Jeff Bezos: The Amazon Origin Story - Groundbreaking 2001 Interview - YouTube
发布时间 2023-12-09 02:30:08 来源
中英文字稿 
The Wake Up Call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2300% a year. Things just don't grow that fast. It's highly unusual. That's me about thinking what kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth. I think there are a couple of things and one of the things that everybody should realize and that is probably the single most important factor is that any startup company that turns into a substantial company over the years never lose track of the fact that there was a lot of luck involved in that. So there are a lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people who are very smart, very hardworking, very few ever have the planetary alignment that leads to a tiny little company growing into something substantial.
这个"警钟"是发现了一个惊人的统计数据：1994年春天，网络使用量每年以2300%的速度增长。事物的增长速度通常不会这么快，这非常不寻常。这让我思考在这样的增长背景下，什么样的商业计划才可能有意义。我认为有几件事是大家应该意识到的，其中可能最重要的一点是，任何能够在几年内从初创企业成长为大型公司的企业，始终不要忘记其中有很大一部分是靠运气。因此，有很多企业家，有很多聪明且努力工作的人，但真正少有人能够遇到那种「行星对齐」的机遇，让一个小公司成长为一个大企业。
So that requires not only a lot of planning, a lot of hard work, a big team of people who are all dedicated but it also requires that not only the planets align but you get a few galaxies and they are aligning too. And that's certainly what happened to us. Our timing was good. Our choice of product categories books was a very good choice and we did a lot of analysis on that to pick that category as the first best category for e-commerce online. But there were no guarantees that that was a good category. At the time we launched this business it wasn't even crystal clear that the technology would improve fast enough that ordinary people, non-computer people would even want to bother with this technology. So that was good luck. So there are a whole bunch of things that have to sort of align to make it work.
所以，这不仅需要大量的规划、大量的辛勤工作、一支全心投入的庞大团队，还需要不仅行星排列得当，甚至连几个银河系都能对齐。这确实发生在我们身上。我们的时机很好。选择书籍作为产品类别非常明智，我们对选择这个类别作为电子商务在线的首选类别进行了大量分析。但没有任何保证这就是一个好类别。在我们启动这个业务的时候，甚至还不明确技术会发展得足够快，以至于普通人、非电脑专业的人会想要使用这种技术。所以这纯粹是运气好。所以有很多因素必须都对齐起来，才能让它成功。
I went to my boss and said to him, you know, I'm going to go do this crazy thing and I'm going to start this company selling books online. And this is something that I already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context but then he said let's go on a walk. We went on a two hour walk in Central Park in New York City and the conclusion of that was this he said, you know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me. But it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job. And he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. And so I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision.
我去找老板，对他说，我打算做一件很疯狂的事情，我要创办一家在线卖书的公司。其实之前我已经在更一般的情况下和他讨论过这个想法了，但他说我们去散步吧。于是我们在纽约市的中央公园里散步了两个小时，最后他对我说，实际上这个想法听起来真的很不错，但对那些没有好工作的人来说可能是更好的选择。他说服我在做最终决定前再考虑48小时。于是我离开了，试图找到一个合适的框架来做出这样重大的决定。
And you know, I already talked to my wife about this and she was very supportive and said look, you know, you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do. You know, it's true. She had married this kind of, you know, fairly stable guy in a stable career path. And now he wanted to go do this crazy thing but she was 100 percent supportive. So it really was a decision that I had to make for myself. And the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called, which only a nerd would call a regret minimization framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80. And so, okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.
你知道，我已经和妻子谈过这件事了，她非常支持我，说：'看，你可以完全依赖我，无论你想做什么，我都百分之百支持你。' 这是真的。她嫁给了一个性格稳定、职业道路也很稳定的男人，而现在他想去做这件疯狂的事情，但她仍然百分之百支持。所以，这真的是一个我必须为自己做的决定。而我找到的使这个决定变得非常容易的框架是——只有一个书呆子才会这样称呼它——"后悔最小化框架"。所以，我想象自己到了80岁，然后回顾我的一生。我希望能够减少我后悔的事情。
And you know, I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret having wanted, you know, trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. And I knew that that would haunt me every day. And so when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision. And I think that's a very good, it's if you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, what will I think at that time? It gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion.
你知道，我当时就意识到，当我80岁的时候，我不会后悔曾经尝试过这件事。我不会后悔自己想要参与，我认为会非常重要的互联网事业。我知道，即使失败了，我也不会因此感到后悔。但我清楚自己唯一可能会后悔的事情就是从未尝试过。我知道这种遗憾会每天折磨我。所以，当我以这种方式思考时，做出决定变得异常简单。我觉得这是一个很好的方法，如果你能将自己设想成80岁的样子，思考那时的感受，这会让你摆脱一些日常生活中的困扰。
You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. And that's the kind of thing that the short term can confuse you. But if you think about the long term, then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later. Most regrets by the way are acts of omission and not commission. You know, I think most people when they're 80 years old, you know, you can do bad things. You can go murder somebody and that would be bad and that would be an act of commission that you would regret. But most, you know, everyday ordinary non-murderors, their big regrets are omissions.
你知道的，我在年中的时候离开了那家华尔街公司。这样一来，我就放弃了年终奖金。这种事情在短期内可能会让你困惑。但如果你考虑长远的话，就能做出不会后悔的好人生决定。顺便提一句，大多数人的遗憾实际上是因为没有做某些事情，而不是做了什么坏事。我认为大多数人在80岁的时候，会因为没做某些事情而感到遗憾。你可以做些坏事，比如去杀人，那当然是不好的，是一种你会后悔的行为。但对于大多数普通人来说，他们最大的遗憾往往是那些没有去做的事情。
Well, you know, that blank sheet of paper stage is one of the hardest stages. And one of the reasons it's hard is because at that stage, there's nobody counting on you but yourself. You know, one of the things that is very motivating, I mean, today it's easy because we've got, you know, millions of customers counting on us and, you know, thousands of investors counting on us and then thousands of employees all counting on each other. But in that beginning stage, it's really just you and you can quit any time. Nobody's going to care. And so you said about doing the simple things first. So you want to start a company. Well, the first thing you do is you should write a business plan.
嗯，你知道的，空白纸阶段是最艰难的阶段之一。它之所以难，有一个原因是因为在这个阶段，只有你自己在指望你自己。你知道，有一件非常激励人的事情，比如现在，因为我们有数百万客户、成千上万的投资者，以及成千上万的员工互相依靠，所以事情变得相对容易。但在最初的阶段，真的只是你一个人，你随时都可以放弃，没有人会在意。所以，你会先做一些简单的事情。你想创办一家公司，那么你首先应该做的是写一份商业计划。
And so I did that. I wrote about a 30 page business plan. I wrote a first draft. I actually wrote the first draft on the car trip from, you know, from the east coast to the west coast. And that was, that is very helpful. Now the business plan won't survive. It's first encounters with reality. It will always be different. The reality will never be the plan. But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. I mean, then you sort of, you start to understand, you know, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. And so that's the first step.
