For Jeff Bezos, raising resourceful children wasn’t just a parenting goal — it was a necessity for success.

During a Summit interview with his brother Mark Bezos in 2017, Jeff Bezos explained how crucial self-reliance and resourcefulness are at Amazon.com Inc. He revealed his unconventional approach to instilling these qualities in his four children, letting them use “sharp knives” from as young as age 4 and power tools by ages 7 or 8.

While this may raise eyebrows, Bezos said it stemmed from his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott’s pragmatic perspective. She’d “much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid,” he said, emphasizing this was “a fantastic attitude about life.”

Bezos’s brother then joked, “Luckily you have resourceful kids with 10 fingers.” To which Bezos added with a laugh, “So far.”

This exchange highlighted the Bezos family’s focus on instilling self-reliance and hands-on problem-solving abilities from an early age, prioritizing those skills over sheltering children completely from risk.

Jeff Bezos’s childhood proved crucial in developing this mindset. Spending summers on his grandfather’s remote ranch, Bezos witnessed the value of hands-on problem-solving firsthand. When equipment broke down, his grandfather didn’t call for help — he rolled up his sleeves, figured out solutions and often enlisted young Jeff to assist on ambitious projects.

This early immersion in a self-reliant lifestyle stuck with Bezos. He saw how resourcefulness was a powerful tool, one that could open doors and create opportunities. When he founded Amazon, he carried that same spirit of determined problem-solving through failures and obstacles.

Bezos embraced a mindset of inventiveness, stating in Amazon’s 1997 shareholder letter, “Given a 10% chance of a 100X payout, you should take that bet every time.”

His approach ties into Amazon’s core leadership principles emphasizing invention, simplicity and high standards. His belief in fostering self-reliance and problem-solving mirrors Amazon’s ethos of innovation and customer obsession, aiming to build leaders who are not afraid to challenge the status quo and strive for excellence. This philosophy is deeply ingrained in how Amazon operates, seeking to innovate on behalf of customers while maintaining a culture of continuous improvement and learning.

While few would advocate giving 4-year-olds knives, Bezos’s core parenting philosophy was centered on raising confident, resilient kids unafraid of challenges. By pushing them to take calculated risks and get hands-on experience, he hoped to spark creativity, ingenuity and grit — skills just as vital as academic lessons.

Bezos knew the resource-makers would be the ones equipped to seize opportunities. It’s a controversial approach, but one he lived himself. He raised his children to focus on self-reliant problem-solving, just as his grandfather had with him decades before on that remote ranch.