12 pieces of advice from Jeff Bezos, from handling failure to snubbing the phrase 'work-life balance'

• Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon's CEO in 2021.

• Bezos founded Amazon 28 years ago and has since accumulated a $122 billion fortune.

• Here's a roundup of Bezos' 12 most notable nuggets of advice from his time as Amazon's CEO.

• See more stories on Insider's business page.

1. Failure is important.

"As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments," Bezos wrote in a 2018 letter to shareholders. "If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle."

Bezos noted that the infamous Fire phone was a failure for Amazon, but that the company was "able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa."

2. Work and life shouldn't be a balancing game.

"I get asked about work-life balance all the time, and my view is that's a debilitating phrase because it implies there's a strict trade-off," Bezos said during an April 2018 awards event hosted by Axel Springer, Insider's parent company.

Bezos says people should look at "work" and "life" as integrated instead of two separate entities. "It actually is a circle. It's not a balance," Bezos said.

3. Focus your business on what won't change long-term.

"When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it," Bezos said, as noted in a 2015 blog post by venture capitalism Bill Gurley. "I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time."

For Amazon, this means investing energy into quick delivery times and low prices, according to Bezos.

4. Business ideas should have some element of risk.

"If you have a business idea with no risk, it's probably already being done," Bezos said during Amazon's Re:Mars conference in 2019.