Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at Princeton University

It is hard to imagine life without amazon.com, even for someone of my advanced age.

After all, where else can a few clicks of a mouse take you from the latest novel by Tony Morrison to an 18th century edition of the works of John Lockach, having

stopped in power tools and women's shoes along the way.

Yet, the founder and chief executive officer of the world's largest retailer, whose net sales surpassed 24.5 billion in 2009, is only 46 years old.

And Amazon.com has only existed since 1995, making it even younger than the class of 2010.

The moral of this story is that the right idea in the right hands at the right time can change the way we lead our lives.

The idea in this case was harnessing the power of the naent internet to create a virtual bookstore of limitless proportions.

The hands were those of our speaker, Jeff Bezos, a self-described nerdy commuter commu computer science and electrical engineering major who graduated from Princeton with highest honors in 1986.

And the time was 1994 when he and his wife McKenzie Tuttle Bezos of the class of 1992 exchanged the security of Wall Street where they worked at De Shaun Company for

the uncertain prospects of a dotcom startup.