One thing I learned a long time ago about really smart people: study, read, or listen to the things that they think are great. It’s a shortcut to greatness.

One thing I learned a long time ago about really smart people: study, read, or listen to the things that they think are great. It’s a shortcut to greatness. No. No. No. No. A million time NO. Granted, at least it's better advice to study the things great people study, rather than study great people themselves. By obsessing over what successful people do, we forget to study what the vast majority of people who did not become great did. For the six lessons listed, you can trivially find businesses who did that and failed. I sure you can find businesses for whom that is straight forward bad advice. And finally, you can find businesses who did not do it, and who still succeeded. Those six things was probably the right thing to do for Amazon, at the time Amazon did them. Except abstracted beyond recognition, they are not generally applicable.