The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins’ bestselling 1986 book that skewers the notion of intelligent design while celebrating the rational science of evolution, got its star turn today in Jeff Bezos’ final shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon.
Specifically, Bezos quoted this passage on what the natural fight to stay alive means from a purely biological standpoint:
“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings.”
Bezos point? That the struggle to stay alive is constant as our environment dispassionately seeks to return all of us to room temperature.
And that, from a business standpoint, doesn’t align with his Day One philosophy. He continued:
“While the passage is not intended as a metaphor, it’s nevertheless a fantastic one, and very relevant to Amazon. I would argue that it’s relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?”
Of course, the book also points out that from an evolutionary standpoint, one universal constant in the struggle to stay alive is that it always and eventually ends exactly the same way.
Bezos ends his letter with this message: “The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.”
More from Bezos’ shareholders letter:
