By Phong Ngo  October 14, 2025 | 03:37 am PT
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that stress doesn’t come from long hours or hard work, but from avoiding issues that need attention.
“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over,” Bezos said in a 2001 interview at the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio, according to Fortune. “You can be working incredibly hard and loving it. And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that,” he added.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Photo from Instagram
At the time, Bezos was 37 and a newly minted billionaire after Amazon’s 1997 IPO. He described stress as a warning signal rather than a consequence of hard work. “So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me,” he said. “What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it.”
Bezos suggested that even small actions, like making a phone call or sending an email, could significantly reduce stress before the problem is fully resolved.
Bezos, 61, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO to become executive chairman in 2021, is now the world’s fourth-richest person, with a net worth of $233 billion, according to Forbes. In June, he married former news anchor Lauren Sanchez in a three-day celebration in Venice, Italy.