertainty Bezos was talking about. There was no guarantee that online shopping would become an ordinary part of consumer life.