Amazon (AMZN) focuses on customers, rather than the competition.

“You want to be customer-obsessed, not competitor-obsessed,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Thursday at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit.

Why?

“Customers are always dissatisfied and they always want more,” he continued. “So they pull you along. If you’re competitor-obsessed and you’re a leader, you see everyone behind you and you slow down a bit. But customers pull you along.”

Bezos is at the top of Vanity Fair’s list of most influential leaders this year, which is sometimes considered a curse. Like Bezos, Steve Case — the former AOL CEO who merged the company with Time Warner — was once named named Vanity Fair’s most influential business leader; three years leader Case was off the 100-person list entirely.

“This experience kind of already happened to me,” Bezos told Isaacson. “You put me on the cover of TIME as Person of the Year in 1999, then the internet bubble burst. So these things happen.”

“The thing for companies is you need to be nimble, and robust, and you need to be able to take a punch,” Bezos said. “And you need to always be leaning into the future. If you’re leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time.”

And customers, with their constant dissatisfaction, necessarily drag companies forward.

Isaacson also asked why Bezos has always considered Amazon a customer company rather than an internet company, despite that Amazon is best-known for re-inventing — or perhaps defining — the modern online shopping experience.

Bezos referred to his famous 1997 letter to Amazon shareholders on how the company’s ethos was developed not around technology or competition but serving customers.

And in subsequent letters to shareholders, Bezos has introduced the idea of Amazon’s “flywheel” as a building block of how the company gains and retains its existing user base.

Of course, this flywheel imagery is intentionally chosen. Flywheels gain speed no matter where additional force is exerted. Even if — and perhaps especially if — that additional push from a customer is negative.

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Myles Udland is a writer at Yahoo Finance.

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