Famous People Who Attended Montessori: Jeff Bezos

Here at Villa di Maria, we know just how amazing Montessori education is - how the freedom within limits philosophy helps each child to develop executive functioning skills, how the "cosmic education" component helps to make the world a better place - we could go on and on! That's why it is  not surprising that many famous, successful adults attended Montessori school as children. Today, we explore one: American technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Amazon Jeff Bezos. It's no secret that some of the top tech innovators have one thing in common: roots in Montessori education. For Bezos, his Montessori education, along with summers spent tinkering with windmills and repairing equipment on his grandparents' Texas ranch, helped him to develop a mindset that valued and sought out experimentation. In a 2015 interview with Fortune, Bezos states, "Experiments are key to innovation because they rarely turn out as you expect and you learn so much... We’ve tried to reduce the cost of doing experiments so that we can do more of them. If you can increase the number of experiments you try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase the number of innovations you produce."Bezos has also been described as focusing on process, not failure, growing and learning from mistakes rather than allowing them to inhibit his experimentation. Constantly viewing failures as opportunities for growth, Bezos was able to grow and remain open to all possibilities. This way of approaching the world, with a hands-on, curious mindset and an openness to new experiences, is truly Montessori.