于是我就这么做了。我写了一个大约30页的商业计划。我写了第一稿。实际上，我是在从东海岸到西海岸的车程中写的第一稿。这确实很有帮助。不过，商业计划在最初遇到现实时总是无法完全保留其原样。现实总是与计划不同。但是，写计划的过程会迫使你去思考一些问题，让你在这个领域中有一定的心理准备。就是说，你会开始理解，如果你按下这个按钮，那边的东西会移动等等。所以这就是第一步。
Tried to get a lot of the little housekeeping details done even before we arrived in Seattle called an attorney, actually. I called a friend who lived in Seattle. I asked him, he recommended an attorney. He said, yes, he recommended his divorce lawyer. But that's who we used. It was a general practitioner and a small guy, you know, a sort of small, sole practitioner. He incorporated the company. He asked me on the cell phone, what name would you like the company incorporated? I said, Kadabra, as an abra Kadabra. And he said, Kadabra? And I knew then that was not going to be a good name. So we went ahead and incorporated it under that name. We changed it about three months later.
在我们抵达西雅图之前，我就尝试处理很多琐碎的事务，还联系了一位律师。其实，我联系了一个住在西雅图的朋友，请他推荐一位律师。他推荐了他的离婚律师，不过我们还是用了。他是一个全科律师，规模很小的个体经营者。他帮我们注册了公司。他打电话问我，公司叫什么名字，我说Kadabra，像是魔术咒语的Abra Kadabra。他重复了一遍Kadabra？当时我就知道这个名字可能不太合适。但我们还是用这个名字注册了公司。大约三个月后，我们改了名字。
I stopped in San Francisco and interviewed vice presidents of engineering because that was going to be an important, long lead time item. We needed to build the technology that would run the store and found the person who turned out to be the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com on that trip. A guy named Shel Capin who built all of our early systems with help from others. But he really sort of architected them and engineered them and just did a fantastic job. So that, you know, so the initial hiring, right, writing the business plan, the initial hiring, getting the company incorporated, all these, you know, they're very, in a way, they're sort of, you know, simple, almost pedestrian tasks. But that's how you start one step at a time.
我在旧金山停留并面试了几位工程副总裁，因为这是一个重要且需要很长时间准备的环节。我们需要构建负责运营商店的技术系统，最终在这次旅行中找到了这个人成为了亚马逊历史上最重要的人。他叫Shel Capin，他和其他人一起构建了我们所有的早期系统。但他实际上是这种系统的架构师和工程师，工作非常出色。所以，你知道，最初的招聘、撰写商业计划、最初的招聘、公司注册等所有这些任务，从某种意义上说，都是简单甚至平凡的任务。但这就是你如何一步一步开始创业的过程。
The first sort of initial startup capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents. They invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com. And you know, that was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do because they didn't, you know, my dad's first question was, what's the internet? Okay, so this, he wasn't making a bet on this company or this concept. He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother. So, and I told them that I thought there was a 70% chance that they would lose their whole investment, which was a few hundred thousand dollars. And they did it anyway. And, you know, and I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds because, you know, there's really, you know, if you look at the odds of a startup company succeeding at all, it's only about 10%. Here I would give myself a 30% chance.
亚马逊公司最初的启动资金主要来自我的父母。他们投入了他们一大部分的积蓄，成就了今天的亚马逊。这对他们来说是非常大胆和信任的举动，因为他们当时并不了解互联网。我父亲的第一个问题是，什么是互联网？所以他们并不是在投资这家公司或这个概念，而是在投资他们的儿子，我妈妈也是这样做的。我告诉他们，我认为有70%的可能性他们会失去全部投资，这大约是几十万美元。即便如此，他们还是选择支持我。我认为自己给了自己三倍于常规的成功几率，因为如果看一家公司创业成功的几率，只有大约10%。但我给了自己30%的机会。
Startup companies need early planetary alignment because there are so many things that can go wrong. And when we launched that store in July of 1995, we were shocked at the customer response. You know, literally in the first 30 days, we had orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries. And we were woefully unprepared from an operational point of view to handle that kind of volume. And in fact, we quickly expanded, we talked to our landlord and we expanded into a 2000 square foot basement warehouse space. It had six foot ceilings. One of our 10 employees was 6'2". He went around like this the whole time.
创业公司需要早期的一切顺利，因为有太多事情可能会出错。当我们在1995年7月开设那家店时，客户的反应让我们惊讶不已。在开业后的前30天里，我们接到了来自全美50个州和45个不同国家的订单。从运营的角度来看，我们对这样大量的订单处理准备不足。事实上，我们很快就扩展了业务，我们找房东商量后，搬到了一个2000平方英尺的地下仓库，这个仓库的天花板只有6英尺高。而我们的10名员工之一身高6英尺2英寸，他整天都得弯着腰走路。
And we were doing our day jobs, which might have been computer programming and all the different things that 10 people will do in a little tiny startup company. And then we would spend all afternoon and until the wee hours of the morning packing up the orders and shipping them out. I would drive these things to UPS. And so we'd get the last one and we'd wait until the last second. I'd get to UPS and I'd sort of bang on the glass door that was closed and they always would take pity on me and sort of open up and let us, you know, ship things late. We had so many orders that we weren't ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution centers at all.
我们白天从事本职工作，可能是计算机编程之类的，还有其他小型初创公司里的十个人会做的各种事情。然后我们会整个下午甚至一直到凌晨都在打包订单并发货。我会亲自开车把这些东西送到UPS（联合包裹服务公司）。所以我们会处理到最后一刻，然后等到最后一秒再赶到UPS，敲他们关着的玻璃门。他们总是很同情我，会打开门让我们在很晚的时候发货。订单太多了，超出了我们的预期，而我们的配送中心完全没有组织。
In fact, we didn't, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor. And the, I remember just to show you how stupid I can be. I was, you know, my only defense is that it was late. But we were packing these things, everybody, everybody in the company. And I had this brainstorming, as I said to the person next to me, this packing is killing me. You know, my back hurts. This is killing my knees on this hard cement floor and the person said, yeah, I know what you mean.
