Now that some of the dust has settled around Apple Vision Pro, it is clear that nobody really knows if it is going to work. (Though, it's too expensive and it's too heavy are missing the bigger picture.) It sounds like it delivered what it said it was going to deliver as a product, and the potential is there for a "spatial computing" future. But who knows for sure. Here's an excerpt from an essay that Benedict Evans recently published called, "A month of the Vision Pro":

Second, taking one step further back again, even if my doubts are all wrong, we won’t know any of this for years, and right now this is all still in the experimental category. Apple sells more watches in a typical quarter than Meta has active Quest users. Even the iPhone took years to start selling. It’s possible than in five years this will have started to work, and it’s possible than in five years we’ll have concluded that this [AR/Apple Vision Pro] is a niche, and we’ll have to wait for glasses, contact lenses or neural implants.

But ultimately, this is okay. You have to try, because:

Thank you to Lucas Manuel for sending me the above quote.

"Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance." — Seth Godin

I mention and quote Seth Godin fairly often on this blog and so it only seems right to share this recent podcast that he did on the Tim Ferriss Show. Broadly speaking, the conversation is about "the game of life, the value of hacks, and overcoming anxiety." I think most of you will find it useful regardless of what you do and what you're involved in. It's over an hour long, but there's a full transcript available if you'd prefer to read, rather than listen. If you're looking for something even shorter, here's a quick video by Tim Ferris that has Seth talking about why worrying isn't productive and that it's really in service of our need for status quo and reassurance.

Jeff Bezos published his annual letter to shareowners this week. You can find it here. And as is his usual practice, he has attached his 1997 letter to shareholders at the bottom of it. This is his "Day 1" and he clearly likes the reminder.

I was somewhat surprised to learn that 58% of physical gross merchandise sales on Amazon are now by independent third-party sellers. This number has been steadily increasing almost every year since 1999.

And this is despite the fact that first party sales -- products sold by Amazon -- have grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% during this same time period. Amazon excels at the fulfillment component and you can have them do that for you as a third-party seller.

There are a number of other interesting facts sprinkled throughout the letter, but I particularly liked the bits on "intuition, curiosity, and the power of wandering." Here is an excerpt on how Amazon is working to scale the size of its failures:

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

A lot has already been said and written about accepting failure in life and business. Nobody wants to fail, but it can happen when you're trying to "imagine the impossible."

The two nuances here are that failures should scale along with the company. And that "large-scale risk taking" can actually be construed as a service. It might mean that the impossible becomes possible.