It Is Better to Be Kind Than Clever

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, was ten years old when he saw a commercial stating that every puff a smoker took on a cigarette shortened his or her life by two minutes. He was quite a math whiz, so he began adding up how many minutes a long-time smoker like his grandmother had lost to cigarettes. To his surprise, Jeff’s grandmother began to cry when he announced that she had lost sixteen years of her life to smoking. His grandfather took him aside for a talking to. To Jeff’s surprise, his grandfather was not angry, nor did he attempt to punish him. He simply said, “You’ll learn one day that it is much harder to be kind than to be clever.”