- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared his top career advice in an interview with the CEO of LinkedIn.
- "An embarrassing amount of how well you do, particularly in your 20s, has to do with attitude," he said.
- Jassy joined Amazon back in 1997 before working his way up to the position of CEO in 2021.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared his "best career advice" with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky in a new interview.
It's not all about what you know, he said, but rather, it's about having a good attitude.
"I think an embarrassing amount of how well you do, particularly in your 20s, has to do with attitude," he told Roslansky.
But that doesn't just mean being easy to get along with, he explained. It's also about how hard you work, whether you can work on a team, whether you stick to what you say you're going to do, and whether you're a can-do person over being a naysayer.
"People would be surprised how infrequently people have great attitudes," he said, even if it may sound "simple."
Having a good attitude means people in your professional life root for you — you pick up advocates and mentors more quickly as people want you to succeed, Jassy explained.
Mentorship can be a way for people to supercharge their careers. Having a mentor can be a boost to self-confidence in the workplace and a way to gain some career guidance — whether that's help with promotions, finding new challenges, or even a career change.
Jassy himself was taken under the wing of Amazon founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos. After dotting around a bunch of roles at the company since 1997, he was approached by Bezos to be his "shadow" — a role that allowed him to go along to all the CEO's meetings, including his one-on-ones, and they'd discuss and strategize together.
He took over as Amazon's second CEO in 2021 after Bezos stepped down. He proved himself by serving as CEO of AWS, the company's cloud computing platform, from 2016 to 2021, where he grew the segment to a $40 billion business.