Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from The Everything Store by Brad Stone and Jeff Bezos’ talk @ Princeton.
Even as a 10-year-old boy, Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon.com) had a passion for crunching numbers. During a summer road trip with his grandparents, young Jeff got fed up with his grandmother’s smoking in the car. He recalled an ad campaign about smoking and calculated how many cigarettes per day his grandmother smoked, how many puffs she took per cigarette, the health risk of each puff, and then tapped her on her shoulder and proudly proclaimed “You’ve taken nine years off your life!”
Bezos expected to be applauded for his arithmetic skills. Instead, his grandmother burst into tears. His grandfather pulled the car off to the side of the road and asked him to step out. And then his grandfather taught a lesson that this now-billionaire decided to share with the Princeton graduating class of 2010: “My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’”
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com
‘Be kind. The world will roll on without you.’ | Dave Crowley
A Learning a Day 