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Jeff Bezos explains why “wandering” is essential for invention

October 07, 2025

“Wandering is so important because wandering is a kind of humility,” Jeff Bezos begins. “Wandering sounds so inefficient, but the only way to go straight to your destination is if you know where you’re going.”

Jeff continues:

“Sometimes you know where you’re going. But sometimes you don’t. And wandering is the acknowledgement that — in life, business, invention, and building a company — a lot of the time you can see the mountain top, but you can’t see the trail. So you have to explore and wander. It may feel very inefficient. But it’s actually very valuable.”

Ultimately, Jeff explains, you need to balance execution and exploration:

“When you know where you’re going, yes, you should be very efficient . . . You just need to do both [exploration and determined execution]. And they actually do feed each other. It’s the things that come out of the execution that give you new data and ideas about what the next steps should be in your exploration. The two things don’t work against each other. They work together.”