Bezos’ mother: A letter to my wife and other young mothers

On the last Thursday of July 2017, Forbes announced that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com (world’s biggest online bookstore), swept Bill Gates from a perch once his own as the world’s richest man, with a fortune of $90.6 billion, making Bezos the seventh person to hold that title since Forbes started tracking the richest […]

On the last Thursday of July 2017, Forbes announced that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com (world’s biggest online bookstore), swept Bill Gates from a perch once his own as the world’s richest man, with a fortune of $90.6 billion, making Bezos the seventh person to hold that title since Forbes started tracking the richest in 1987. 

While Jeff Bezos’s life is interesting enough, I find his mother’s more so.  She gave birth to him at the clueless age of 17.  Yet, what I find fascinating is how accommodating she was of Bezos’s“crazy” ideas or (as some of our mothers would call it) “wasting time doing useless things” when Jeff was a boy.  She helped him nurture his eclectic interests, which resulted in his dream of creating an “Everything Store.” A dream he has more or less realized – because on Amazon, you can buy anything from diapers and toys to fresh vegetable.

As a mother, you may not be interested in getting your child to be the richest man in the world, however, from this mother (who was once called Captain of Chaos), you may learn one or two things in helping your children foster theirinterestsin becoming problem solvers and creative individuals- and the world can do with more of those.

We’ve all once learned about a mother who facilitated, nurture, nudge or foster the careers of their children – even if those mothers themselves didn’t know anything about those careers – from religious scholars (Bukhari, a collector of Muslims’ books of hadith) to athletes (Phelps, who has won the most Olympic gold medals in history) to puzzle makers (Will Shortz, the only person in the world with an undergraduate degree in the study of puzzles).

I always try to recall the lives of these mothers when I observe the relationship between my wife and her seven years old son.   He appears to lean toward the “crazy” inventor type who litters the house with junk and dangerous objects – a frustrating situation for every mother.  Actually, my own father, his grandfather, counselled me not to buy a bicycle for him.  “A bicycle in the hands of Kalim would be a dangerous object,” he said.  I told my father that he already had a bicycle.  What Ididn’t tell him was that he had hadmany accidents with it, as he feared, including falling into a drainage.

Therefore, without a filter for what is safe and unsafe, his mother tries to protect him from some of his adventures. Yet I reason that what he needs is direction.   I’ve even nick-named him the Creative Professor to encourage him.  And because I’m more accepting of his weird creations, he complains to me that “Mama doesn’t want me to do the creative X” to give legitimacy to anything he is prevented from doing.

My appeals to allow the boy to do what he wants (within reason) has not won any converts.  So, when I read about Bezos’s upbringing cited in Angela Duckworth’s book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” I made a mental note to give it to my wife to read.   I never got to doing it.  However, when he was declared as the richest man in the world (he used to be third), I resolved that my wife must definitely learn about his mother.  So I’m doing that now.  The rest of this column is a comment on Jeff’s mother as written by Angela Duckworth in her book mentioned above.  I want my wife and other young mothers to read it again and again, so that they can count themselves lucky instead of being frustrated when they have creative children:

Jeff’s unusually interest-filled childhood has a lot to do with his unusually curious mother, Jackie.  Jeff came into the world two weeks after Jackie turned seventeen years old. “So,” she told me, “I didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what I was supposed to do.”

She remembers being deeply intrigued by Jeff and his younger brother and sister: “I was just so curious about these little creatures and who they were and what they were going to do. I paid attention to what interested each one-they were all different-and followed their lead. I felt it was my responsibility to let them do deep dives into what they enjoyed.”

For instance, at three, Jeff asked multiple times to sleep in a “big bed.” Jackie explained that eventually he would sleep in a “big bed,” but not yet. She walked into his room the next day and found him, screwdriver in hand, disassembling his crib. Jackie didn’t scold him. Instead, she sat on the floor and helped. Jeff slept in a “big bed” that night.

By middle school, he was inventing all sorts of mechanical contraptions, including an alarm on his bedroom door that made a loud buzzing sound whenever one of his siblings trespassed across the threshold. “We made so many trips to RadioShack,” Jackie said, laughing. “Sometimes we’d go back four times in a day because we needed another component.

“Once, he took string and tied all the handles of the kitchen cupboards together, and then, when you opened one, all of them would pop open.”

I tried to picture myself in these situations. I tried to picture not freaking out. I tried to imagine doing what Jackie did, which was to notice that her oldest son was blooming into a world-class problem solver, and then merrily nurture that interest. “My moniker at the house was ‘Captain of Chaos,’ ” Jackie told me, “and that’s because just about anything that you wanted to do would be acceptable in some fashion.”

Jackie remembers that when Jeff decided to build an infinity cube, essentially a motorized set of mirrors that reflect one another’s images back and forth ad infinitum, she was sitting on the sidewalk with a friend. “Jeff comes up to us and is telling us all the science behind it, and I listen and nod my head and ask a question every once in a while. After he walked away, my friend asked if I understood everything.

And I said, ‘It’s not important that I understand everything. It’s important that I listen.’ ” 

By high school, Jeff had turned the family garage into a laboratory for inventing and experimentation. One day, Jackie got a call from Jeff’s high school saying he was skipping classes after lunch. When he got home, she asked him where he’d been going in the afternoons. Jeff told her he’d found a local professor who was letting him experiment with airplane wings and friction and drag, and-“Okay,” Jackie said. “Igot it. Now, let’s see if we can negotiate a legal way to do that.”

In college, Jeff majored in computer science and electrical engineering, and after graduating, appliedhis programming skills to the management of investment funds. Several years later, Jeff built an Internetbookstore named after the longest river in the world: Amazon.com. (He also registered the URLwww.relentless.com; type it into your browser and see where it takes you. . . . )