Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old stress cure is to ‘make the first phone call, or send the first email’— and a recruiter says it lands even harder in 2026 |
Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old stress cure is to ‘make the first phone call, or send the first email’— and a recruiter says it lands even harder in 2026
With economic uncertainty, AI anxiety, and a brutal job market weighing on workers everywhere, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a counterintuitive theory on coping with stress—and thinks most people get it completely wrong.
Back in 2001, the then-new tech billionaire, fresh off Amazon’s 1997 IPO, took to the stage at the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio to lay out a take on what actually causes stress. And in his eyes, it has nothing to do with workload, grueling hours, or needing a holiday.
“You can be working incredibly hard and loving it,” Bezos said. “And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed.”
The culprit, Bezos argued, isn’t your workload. It’s inaction.
“People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion,” he added. “Stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring.”
Feeling stressed? Here’s Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old fix
The fix, Bezos says, is simple—and it doesn’t require even solving the dilemma that’s making you lose sleep. You just need to do something, anything, to chip away at it.
“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over, so if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me,” Bezos explains. “What it........