Jeff Bezos left his position as CEO of Amazon last year, but shortly before making that decision, he was one step away from conditioning a major investment in the company by “envy” of Elon Musk.
At least that is how it is told in the new Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work, by the author specializing in labor management, Minda Zetlin.
Apparently, after learning about the tax incentives that this state had granted to Tesla for building its gigafactory on its land.
For authorship, Bezos’ decision leaves a message: be careful not to let emotions, especially negative ones, drive business decisions.
Bezos wanted to have the same treatment as Musk
The search for HQ2 lasted more than a year and consumed countless hours of the time of Amazon executives and government officials in 238 cities and counties. When it ended, the company had only half a deal, with Northern Virginia, which promised $573 million in incentives in exchange for 25,000 of the 50,000 jobs planned for HQ2. The other half of HQ2, planned for Queens, New York, fell apart resoundingly when Amazon was met with deep resistance and bad publicity for $2.5 billion in city and state incentives and unmitigated anti-union stance. of the company.
Bezos wondered why Amazon received much smaller subsidies than Tesla and carried out a search that ended without fruit. The author believes that this Bezos story also shows how success is relative and, in a way, unattainable.
“We spend our lives chasing success. But where exactly is that point?” he says. “If you’re the richest person in the world, as he was at the time, and you’re still not satisfied, not happy, not jealous of someone else, it seems to illustrate that there’s no such point,” says Zetlin.
Zetlin’s book draws on her reporting, interviews, and personal experiences to examine self-care on the assumption that, for many of us, work and the rest of our lives are now inevitably intertwined.
But ultimately, Zetlin makes it clear that the key is not some new time management trick, but the ability to step back and change your mindset, including how to value yourself and your career holistically.
“We think of our work and our lives in opposition, and that idea is implicit in the term work-life balance. You have two things that are fighting each other, and they have to balance each other, and a lot of times it feels that way,” he says.
“The fact is it goes both ways,” he adds. “Who I am professionally is part of who I am as a human being. Who I am as a human being is part of who I am professionally, and those two things don’t have to fight.”
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