Ex-Amazon VP: Do This at Work to Get Promoted Fast | Ethan Evans

BigDeal

Codie Sanchez

Marketing, Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.9 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2026

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You work harder than half your team. You deliver results. But somehow, the person who talks a good game in meetings just got promoted ahead of you. Here's the truth: hard work doesn't get you promoted. Visibility, advocacy, and understanding the game do. Ethan Evans is a retired Amazon VP who spent over 15 years building billion dollar businesses inside one of the most demanding companies on earth. He went from getting fired twice early in his career to running Prime Video, Twitch sponsorships, the Amazon Appstore, and a t-shirt printing business that now does over a billion dollars a year. He worked directly with Jeff Bezos, survived public failures, learned how to navigate corporate politics without losing his soul, and retired early to teach others how to do the same. In this episode, you'll learn: The magic loop: how to turn your boss into your biggest advocate by making them successful first Why invisible performers lose to visible performers every time and how a weekly status report changes everything The exact script to ask for a raise that gets results without threatening to quit Good boss versus bad boss: why consistency beats likability and how to tell the difference in an interview How to give difficult feedback that actually lands: professionally firm, personally warm The career killers nobody talks aboutJeff Bezos's philosophy: strategically patient, tactically impatient, and why Amazon banned PowerPoint for six page narratives ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction: Why Half Your Talent Wins and You Don't (00:00:56) Corporate Politics: The Game You Didn't Know You Were Playing (00:08:28) The Magic Loop: Turn Your Boss Into Your Biggest Advocate (00:27:20) Invisible vs Visible Performers: Why Hard Work Isn't Enough (00:16:30) How to Actually Ask for a Raise and Get It (00:06:13) Good Boss vs Bad Boss: Consistency Over Likability (00:42:42) Giving Difficult Feedback: Professionally Firm, Personally Warm (00:51:28) Career Killers: Betrayal, Gossip, and Breaking Trust (01:04:51) Jeff Bezos: Strategically Patient, Tactically Impatient (01:11:05) The Six-Page Narrative: Why Amazon Banned PowerPoint (01:18:06) Building Billion-Dollar Businesses: Prime Video to T-Shirt Printing (00:58:22) Burnout Is About Vision Loss, Not Hard Work (01:24:48) Hiring A Players: The Reference Check Hack Nobody Uses (01:32:28) Final Advice: Know What You Want and Make the Deal ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Burnout is less, it turns out, about hard work.
0:03.2	It's more about losing your vision. You don't only know where you're going. I'm just going to keep my head down and work hard. I call this work hard and hope to be noticed. Hope is not a very good strategy. Why is it that people with half your talent seem to be winning all of the time? Ethan Evans should know. He's a retired Amazon VP. He's gonna give us the exact framework he used
0:22.5	to climb from getting fired twice early all of the time. Ethan Evans should know. He's a retired Amazon VP. He's going to give us the exact
0:21.5	framework he used to climb from getting fired twice early in his career to running multiple
0:27.2	billion dollar businesses. What do you see Jeff Bezos do differently? He often said we need to be
0:33.1	strategically patient but tactically impatient. So it's feeling this urgency of how have I moved my business forward as far as I possibly can today,
0:42.4	and yet realizing that building something of real value might take 10 years.
0:46.1	There's someone listening right now.
0:47.5	They get to take one piece of advice from this podcast.
0:50.3	What is the one thing you would give them?
0:52.4	Know what you want.
0:54.4	Know where you're going.
0:59.1	Everyone talks about climbing the corporate ladder.
1:01.5	Yeah.
1:01.8	But it's much more than a corporate ladder.
1:04.7	I think it's like climbing a corporate ladder
1:06.6	while somebody's trying to pull it from underneath you
1:08.9	and somebody else has cut it from up above.
1:10.8	And there's all these politics. from underneath you and somebody else has cut it from up above.
1:12.1	And there's all these politics.
1:16.5	And so you've navigated the politics at the highest level of the game.
1:22.7	What do you wish you knew about corporate politics when you started that you know now?
	...

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