president, and CEO of Amazon.com, as delivered to the Class of 2010 of
Princeton University!!
Really inspiring. This one is for all the AeSI students who will
graduate this year !
So grab a cup of coffee, read and be inspired.
As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in
Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores.
We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our
Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of
Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and
Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up
the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a
line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my
grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one
particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the
big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And
my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these
trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor
arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless
statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad
campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically
the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes
off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At
any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the
number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per
cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a
reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped
my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two
minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I
expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic
skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky
estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some
division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst
into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While
my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in
silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of
the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to
follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent,
quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to
be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car
and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm
with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might
be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and
after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day
you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts
and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are
easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce
yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll
probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the
gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case
because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that
you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.
Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of
marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves.
We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by
atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make
repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news
that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only
synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe
you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark
Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have
wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will
have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual
gifts as you sit before me.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or
pride in your choices?
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact
that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen
or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an
online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply
couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had
just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my
wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing
that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't
sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad
and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a
young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate
closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work
very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap
my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to
follow my passion.
I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of
very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I
went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books
on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened
carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good
idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't
already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he
convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final
decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but
ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd
regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted
by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the
less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.
Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from
scratch on your own -- begins.
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you
fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet
moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal
version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and
meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we
are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!
Source: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml
