Grammer #05.

Finally, the book can be browsed through and picked apart for entertainment, for an enjoyable ride through the foible and great deeds of our predecessors in power. A warning, however, to those who use this book for this purpose: It might be better to turn back. Power is endlessly seductive and deceptive in its own way. It is a labyrinth - your mind becomes consumed with solving its infinite problems, and you soon realized how pleasantly lost you have become. In other words, it becomes most amusing by taking it seriously. Do not be frivolous with such a critical matter. The god of power frown on the frivolous; they give ultimate satisfaction only to those who study and reflect, and punish those who skim the surface looking for the good time.

Before it was a self-proclaimed largest bookstore on Earth or the Web’s dominant superstore, Amazon.com was an idea floating through the New York City offices of one of the most unusual firms on Wall Stree: D.E. Shaw & Co.

Bezos was ready to leave Wall Street altogether when a headhunter convinced him to meet executive at just one more financial firm, a company with an unusual pedigree. Bezos would later say he found a kind of workmate soulmate in David Shaw - “one of the few people I know who has a fully developed left brain and a fully developed right brain.”

Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist, became the company’s first official accountant, handling the finances, writing the checks, and helping with hiring. For coffee breaks and meetings, the employees would go to a nearby Barnes & Noble, an irony that Bezos later mentioned often in speeches and interviews.