Amazon’s Leadership Principles are used in everything from hiring to design reviews, and they’ve become hugely influential well beyond Amazon itself.

Watch a walkthrough of the principles on YouTube →

The fourteen principles:

1. Customer Obsession
2. Ownership
3. Invent and Simplify
4. Are Right, A Lot
5. Learn and Be Curious
6. Hire and Develop the Best
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
8. Think Big
9. Bias for Action
10. Frugality
11. Earn Trust
12. Dive Deep
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
14. Deliver Results

(Amazon has since added two more - “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer” and “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility” - bringing the total to sixteen.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger gave this commencement speech at the University of Southern California, and the six rules he lays out have stuck with me. They’re simple, but they apply just as much to a career in engineering as to anything else.

Watch Arnold’s full USC commencement speech on YouTube →

His six rules:

1. Trust yourself. Work out who you really are and what you want, rather than what others expect of you.
2. Break the rules. Not the laws - the conventions. You rarely do anything remarkable by following the well-worn path.
3. Don’t be afraid to fail. You can’t win without being willing to lose. Failure is the cost of trying anything worthwhile.
4. Don’t listen to the naysayers. “It can’t be done” usually means “I couldn’t do it.”
5. Work your butt off. There is no substitute for the hours. Talent without effort gets overtaken.
6. Give back. Reaching the top means nothing if you don’t reach back and help others up.

What I take from it for our work: most of the interesting problems in cloud and reliability engineering come from being willing to question how things are “normally” done, putting in the unglamorous hours to get the details right, and then sharing what you learn. That’s a big part of why this blog exists.

Bill Gates is famously a voracious reader, getting through dozens of books a year and publishing detailed recommendations on his blog, GatesNotes.

Watch a roundup of fifteen of his picks on YouTube →

What I like about his lists is how little of it is about technology. Gates reads widely - history, public health, psychology, science, biography - and that breadth clearly feeds into how he thinks about hard problems.