实际上，我们并没有（做其他事），我们在坚硬的水泥地板上跪着打包。我记得当时为了展示我有多蠢，我对旁边的人说——那时已经很晚了，这也许是我唯一的借口——“打包这些东西真要命，我的背好痛，这硬邦邦的水泥地板也弄疼了我的膝盖。”旁边那个人回答说：“是啊，我懂你的意思。”
And I said, you know what we need? This is my brilliant insight. We need knee pads. I was very serious. And this person looked at me like I was the stupidest person they'd ever seen. They're like, I'm working for this person. This is great. And I said, what we need is packing tables. And I looked at this person and I thought that was the smartest idea I'd ever heard. The next day we got packing tables and I think we doubled our productivity. That early stage, by the way, of Amazon.com, where we were so unprepared, is probably one of the luckiest things that ever happened to us because it formed a culture of customer service in every department of the company.
我说：“你知道我们需要什么吗？这是我的一个绝妙见解，我们需要护膝。”我非常认真地说。这个人看我的眼神仿佛我是他们见过的最蠢的人。他们的反应是：“我居然为这样的人工作，真是太好了。”然后我说：“我们需要的是打包桌。”当时我觉得这是我听过最聪明的主意。第二天我们就得到了打包桌，我觉得我们的生产力翻了一倍。顺便说一句，Amazon.com的早期阶段，我们非常缺乏准备，这可能是我们遇到最幸运的事情之一，因为它塑造了公司各个部门的客户服务文化。
Every single person in the company because we had to work with our hands so close to the customers, making sure those orders went out, really set up a culture that served us well. And that is our goal to be Earth's most customer-centric company. And then a second round of fundraising about a year later or so, we raised a million dollars and I had to talk to about 60 different people. This is Angel Investor. So venture capitalists were totally uninterested.
因为我们必须近距离与客户合作，确保订单顺利发出，所以公司的每一个人都参与其中。这种做法创造了一个对我们非常有利的企业文化。我们的目标是成为全球最以客户为中心的公司。大约一年后，我们进行了第二轮融资，筹集了一百万美元。我跟大约60个不同的人进行了交谈。这些是天使投资人，而风险投资家对我们完全没有兴趣。
And this was a time, it wasn't like what people think of today. And in 1998 and 1999, you could raise 60 million dollars for an internet idea without a business plan, with a single phone call. It was a very different era, but back in 1995, it was very difficult to raise money. And by the way, it wasn't more difficult than it had been for the previous 20 years to raise money. It just was sort of normally hard. It's supposed to be hard to raise a million dollars. And so with a lot of hard work, we raised that million dollars for about 20 different angel investors who invested about $50,000 each.
那是一个不同于今天的时代。在1998年和1999年，你甚至可以在没有商业计划的情况下，仅仅通过一个电话就为一个互联网创意筹集到六千万美元。那是一个完全不同的时代，但在1995年，筹集资金是非常困难的。顺便说一下，当时筹钱并不比过去20年更难，筹集资金本来就是一件难事。筹集一百万美元理应是困难的。经过大量的努力，我们从大约20个天使投资人那里筹集到了一百万美元，每个投资人大约投资了五万美元。
And that was the original money that really funded Amazon.com. Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way, it's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. And so if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70% chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. I mean, it's sort of like, I don't have any doubt about whether we're going to fail. That's the likely outcome. And it just is.
这笔最初的资金实际上是资助了亚马逊的成立。当你以现实的方式看待机会时，创业者务必保持现实。如果在撰写商业计划的第一天，你相信整个项目有70%的可能会失败，那么这会缓解自我怀疑带来的压力。我的意思是，好像你对是否会失败没有任何怀疑，因为失败是最有可能的结果。事情就是这样。
And to pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. So what you do with those early investment dollars, so if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars, what you do with those early, precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are and you try to eliminate them one at a time. And that's how small companies get a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger.
假装这不是真的，会导致你做出奇怪而不自然的事情。所以，如果你有30万美元，然后有100万美元，你应该如何使用这些早期的投资资金呢？你要系统地尝试消除风险。你先挑出你认为最大的那些问题，然后一个一个地解决它们。就这样，小公司会一点一点地变大，一步一步地成长。
And until finally, at a certain stage, you reach a transition where you have where the company has more control over its future destiny. When a company is very tiny, it needs a tremendous amount of not only hard work, but as we talked about earlier, luck. As a company gets bigger, it starts to become a little more stable where if at a certain point in time, the company has a much bigger influence over its future outcome. It needs a lot less luck and instead it needs the hard work. And at that point, in a way, at that point, there's a little bit more pressure because then if you fail, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
直到某一阶段，你会达到一个转折点，公司开始对其未来命运有了更多的控制权。在公司非常小的时候，不仅需要大量的努力工作，还需要很多运气。随着公司的成长，它会变得更加稳定，在某个时间点，公司对其未来结果有了更大的影响力。这时，运气的重要性减少了，而需要更多的是努力工作。而在那个时候，从某种程度上来说，压力也会更大一些，因为如果失败了，你只能怪自己。
I had what I consider to be in idyllic childhood. I had two parents who loved me incredibly. I also had a tremendous amount of contact with my grandparents, my mom's parents. In fact, I spent all my summers on my grandfather's ranch not far from where we're sitting right now, not far from San Antonio. And spent three months every year from the age of four to age of 16 working on the ranch with my grandfather, which was just an incredible experience. Ranchers and anybody who works in rural areas, they learn how to be very self-reliant and whether they're farmers, whatever it is they're doing, they have to rely on themselves for a lot of things. My grandfather did sort of all of his own veterinary care on the cattle. We would repair the D6 caterpillar bulldozer when it broke and it had gears this big. We would build cranes to lift the gears out. This is just a very common sort of thing that folks in faraway places do. I think it was a great experience.
我认为我有一个非常理想的童年。我有两位非常爱我的父母。我也经常和我妈妈的父母，即我的祖父母接触。实际上，我每年夏天都会在距离圣安东尼奥不远的祖父农场度过。从四岁到十六岁，我每年有三个月的时间都在农场和祖父一起工作，这真是一次难得的经历。
牧场主和任何在农村地区工作的人都学会了如何非常依赖自己。无论他们是农民还是做其他工作，他们都必须在很多事情上依靠自己。我的祖父亲自为牛群进行兽医护理。当我们的大型推土机坏了，我们会自己修理，它的齿轮大得惊人。我们甚至会建造吊车来把齿轮吊出来。这些都是偏远地方常见的事情。我觉得这是一次非常棒的经历。
I remember the very first occupation I wanted to be when I think I was about six years old as archaeologist. This was even I would like to point out. It's a point of pride pre-Indiana Jones. Then I wanted to be an astronaut. Then later, by the time I was in my high school years I wanted to be a physicist. Then by the time I got to college, I wanted to be a computer programmer. That's actually what I studied in school. That's what led me along the path I'm on. I had some family role models and I had some other people, some sort of historical role models that I really looked at too. Certainly my grandfather was a serious role model for me. I just had spent so much time. I think you learn different things from grandparents and you learn from parents. It's great I would encourage anybody to try to spend time not only with their parents but with their grandparents.
