Amazon CEO Andy Jassy tells Gen Z that if they want to be successful, they have to ‘pay their dues’ first

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........

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