MY BROTHER AND I had a very fortunate childhood. We got to spend a lot of time with our grandparents. You learn different things from grandparents than you do from parents. It’s just a very different relationship. I spent all my summers from ages four to sixteen on my grandfather’s ranch. He was incredibly self-reliant. If you’re in the middle of nowhere, in a rural area, you don’t pick up the phone and call somebody when something breaks. You fix it yourself. As a kid, I got to see him solve all these problems himself.

My grandfather once bought a used D6 Caterpillar for $5,000. It was an enormous bargain; it should have cost way more but was so cheap because it was completely broken. The transmission was stripped. The hydraulics didn’t work. And so we spent basically a whole summer repairing it. Giant gears would arrive by mail order from Caterpillar. We couldn’t even move the gears. The first thing my grandfather did was build a crane to move them. That’s self-reliance and resourcefulness.

He was a careful, conservative, quiet, and introverted sort of person, not prone to crazy acts. One day he was all by himself at the main gate of the ranch. And he forgot to put the car in park. When he got to the gate, he noticed the car was slowly rolling down to the gate. He thought, “This is fantastic. I have just enough time to unlatch the gate, throw the gate open, and the car is going to drive right through, and it’ll be wonderful.” He almost got the gate unlatched when the car hit the gate and caught his thumb between the gate and the fence post, stripping all the flesh off his thumb. It was hanging there by a tiny little thread.

He was so angry at himself that he ripped that piece of flesh off and threw it in the brush, got back in the car, and drove himself to the emergency room in Dilley, Texas, sixteen miles away. And when he got there, they said, “This is great. We can reattach that thumb. Where is it?” He said, “Oh, I threw it in the brush.” They drove back with the nurses and everybody. And they looked for hours for the thumb, and they never found that piece of flesh—something had probably eaten it. They took him back to the emergency room and said, “Look, you are going to have a skin graft for that. We can sew your thumb to your stomach and leave it there for six weeks. That’s the best way to do it. Or we can just cut a skin graft from your butt and suture it on, and it won’t ever be as good, but the advantage is your thumb won’t be sewn to your stomach for six weeks.” And he said, “I’ll take option two. Just do the skin graft from my butt.” That’s what they did. It was very successful, and his thumb worked fine. But the funniest thing about this story is that I have incredibly vivid memories—we all do—of him, and definitely his mornings were completely ritualized. He would wake up, eat breakfast cereal, read the newspaper, and shave with an electric razor for a really long time. For like fifteen minutes. When he was done shaving his face with that razor, he would take two quick passes over his thumb because his thumb grew butt hair. Which, by the way, did not bother him at all.

The whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, failures, things that don’t work. You need to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have a setback, you get back up and try again. You’re using resourcefulness; you’re using self-reliance; you’re trying to invent your way out of a box. We have tons of examples at Amazon where we’ve had to do this. We’ve failed so many times—I think of this as a great place to fail. We’re good at it. We’ve had so much practice.

To give you one example: Many years ago we wanted a third-party selling business because we knew we could add selection to the store. We started Amazon Auctions. Nobody came. Then we opened this thing called zShops, which was fixed-price auctions, and again nobody came. Each one of these failures was like a year or a year and a half long. We finally came across this idea of putting the third-party selection on the same product-detail pages as our own retail inventory. We called this Marketplace, and it started working right away. That resourcefulness of trying new things, figuring things out—what do customers really want?—pays off in everything. It pays off even in your daily life. How do you help your children? What’s the right thing?

Even when our kids were four, we would let them use sharp knives, and when they were seven or eight, we would let them use certain power tools. My wife, much to her credit, has this great saying: “I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid,” which is a great attitude about life.