我记得大约在我六岁的时候，我第一次想成为的职业是考古学家。我要强调一下，这是我引以为豪的事情，因为是在电影《夺宝奇兵》之前我就有这个想法的。后来，我想成为宇航员。再后来，到高中时，我想成为物理学家。到上大学时，我则想成为计算机程序员。这实际上就是我在学�
I also had two people I always would read about and were Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Those were sort of my two biographical heroes. I've always been interested in inventors and invention and Edison of course just for a little kid and probably for adults too. I still feel this way at least. Not only the symbol of that but the actual fact of that, the just incredible inventor. I've always felt that there's a certain kind of important pioneering that goes on from an inventor like Thomas Edison. Then Disney was a different sort of thing. He also, you know, a real pioneer and an inventor and doing new things. But it seemed to me that he had this incredible capability to create a vision that he could get a large number of people to share because the things that Disney invented like Disneyland, you know, the theme parks and so on, they were such big visions that no single individual, unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on, no single individual could ever pull them off. Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction.
我总是会读关于两个人的书，他们是托马斯·爱迪生和沃尔特·迪士尼。他们是我心目中的两位传记英雄。我一直对发明家和发明很感兴趣，尤其是爱迪生。对一个小孩来说，他是个了不起的发明家，可能对成年人来说也是这样，我至今仍然有这种感觉。不仅是象征意义，爱迪生本人就是一个不可思议的发明家。我一直觉得，像托马斯·爱迪生这样的发明家在某种意义上是重要的开拓者。
迪士尼则是不同的类型。他也是一个真正的开拓者和发明家，做出了许多新的事物。但在我看来，他有一种令人难以置信的能力，能够创造出一个愿景，并让许多人共同分享这个愿景。比如说，迪士尼发明的迪士尼乐园，主题公园等，这些都是如此宏大的构想，不像爱迪生的许多发明，单靠一个人永远无法实现。沃尔特·迪士尼真正能够让一大批人朝着统一的方向努力。
I was very nerdy and good student. So I was in the goody-goody class of students and was always working hard studying, always did my homework on time. I was a good student. I liked school. The things I got into trouble on were like I lost my library privileges one time which was really inconvenient for me because I was actually for laughing. I know you'll never believe this, but laughing too loudly in the library. I've had this laugh all my life. I have no idea where it came from. There was a period where my brother and sister wouldn't go see a movie with me. It was too embarrassing. But no, I was sort of, you know, probably unnaturally on the side of not getting in trouble. By the time I was in high school, we did some pranks-type things, but they were the kind of pranks that at the end of the day the teachers actually secretly loved.
我很书呆子气，同时也是个好学生。所以我在一群乖乖学生的班里，总是努力学习，按时完成作业。我是个好学生，我喜欢学校。不过我也有些时候会惹些麻烦，比如有一次我丧失了进入图书馆的特权，这对我很不方便，因为其实我是因为笑得太大声被赶出来的。我知道你可能不会相信，但我真的是因为在图书馆笑得太大声被禁足的。我这辈子一直有这种笑声，我也不知道它从哪里来的。那段时间，我的哥哥和姐姐都不愿意和我一起去看电影，因为觉得很尴尬。但总的来说，我应该算是那种几乎从不惹麻烦的人。到了高中，我们也做过一些恶作剧，不过那些恶作剧类型是老师们其实最后都会暗自喜欢的。
I remember in fourth grade we had this wonderful contest which was the people in the class. There was some prize that came from where it was, whoever could read the most newberry award winners in a year. I read through, I didn't end up winning. I think I read like 30 newberry award winners that year, but somebody else read more. And the stand out there is the old classic that I think so many people have read and enjoyed a wrinkle in time. I just remember loving that book. I was always a big fan of science fiction even from when I was in elementary school reading various things and loved of course the Hobbit and the Tolkien's trilogy that follows on from that. And this little town where my grandfather lived in the summers where I spent my time in the summer had a tiny little Andrew Carnegie style library that where all the books had been donated from the local citizens.
我记得在四年级的时候，我们班举行了一个很棒的比赛。比赛是关于谁能在一年内读最多的新贝里奖获奖图书。奖品是什么我已经记不清了，但我知道我读了很多书，虽然最终没有获胜。我记得那年我读了大约30本新贝里奖获奖书，但有个人读得更多。在那些书中，《时间的皱纹》这本经典书是我印象最深的，我相信很多人都读过并喜欢它。我从小学起就是一个科幻小说的狂热爱好者，各种书我都爱读，当然也包括《霍比特人》和之后的《托尔金三部曲》。
我暑假经常去爷爷所在的小镇待着。那个小镇有一个很小的安德鲁·卡内基风格的图书馆，所有书都是当地居民捐赠的。
And I found, I mean this is a very small library, smaller than the room that we're sitting in now. And it had an extensive science fiction collection because it just so happened one of the residents of this 3,000 person town had been a science fiction fan and donated their whole collection. And that started to love affair for me with people like Heinlein and Asimov and all the well-known science fiction authors that persist to this day. My math teacher in either fourth or fifth grade, I can't remember Mrs. McInerney, she had a big influence on me. My calculus teacher in high school, Mr. Moore, he had a big influence on me. Mrs. Delchamps who taught chemistry in high school. Mrs. Rule who taught physics. I really, I have been blessed with conscientious, hardworking, super smart teachers.
我发现这是一个非常小的图书馆，比我们现在坐的这个房间还要小。它却有一个丰富的科幻小说收藏，因为恰好这个有3000人的小镇里有一位居民是科幻迷，他捐赠了自己所有的收藏。从那时起，我开始爱上了诸如海因莱因和阿西莫夫等知名科幻作家的作品，这种热爱一直延续到今天。我的数学老师，四年级或五年级的时候，我记不太清了，Mrs. McInerney，对我影响很大。高中时我的微积分老师，Mr. Moore，对我也有很大影响。还有教化学的Mrs. Delchamps和教物理的Mrs. Rule。我真的很幸运，遇到了这些认真、勤奋、非常聪明的老师。
And I don't know because I only got to go through school once so I don't know if I have a feeling I was lucky. I know there are a lot of hardworking teachers out there but I seem to have had more than my fair share. I always wanted to please, it was one of the things and I think one of the things that these teachers who are really, really good do is they recognize that they're students. They create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning that's going on. So it's like anything, if you do something and you find it to be a very satisfying experience, then you want to do more of it. And so the great teachers somehow convey and their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning.
