Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon)

**Ethan Evans** (0:00)
People think invention takes all this time, but you only need two hours once a month. The thing is, once you have one good idea, it often takes years to express that. So you had the idea to have a newsletter. I know some of the history of your newsletter. You've been working on the expression of that idea for years now. Jeff and Amazon had ideas like, let's have Prime shipping. Prime is still getting better and still being worked on.
It's a 20-some year old idea. You know, the Kindle, a decades old idea now, is still getting better. The point here is, you don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
Today, my guest is Ethan Evans. Ethan is a former vice president at Amazon, executive coach and course creator focused on helping leaders grow into executives. Ethan spent 15 years at Amazon, helped invent and run Prime Video, the Amazon App Store, Prime Gaming and Twitch Commerce, which alone is a billion dollar business for Amazon. He led global teams of over 800, helped draft one of Amazon's 14 core leadership principles, holds over 70 patents and currently spends his time executive coaching and running courses to help people advance in their career, build leadership skills and succeed in senior roles. In our conversation, Ethan shares an amazing story of when he failed on an important project for Jeff Bezos and what he learned from that experience. We spent some time on something called the Magic Loop, which is a very simple idea that I guarantee will help you get promoted and advance in your career. We also get into a bunch of other career advice, primarily for senior ICs and new managers. We get into advice for standing out in interviews, plus some of Amazon's most important and impactful leadership principles and much more. I learned a lot from Ethan and I'm excited to bring you this episode. With that, I bring you Ethan Evans after a short word from our sponsors.
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Ethan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Ethan Evans** (4:30)
Lenny, thank you a ton for having me. I'm super excited to talk about some of the things we have teed up today and to help people.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:37)
The first thing I thought we could chat about is the magic loop. So you wrote this guest post for my newsletter sometime earlier this year. It is, I don't know if you know this, but it's currently the sixth most popular post of all time in my newsletter across 300 plus posts.