ENGLISH SPEECH JEFF BEZOS What Will You Be English Subtitles
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!