我不知道是否我真的是幸运，因为我只上过一次学，所以没有其他的经验可以比较。我知道有很多勤奋的老师，但似乎我遇到的好老师特别多。我一直想让老师满意，这是我的一个特点。我认为真正优秀的老师都能认识到他们的学生，并且创造一种环境，让学习的过程非常令人满足。就像任何事情一样，如果你做的事情让你感到很满足，那么你就会想做更多。所以那些伟大的老师通过他们的态度、言语和行为，让学生感受到他们正在学习的重要性。
And by doing that, you end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. And I think that's a real talent that some people have to kind of convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students. I was very difficult to punish for my parents because they would send me to my room and I was always happy to go to my room because I would just read. So it was quite, if I talked back or did anything that was sort of go your grounded and you have to stay in your room, that was always fine with me. So I was a big reader. I remember playing lots of games in elementary school, like Kick the Can and various tag and all the outdoor games and so on. And I did all those things.
通过这样做，你会越来越想做更多这类事情。我觉得有些人真正具备一种天赋，可以传达这些事情的重要性并反映给学生。我父母很难惩罚我，因为他们会把我关在房间里，但我总是很乐意待在房间里，因为我可以读书。所以，如果我顶嘴或做了什么，我被关在房间里对我来说总是没问题。我是一个爱读书的人。我记得在小学的时候玩了很多游戏，比如踢罐子、捉迷藏和其他各种户外游戏。我全都玩过。
I think I had a very kind of normal sort of, except for my ranch experience, which I think is very unusual for experiencing a great one to have had. I think my experience as a kid was a very normal one. I was five and six years older than them. So now that I'm 37 years old, it's like we're of the same generation. When I was 15 and they were 10 and nine, I had no time for them whatsoever. It was, they were always like the pesky younger siblings that I was trying to, you know. I was constantly booby trapping the house with various kinds of alarms. Some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually physical booby traps. I think I occasionally worried my parents that they were going to open the door one day and have 30 pounds of nails drop on their head or something.
我觉得我小时候除了在牧场的经历外，都算是很普通的。牧场的经历非常特别，也是很棒的回忆。总体来说，我童年的经历是很正常的。我比我的兄弟姐妹大五六岁，所以现在我37岁时，感觉我们像是同一个时代的人。但我15岁时，他们才9岁和10岁，那时我根本就不怎么理他们，他们总是像烦人的小弟弟妹妹，我一直在试图避开他们。我经常在家里布置各种警报陷阱，有些不仅是声音警报，还有物理陷阱。我想我偶尔会让父母担心某天开门时会有30磅重的钉子掉在他们头上。
I was always, you know, our garage was basically, you know, science fair central. And my mom is a saint because she would drive me to Radio Shack multiple times a day to the point where she would finally say, okay, look, will you please get your parts list straight before we go? You know, I can't handle more than one trip to Radio Shack per day. So there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on in our house. I went to Princeton primarily to, because I wanted to study physics, and it was such a fantastic place to study physics. And things went fairly well until I got to quantum mechanics and I started, and I really were about 30 people in the class by that point.
我一直都是那种，你知道，我们家的车库基本上就是科学展览中心。我的妈妈真是个圣人，因为她一天要带我去好几次Radio Shack（电子零件店），最后她终于说道，好吧，你能不能在我们出发前把你的零件清单弄好？我一天去Radio Shack一次已经受够了。所以我们家常常发生这样类似的事情。我去了普林斯顿大学，主要是因为我想学习物理，那里的物理课程非常出色。事情进展得相当顺利，直到我学习量子力学的时候，班上还有大约30个人。
And it was so hard for me. And I just remember there was a point in this where I realized, I'm never going to be a great physicist. There were three or four people in the class whose brains were so clearly wired differently to process these highly abstract concepts in, you know, so much more. I mean, I was doing well in terms of the grades I was getting, but for me, it was laborious, hard work. And for some of these truly gifted folks, it was awe-inspiring for me to watch them, because in a very easy, almost casual way, they could absorb concepts and solve problems that I would, you know, work 12 hours on.
这对我来说真的非常难。我记得有一次，我突然意识到，我永远也不能成为一位伟大的物理学家。在我们班上，有三四个人的大脑显然天生就适合处理这些高度抽象的概念，远超常人。我的成绩其实也不错，但对于我来说，那是繁重困难的辛勤劳动。而对于那些真正天才的人来说，看他们学习简直让我叹为观止。因为他们能以非常轻松，几乎不费吹灰之力的方式，吸收概念并解决我需要花12个小时才能搞定的问题。
And it was a wonderful thing to behold. At the same time, I had been studying computer science and was really finding that that was something where I was drawn to, drawn, I was drawn to that more and more. And that turned out to be a great thing. So I found one of the great things Princeton taught me is that I'm not smart enough to be a physicist. I was very, very lucky because in fourth grade, which for me would have been, it would have been about 1974, I had access to a mainframe computer. There were no personal computers in 1974, and there was a company in Houston that had loaned excess mainframe computer time to this little elementary school.
这真是美妙的景象。同时，我一直在学习计算机科学，逐渐发现自己被它深深吸引，越来越喜欢它。这件事对我来说是非常棒的。普林斯顿教给我的其中一件重要的事情是，让我认识到自己不够聪明，无法成为一名物理学家。我觉得自己非常幸运，因为在大约1974年，我上四年级的时候，我能够接触到一台大型计算机。那时候还没有个人电脑，有一家位于休斯顿的公司把多余的大型计算机时间借给了我们这所小学。
And we had a teletype that was connected by an old, you know, acoustic modem. You literally dialed a regular phone and picked up the handset and put it in this little cradle. And nobody, none of the teachers knew how to operate this computer. Nobody did, but there was a stack of manuals. And me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing. And that worked well for maybe about a week. And then we learned that the mainframe programmers in some central location somewhere in Houston had already programmed this computer to play Star Trek. And from that day forward, all we did was play Star Trek.
我们有一台电传打字机，通过一种老式的声波调制解调器连接。你需要拨打一个普通电话，然后把听筒放在一个小托架上。而且没有一个老师知道如何操作这台电脑。没有人知道，不过有一堆手册。我和另外几个孩子放学后留了下来，学会了如何编程操作这台电脑。这种情况大概持续了一星期左右。然后我们发现，在休斯顿某个中心位置的主机程序员已经给这台电脑编好了一个《星际迷航》游戏。从那天起，我们就一直在玩《星际迷航》。
And that's actually something I should have mentioned. I used a large portion of my elementary school free time hours, not only watching Star Trek. The original, of course, but also playing Star Trek. And everybody wanted to be, all of my friends, we all wanted to be Spock. And if you couldn't be Spock, then you would be Captain Kirk. And if you couldn't be Captain Kirk, then it started to separate. Some people wanted to be different. Some people wanted to be Bones. I never wanted to be Bones. I would take as my third choice. If I couldn't get Spock or Kirk, I would take the computer. It was a, somebody would ask, because the computer was fun to play, because people would ask you questions and they'd say computer and you'd say working.
