Pete's Pod

He started as Jeffrey Jorgensen, born to a 17-year-old mother in Albuquerque, not exactly the origin story you'd expect from the man who built the largest bookstore, then the largest retailer, then one of the most valuable companies on Earth.

In this episode of Pete's Pod, we trace Jeff Bezos from his grandfather's Texas ranch and a self-run statistical survey on his sixth-grade teachers, through Princeton, D.E. Shaw, and the walk in Central Park where his boss told him this was "a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job." We get into the regret minimization framework that made him quit anyway, the Home Depot door desks in that Bellevue garage, the near collapse after the dot-com crash, and how Amazon Prime and AWS turned a struggling bookstore into an empire.

This is a story about obsessive ambition, what it built, and what it cost.

Full written profile: https://substack.com/@coltonkpeters
More profiles & episodes: https://coltonkpeters.com

The first episode in a new series profiling the most obsessive, high performing people to ever exist. First up, Tiger Woods.

We start before any of the trophies, his father Earl's own complicated history, the neuroscience behind a baby swinging a club before he could walk, the Walkman tapes full of motivational affirmations instead of music, and a sport psychologist teaching a five year old a hypnosis technique before he could drive a car. From there we go through the 1997 Masters, the most dominant peak any athlete has ever had in their sport, and the pattern of burned relationships that ran alongside it the whole time. We end on the hardest part, the ego, the buried stories, and the honest question of whether the highest performing people can also be great people, or whether that's simply impossible.

Greatness isn't random. It's built. But it isn't free either.

Read the full written profile and subscribe:
https://coltonkpeters.substack.com/

More at coltonkpeters.com