What Did Jeff Bezos's Grandfather Tell Him When He Thought He Was Being Smart?

Jeff Bezos was nine or ten years old, in the back seat of his grandparents' Airstream trailer on a cross-country road trip.

His grandmother was smoking. Bezos had been listening to anti-smoking public service announcements on the radio. He did the math in his head — calculating the number of cigarettes per day, the years of smoking, the statistical reduction in life expectancy per cigarette. He was proud of his arithmetic.

He tapped his grandmother on the shoulder and told her how many years of her life she had taken off.

She burst into tears.

His grandfather, Lawrence Gise — a retired senior official with the Atomic Energy Commission, a self-sufficient man who built his own bulldozer — pulled over the car. He got out. He walked around to the back door and helped Bezos out of the car.

Bezos expected to be in trouble.

Instead, his grandfather looked at him quietly and said: "Jeff. One day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

That was it. They got back in the car.

Bezos told this story at his Princeton commencement address in 2010 — to a stadium full of some of the cleverest young people on earth. His point: cleverness is a gift. Kindness is a choice. You don't get credit for gifts. You only get credit for choices.

His grandfather had the kindness not to humiliate him. And in not humiliating him, taught him the thing that no amount of cleverness could have taught.