其实这一点我早应该提到的。我在小学时，除了看《星际迷航》之外，还花了很多自由时间在玩《星际迷航》游戏。当然，是看原版《星际迷航》。我和我的朋友们都想扮演Spock。如果不能扮演Spock，我们就会争当Kirk船长。如果Kirk船长也扮不了，大家才会开始选择不同的角色。有些人想当Bones，我从没想过当Bones。我的第三选择是，如果不能扮演Spock或Kirk，我就会选当电脑。有人会来问问题，因为扮演电脑也很有趣，人们会问你问题，他们说“电脑”，而你就回答“正在工作”。
I think it's always hard to know why you're drawn to a particular thing. I think part of it is if you have a facility with that thing, then of course it's satisfying to do it in a way that's self-reinforcing. And certainly I always had a facility with computers. I always got along well with them. And there's such extraordinary tools. I mean, you can teach them to do things and then they actually do them. I mean, it's kind of an incredible tool that we've built here in the 20th century. And that was a love affair that really did start in fourth grade. And then by the time I got to high school, I think when I was in 11th grade, I got an Apple II Plus and continued fooling around with computers.
我觉得总是很难知道你为什么会被某件事情吸引。部分原因可能是，如果你在这方面有一定的天赋或能力，那么做起来就会很有满足感，会不断激励自己。而且我一直在电脑方面有这种天赋，我和它们相处得很好。电脑真的是非常了不起的工具，你可以教它们做事情，它们也确实会去做。这真是20世纪创造的一个令人惊叹的工具。这种迷恋其实从我四年级就开始了。到了高中时，大概在我十一年级的时候，我得到了一台 Apple II Plus，然后继续与电脑打交道。
And then by the time I got to Princeton, I was taking all the computer classes and actually not just learning how to hack, but learning about algorithms and some of the mathematics behind computer science. And it's fascinating. I mean, it's really a very involving and fun subject. I toyed with the idea of starting a company and even talked to a couple of friends about starting a company and ultimately decided that it would be smarter to wait and learn a little bit more about business and the way the world works. You know, one of the things that it's very hard to believe when you're 22 or 23 years old is that you don't already know everything.
当我进入普林斯顿时，我上了所有的计算机课程，不仅学会了黑客技术，还学习了算法和计算机科学背后的数学原理。这真的很吸引人，计算机科学是一门非常有趣且让人沉浸的学科。我曾经考虑过创办一家公司，甚至和几个朋友讨论过这个想法，但最终决定还是先等等，先多学习一些商业知识和社会运作的方式。你知道，当你22或23岁的时候，很难相信自己并不了解所有事物。
It turns out, I mean, as I suspect, you know, people learn more and more as they get older that you seem to learn, you seem to realize that you know less and less every year that goes by. I can only imagine that by the time I'm 70, I will realize I know nothing. So that was, I think, a very good decision to not do that. I went to work for a startup company, but you know, one in New York City that was building a network for helping brokerage firms clear trades. I mean, it's kind of an obscure thing and it's not very interesting to go into, but it used my technical skills and it was very fun work and I loved the people I was working with. And then that sort of, from then on, I started working sort of at the intersection of computers and finance and stayed on Wall Street for a long time, ultimately worked for a company that did this thing called quantitative hedge fund trading. So we programmed the computers and then the computers made stock trades and that was very interesting too. And that was where I was working when I came across the fact that the web was growing at 2300% a year and that's what led to the forming of Amazon.com.
事实证明，随着年龄的增长，人们会越来越多地学习新东西，但与此同时，你会发现自己每年知道的东西越来越少。我只能想象，到我70岁的时候，我会意识到自己几乎什么都不知道。因此，我认为不做某件事是个非常好的决定。我去了一家初创公司工作，这家公司在纽约市，帮助经纪公司清算交易。这听起来有点晦涩，也不太有趣，但确实用到了我的技术技能，工作也非常有趣，我很喜欢和同事们一起工作。后来，我开始在计算机和金融的交汇处工作，并在华尔街待了很长时间，最终加入了一家做量化对冲基金交易的公司。我们编程电脑，然后由电脑进行股票交易，这也非常有意思。我正是在那里发现了互联网每年以2300%的速度增长的事实，这促使我创办了亚马逊公司。
I think the internet in general, Amazon.com in particular, this is still chapter one. So you're sort of asking me about my story and it's still sort of the very beginning. And which I think is, you know, it is interesting because there's, you know, there's, there's still a lot of this to be built, a lot of technology to build, a lot of innovations for customers to be built and also the financial side of the story is still playing itself out in real time. But you know, there are, there's a lot of visibility on the internet and there has been for the last couple of years. The first, you know, four years of the company, you know, we sort of worked in relative obscurity and it was, you know, we always had lots of supporters and we always had lots of skeptics. And that's still the same today. It's just that the level of visibility is so much higher.
我认为互联网总体上，尤其是亚马逊网站，还处在早期阶段。你问我关于我的故事，这其实还只是个开头。我觉得这很有趣，因为还有很多东西需要构建，许多技术需要开发，很多为顾客的创新还在进行中，同时财务方面的故事也仍在实时展开。不过，互联网已经引起了很大的关注，过去几年一直是这样。在公司的前四年里，我们在相对默默无闻的情况下工作。我们总是有很多支持者，也有不少怀疑者。今天的情况依旧如此，只是我们的知名度现在已经大大提高了。
So, you know, if you look at the six years that we've been doing business so far, one of them, exactly one of those six years, we were not the underdog and that was 1999. And that was the weird year for us. Now it's much more normal. It's more what we're used to. You know, at this point in time, we haven't built a lasting company yet. We still have a tremendous amount of hard work ahead of us. But we have all the assets in place now. We have eliminated the necessity for the luck that a startup company requires. And now, you know, our future is in our own hands as a team and as a company. We have so many smart people. We have so many customers who treat us so well. And we have the right kind of culture that obsesses over the customer. If there's one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the internet space, you know, over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience and that really does matter.
