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Gen Z has a long checklist for their early careers: solid pay, work-life balance, and a trajectory that won\u2019t be wiped out by AI. But according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the dream of landing a great job straight out of college is the first thing that needs to go\u2014because it almost never works that way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you aren\u2019t willing to start at the bottom and pay your dues, it\u2019s unlikely that you\u2019re going to ever be successful,\u201d Jassy said earlier this year on Capital Group\u2019s Power of Advice<\/em> podcast. \u201cYou have to be willing to start at the bottom. You have to do whatever people ask you to do within reason.\u201d<\/p>\n Becoming known as reliable, detail-oriented, and relentlessly hardworking is what builds the foundation for everything that comes next, the 58-year-old said.<\/p>\n That willingness to grind, Jassy argued, is what separates the people who move up from those who stall out. During his nearly 29 years at Amazon\u2014a stretch that saw the company grow from a few hundred employees to more than 1.5 million worldwide\u2014he\u2019s noticed one trait that consistently separates standout performers from everyone else: an obsession with learning over defaulting to what\u2019s already been done.<\/p>\n \u201cYou just have to be a learning machine,\u201d Jassy said.<\/p>\n Fortune<\/em> reached out to Amazon for further comment.<\/p>\n Jassy\u2019s own career is evidence that the path up rarely runs in a straight line.<\/p>\n Despite his long tenure at Amazon, he didn\u2019t 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\u2014he even played soccer at Harvard before accepting that elite athletics wasn\u2019t in the cards.<\/p>\n After graduating, he pursued sportscasting, sports production, and coaching. Later came stints as a paralegal, explorations of investment banking, and a brush with entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1997 that he landed at Amazon. But his long stretch of trial and error was far from wasted.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s great to have an idea,\u201d Jassy said. \u201cBut it\u2019s very useful to try a lot of different things to figure out what you don\u2019t like and what you do like.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou never know which things you\u2019re going to like. In my lifetime, I have not predicted the things that I have loved.\u201d<\/p>\n Jassy also recognized that his brand of exploratory thinking is easier said than done for today\u2019s young workers. The workforce is constantly being reshaped by massive layoffs (including at Amazon), AI-driven automation, and a job market where a college degree no longer guarantees a clear on-ramp.<\/p>\n The pressure to pick the right lane early, and stick with it, has never felt higher. Jassy\u2019s own 22-year-old son\u2019s friends, he said, already feel enormous pressure to know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n Escaping that mindset, he said, can be a career accelerator.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can get over the idea that every time you\u2019re being exposed to somebody new, that it\u2019s a pass-fail referendum on your competence, you\u2019re going to be better off,\u201d Jassy said. \u201cIt just puts undue pressure on people, and it\u2019s just not the way the real world works.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2014something that happens to everyone who\u2019s genuinely trying.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019ll be a lot of times where things don\u2019t work out the way that you\u2019d hoped,\u201d he said. \u201cYou are going to face adversity and you are going to fail and things aren\u2019t going to work out, and you just have to realize it\u2019s okay. It happens to everybody. You wake up the next day and you start over.\u201d<\/p>\n This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\nYoung Andy Jassy never had his sights set on the C-suite\u2014he tried sportscasting and coaching before making it to Amazon<\/h2>\n
Andy Jassy admits his advice is easier said than done<\/h2>\n