Gen Z has a long checklist for their early careers: solid pay, work-life balance, and a trajectory that won’t be wiped out by AI. But according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the dream of landing a great job straight out of college is the first thing that needs to go—because it almost never works that way.
“If you aren’t willing to start at the bottom and pay your dues, it’s unlikely that you’re going to ever be successful,” Jassy said earlier this year on Capital Group’s Power of Advice podcast. “You have to be willing to start at the bottom. You have to do whatever people ask you to do, within reason.”
Becoming known as reliable, detail-oriented, and relentlessly hardworking is what builds the foundation for everything that comes next, the 58-year-old said.
That willingness to grind, Jassy argued, is what separates the people who move up from those who stall out. During his nearly 29 years at Amazon—a stretch that saw the company grow from a few hundred employees to more than 1.5 million worldwide—he’s noticed one trait that consistently separates standout performers from everyone else: an obsession with learning over defaulting to what’s already been done.
“You just have to be a learning machine,” Jassy said.
Fortune reached out to Amazon for further comment.
A young Jassy never had his sights set on the C-suite—he tried sportscasting and coaching before making it to Amazon
Jassy’s own career is evidence that the path upward rarely runs in a straight line.
Despite his long tenure at Amazon, he didn’t start out with any clear destination in tech or e-commerce. Growing up in New York as a devoted Giants fan, he dreamed of becoming a professional athlete; he even played soccer at Harvard before accepting that elite athletics wasn’t in the cards.
After graduating, he pursued sportscasting, sports production, and coaching. Later came stints as a paralegal, explorations of investment banking, and a brush with entrepreneurship.
It wasn’t until he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1997 that he landed at Amazon. But his long stretch of trial and error was far from wasted.
“It’s great to have an idea,” Jassy said. “But it’s very useful to try a lot of different things to figure out what you don’t like and what you do like.
“You never know which things you’re going to like. In my lifetime, I have not predicted the things that I have loved.”
Jassy admits following his advice is easier said than done
Jassy also recognized that his brand of exploratory thinking is easier said than done for today’s young workers. The workforce is constantly being reshaped by massive layoffs (including at Amazon), AI-driven automation, and a job market where a college degree no longer guarantees a clear on-ramp.
The pressure to pick the right lane early, and stick with it, has never felt higher. Jassy’s own 22-year-old son’s friends, he said, already feel enormous pressure to know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives.
Escaping that mindset, he said, can be a career accelerator.
“If you can get over the idea that every time you’re being exposed to somebody new, that it’s a pass-fail referendum on your competence, you’re going to be better off,” Jassy said. “It just puts undue pressure on people, and it’s just not the way the real world works.”
The same goes for setbacks. Rather than treating failure as a verdict, Jassy said, it needs to be accepted as simply part of the process—something that happens to everyone who’s genuinely trying.
“There’ll be a lot of times where things don’t work out the way that you’d hoped,” he said. “You are going to face adversity, and you are going to fail, and things aren’t going to work out, and you just have to realize it’s okay. It happens to everybody. You wake up the next day and you start over.”