你知道吗，如果你回顾我们这六年的经营历程，其中只有一年，我们不再是“黑马”，那就是1999年。那年对我们来说是个特别的年份。现在的情况更加正常，属于我们习以为常的状态。到了这个阶段，我们还没有建立起一个持久的公司，仍然有大量的艰苦工作摆在我们面前。但我们现在拥有了所有必要的资源，不再需要初创公司那种依赖运气的机遇。现在，我们的未来掌握在我们团队和公司的手中。我们有许多聪明的人才，还有很多善待我们的客户。我们拥有一种关注客户体验的企业文化。如果说过去六年里，我们在互联网领域的表现优于大多数同行的原因，我认为那就是我们像激光一样专注于客户体验，这真的很重要。
I think in any business, it certainly matters online where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. You know, if you make a customer unhappy, they won't tell five friends. They'll tell five thousand friends. So we are at a point now where we have all the things we need to build an important and lasting company. And if we don't, it will be shame on us. I think in my particular case, I laugh a lot. So it is, you know, there are, I think, stress. You can be, like one of the things that's very important to note about stress is that stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.
我认为在任何生意中，尤其是在网络上，口碑都非常非常重要。如果你让一个客户不满意，他们不会只告诉五个朋友，而是会告诉五千个朋友。所以我们现在已经拥有了建立一个重要且持久公司的所有要素。如果我们没有成功，那就是我们的错。我个人的经验是，我经常笑。这是一种我对压力的应对方式。我觉得需要强调的一点是，压力大多来自于你本可以控制却没有采取行动的事情。
So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that's a warning flag for me. What it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me and I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address that situation, even if it's not solved, the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring, I think, in large part.
所以，如果我发现某件事情让我感到压力，那对我来说就是一个警示信号。这意味着在我的意识中，可能有某些东西还没有完全被识别出来，这让我感到不安，而我还没有采取任何行动。一旦我识别出问题，并打出第一通电话或发出第一封电子邮件，或者做任何开始处理这个情况的事情，即使问题没有完全解决，仅仅因为我们开始处理它，压力就会大大减少。所以，我认为，压力很大程度上来源于忽视那些你不应该忽视的事情。
So stress doesn't come. People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion. Stress doesn't come from hard work, for example. You know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it. And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that. So and likewise, if you kind of use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work, but you're going through a disciplined approach of a series of job interviews and so on and working to remedy that situation, you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.
所以，压力并不会凭空而来。我的观点是，人们常常误解压力的来源。例如，压力并不是因为工作辛苦。 你可能在非常努力地工作，同时还乐在其中。同样地，你可能在失业的情况下感到极大的压力。所以，如果我们把这类情况作为一个类比来解释我刚才讲的内容，当你失业时，如果你采取了有条理的方法，进行一系列的面试等来解决这个问题，那么你的压力会比你只是担心但什么也不做要小得多。
Well, I think, you know, one of the things that I think people would be surprised to learn, and I don't know if this is true for everybody, but I suspect it is. And I think that at least at a certain age, the basic foundational things about people are largely set. And so, you know, I'm a lottery winner of a certain kind. And I suspect if you were to go, you know, survey lottery winners, you would find that the core things about them don't really change because they won the lottery. And I think that's probably, and I think people are always very curious about that. How does it foundationally, fundamentally change a person when they win a lottery? And I don't think it does very much.
嗯，我觉得你知道，有一件事我认为大家会感到惊讶，我不确定是否所有人都是这样，但我怀疑是的。我觉得至少在某个年龄段，人们的基本性格已经基本定型了。所以，我是某种意义上的彩票赢家。但我猜如果你去调查彩票赢家，你会发现他们的核心特质并不会因为中了大奖而改变。我认为这是一个很有趣的话题，大家总是很好奇，中彩票会如何从根本上改变一个人。而我认为实际上并不会有太大的变化。
One thing I find very motivating, and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or motive, or cause of motivation, is I love people counting on me. And so, you know, today it's so easy to be motivated because we have millions of customers counting on us at Amazon.com. We've got thousands of investors counting on us, and we've got, you know, we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. And so, it's a, and that's fun.
我发现让我非常有动力的一件事，也是很多人获得动力的一种常见方式，就是我喜欢人们依赖我。所以，现在激励自己变得很容易，因为在Amazon.com上，我们有数百万的客户依赖我们。我们还有成千上万的投资者在依赖我们，并且我们是一支由成千上万名员工组成的团队，互相依赖。这很有趣。
Do something you're very passionate about. And don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day. I think we actually saw this. I think you see it all over the place in many different contexts. So I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where, you know, at the sort of peak of the sort of internet, you know, mania, and say 1999, you found people who were, you know, very passionate, they kind of left that job and decided I'm going to, you know, do something in the internet because it's, you know, it's almost like the, you know, the 1849 gold rush in a way. I mean, you find that people, if you go back and study the history of the 1849 gold rush, you find that, you know, at that time everybody who was in, was within the shouting distance of California was, you know, they might have been a doctor, but they quit being a doctor, and they started panning for gold. And that, that almost never works. And even if it does work, you know, according to some metric, financial success or whatever it might be, I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied.
做一些你非常热爱的事情。不要试图去追逐当前流行的热门行业。我觉得我们确实看到过这种情况。在互联网世界中，我们就看到了很多类似的现象。在1999年互联网热潮的高峰期，许多人非常有激情，离开了原本的工作，决定投身互联网行业。就像1849年的淘金热一样。如果你去研究1849年淘金热的历史，会发现当时在加利福尼亚附近的人，不管他们本来是医生还是其他职业，都放弃了原来的职业，开始淘金。但这种做法几乎从来不会成功。即便按照某些标准，比如财务成功，它可能真的起作用了，我怀疑最终你还是会感到不满足。
So you really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for, that works for career decisions, it works for family decisions. You know, do you want, I have a 14 month old son, and it's very easy for me to, if I think about myself when I'm 80, I know I want to watch that little guy grow up. And so it's, I don't want to be 80 and think, shoot, you know, I miss that whole thing and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had and so on and so on. So if you think about that,
所以，你真的需要非常清楚自己的想法。我认为其中一个最好的方法就是想象你到了80岁，回顾自己的一生，尽量确保你所遗憾的事情最少。这适用于职业选择，也适用于家庭决定。你知道吗，比如我有一个14个月大的儿子，如果我想到自己80岁时，我知道我会希望看到这个小家伙长大。所以，我不想到了80岁时感叹：“唉，我错过了他的成长，与儿子的关系也不像我期望的那样。”以此类推。所以，如果你考虑到这一点——
So I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long term point of view. And I think this is something about which there's a lot of controversy. You know, there's a, you know, a lot of people, and I'm just not one of them, believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is you think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's going to leave you ultimately satisfied. So this is just my, this is the way it works for me. And I mean, this is, everybody needs to find that for themselves.
所以，我想我会给大家的另一个建议是，要始终以长远的眼光看待问题。我知道这一点有很多争议，有很多人——我不是其中之一——相信你应该活在当下。我的观点是，你应该考虑眼前未来的漫长岁月，并确保你在计划中能让自己最终感到满意。这只是我的观点，对我来说，这样行得通。每个人都需要找到适合自己的方式。
I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works, works for you. If you are a lottery winner, as I am, then one of the things that you, you get a chance to do at some point in your life is to be a philanthropist. And so I, you know, I didn't grow up hoping, you know, boy, maybe I'll be a philanthropist one day. That wasn't ever on my list of, you know, archeologist, astronaut, those things I wanted to be, physicist, I never, I think in large part because I never expected to have the means to be a philanthropist. But I think that if you win a lottery of this kind of size, that one of the things that, that, that over time you have an obligation to do is to think about the ways that that, that that wealth can be used in a highly leveraged way.
我认为有很多途径可以达到满足感，你需要找到一个适合自己的。如果你像我一样中了大奖，那么你某个时候有机会成为一个慈善家。我并不是从小就希望有一天能成为慈善家，我梦想的职业包括考古学家、宇航员、物理学家，但成为慈善家从来没有在我的愿望清单上。主要是因为我从未料到自己能拥有成为慈善家的经济条件。然而，如果你中了像这样巨额的奖，你就有责任思考如何利用这些财富去产生巨大的影响。
I also think by the way, it's really easy to give away money in highly unleveraged ways where it's just a waste of money. I suspect that it takes as much sort of time, energy, focus, and hard work to effectively give away money as it does to get it in the first place. I think one of the things that's most important to me is, you know, this, the, one of the, really the notions that, that the United States was founded on and this, and, and it is liberty. So it is a, it is a very, it's a very difficult thing. I mean, there's lots of very interesting stuff to think about in this regard. And, you know, it just so happens that a free market economy, sort of a capitalist system, which has a lot of liberty mixed in with it, that we all get to decide, you know, how we're going to go about making our own living and so on and so on, that happens to also be a very effective way of, of deploying an economy so that you get an economy which mostly makes sense, you know, things mysteriously because of that invisible hand tend to work out.
我也认为，顺便一提，很容易以非常低效的方式捐赠金钱，这样只是在浪费钱。我怀疑，要有效地捐赠钱款，其实需要花费和赚取钱财同样多的时间、精力、专注和辛苦。我认为，对我来说，最重要的事情之一，就是美国建立时所基于的一个理念，那就是自由。这是一个非常困难的事情，我是说，有很多有趣的东西值得思考。碰巧的是，自由市场经济，也就是一种夹杂了大量自由成分的资本主义制度，让我们每个人都能决定如何谋生，这也恰好是一个非常有效的经济运行方式，结果是，你会得到一个大体上合理的经济，很多事情因为那只看不见的手而神奇般地得到解决。
I remember there was a time, I may have these statistics slightly wrong a few years ago, there was a heat wave in the south that killed 3% of chickens and I think egg prices doubled because there were 3% fewer chickens. So that means that the number of chickens is roughly right, even though there's nobody deciding how many chickens there should be. So that is a very interesting fact, I think, that the free market economy which by necessity involves a lot of liberty just happens to work well in terms of allocating resources. But imagine a different world, imagine a world where, you know, some incredibly artificially intelligent computer could actually do a better job than the invisible hand of allocating resources. You know, there shouldn't be this many chickens, there should be this many chickens, just a few more or a few less.
我记得有一次，可能统计数据有些不准确，几年前南方发生了一场热浪，导致3%的鸡死亡，结果鸡蛋价格翻了一倍，因为鸡数量减少了3%。所以这说明鸡的数量基本是合适的，尽管没有人决定应该有多少鸡。我认为这是一个非常有趣的事实，自由市场经济在一定程度上依靠自由，它在资源分配方面竟然表现得很好。但是，想象一个不同的世界，想象一个世界里，有一个超级智能的计算机能比“看不见的手”更好地分配资源。它可以精确地决定应该有多少鸡，是多一点还是少一点。
Well, that might even lead to more aggregate wealth, so it might be a society that if you give up liberty, everybody could be a little wealthier. Now the question that I would pose is if that turned out to be the world, is that a good trade? Personally, I don't think so. Personally, I think it would be a terrible trade. And I sometimes worry about that because I think it's a coincidence that liberty tends to do such a good job of, you know, sort of creating an economy that functions well. You know if you look over long periods of time, you know, look over hundreds of years and look at the average sort of life cycle of a new technology, what you find is that it's getting compressed and compressed and compressed. The rate of change is getting faster and faster. Every decade that goes by, there's sort of more important discoveries per unit time than there were in the previous decade. And a lot of these discoveries tend to, you know, have two uses. I mean, technologies tend to be agnostic with respect to whether they could be used for good or used for evil.
好的，这甚至可能导致更多的总财富，所以如果你放弃自由，社会可能会变得更富裕一点。现在我要问的问题是，如果这真是现实情况，那么这是一个好的交换吗？就我个人而言，我认为不是。我个人认为这会是一个糟糕的交换。我有时为此感到担忧，因为我认为自由在促进经济良好运转方面做得很好是一个巧合。如果你观察很长时间，比如几百年，以及观察新技术的平均生命周期，你会发现这个周期在不断缩短，变化速度也越来越快。每过去十年，每单位时间内的重要发现比上一十年更多。而且很多这些发现往往有双重用途。也就是说，技术本身是不分善恶的，它们既可以被用于好的方面，也可以被用于坏的方面。
And I think that, you know, over the next 50 years, we are going to face a lot of very tough decisions as a society in how we make sure that we are harnessing those technologies for good purposes. I think liberty, giving people the freedom to, you know, as long as they're not hurting somebody else, do what they want, is super important. I think it's the core essence of the American dream. And I think at times, we as a people get confused about it. I mean, I think one of the things that you see come up in various places and people talk about it under different labels, sometimes they talk about it as a lack of personal responsibility and other kinds of labels. But what it really is is I think people should, you know, carefully reread the first part of the Declaration of Independence because I think sometimes we as a society start to get confused and think that we have a right to happiness.
我认为，在未来50年里，作为一个社会，我们将面临许多非常艰难的决策，以确保我们能够将这些技术用在好的方面。我认为自由非常重要，给人们自由，只要他们不伤害别人，去做他们想做的事。这是美国梦的核心意义。我认为有时候我们作为一个民族会对此感到困惑。我觉得有些事情会以不同的形式和名字出现，人们有时称之为缺乏个人责任感等。但实际上，我认为人们应该仔细重读《独立宣言》的第一部分，因为有时候我们作为一个社会开始混淆，认为我们有权获得幸福。
But if you read the Declaration of Independence, it talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody has a right to happiness. You should have a right to pursue it. And I think the core of that is liberty.
但是如果你读《独立宣言》的话，它提到的是生命、自由和追求幸福的权利。没有人有获得幸福的权利，但你应该拥有追求幸福的权利。而我认为，其核心就是自由。