Jeff Bezos為2010年普林斯頓大學畢業生演講 - YouTube

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on the 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 traveled together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go. And a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents, and I really looked forward to these trips.

当我还是个孩子的时候，我在德克萨斯州的牧场里和我的祖父母度过了我的夏天。我帮忙修理风车，给牛接种疫苗，做其他家务。每天下午我们也会看肥皂剧，尤其是《我们生活的日子》。我的祖父母是一个叫做“大篷车俱乐部”的团体成员，他们都是Airstream拖车的拥有者，一起环游美国和加拿大。而每隔几个夏天，我们会加入这个大篷车队。我们将Airstream拖车连接到我祖父的车上，然后我们就启程了。与其他300个Airstream冒险家一起。我深爱并崇拜我的祖父母，我真的很期待这些旅行。

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.

在一次特别的旅行中，我大约10岁。我在车后排的大长椅上翻来覆去。我祖父在开车，我的祖母坐在副驾驶座上。她在这些旅行中一直在吸烟，我讨厌那股味道。那个年纪，我会找任何借口来估算和做一些小算术。我会计算我们的油耗，算出一些无用的统计数据，比如杂货开销。我听到过一个有关吸烟的广告宣传。我记不清细节了，但基本上广告说，每抽一口烟就会让你的寿命缩短一段时间。我记得可能是每抽一口短两分钟。

At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, 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 of your life. I have a very vivid memory of what happened next, and it was not what I had expected. I expected to be applauded from my cleverness and my arithmetic skills. Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates.

无论如何，我决定为我的祖母做一番算术。我估计了每天吸烟的数量，估计了每支香烟的吸气次数等等。当我满意地得出一个合理的数字时，我探头到车前座，拍了拍祖母的肩膀，自豪地宣称，每次吸烟两分钟，你已经让自己少活了九年。我对接下来发生的事情有很生动的记忆，但事情并不是我所期望的。我以为自己会因为聪明和算术技能受到称赞。杰夫，你太聪明了。你一定进行了一些巧妙的估计。

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 back seat, didn't know what to do, while my grandmother was crying. My grandfather, who'd 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. 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.

算出一年有多少分钟，然后做一些除法。但事情并不是这样发生的。相反，我的祖母突然哭了起来。我坐在后座上，不知道该做什么，当我祖母在哭。我的祖父一直静静地开车，突然停下来靠在公路的路肩上。他下车绕到我的身边，打开车门等待我跟出去。难道我惹麻烦了吗？我的祖父是一个聪明、沉默的人。他从未对我说过一句苛刻的话。也许这会是第一次。或者他会要求我重新上车向祖母道歉。我在和祖父母的这个领域没有经验，也无法评估可能面临的后果。

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.

我们停在拖车旁边。我的爷爷看着我，沉默片刻后，温和而平静地说：“杰夫，总有一天你会明白，善良比聪明更难。”我今天想和你谈谈的是天赋和选择的区别。聪明是一种天赋，善良是一种选择。天赋很容易，毕竟是给予的。选择可能很难。如果不小心，你可能会被自己的天赋所迷惑。如果发生这种情况，可能会损害你的选择。

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 Admissions wouldn't have let you in. Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans, plotting as we are, will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Adam by Adam, we'll assemble small machines that can intercell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but inevitable news that we've synthesized life. And the coming years will not only synthesize it, but 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.

这是一个拥有许多天赋的群体。我相信你拥有聪明而能干的大脑这一天赋之一。我有信心是因为入学竞争激烈。如果没有一些迹象表明你很聪明，招生主任就不会让你进来。你的聪明才智将会派上用场，因为你将在一个神奇的世界中旅行。我们人类，尽管心怀阴谋，却会让自己惊叹不已。我们将发明出产生清洁能源的方式，而且会有大量产出。我们将一步步组装能够穿越细胞壁并进行修复的小机器。本月传来了令人惊叹但又不可避免的消息，我们合成了生命。未来的几年将不仅合成生命，而且还会根据规格进行基因工程。我相信你甚至会看到我们理解人类大脑。儒勒·凡尔纳、马克·吐温、伽利略、牛顿，所有古今中外的好奇者都希望最终活在这个时代。

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 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 2300% per year and I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast. 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.

作为一个文明社会，我们将拥有如同你们每个人坐在我面前的时候拥有的那么多天赋。你们如何运用这些天赋，你们会为自己的天赋感到骄傲，还是会为自己的选择感到骄傲？16年前，我有了创办亚马逊的想法。我发现网络使用量每年增长2300%，这样迅猛的增长速度我之前从未见过或听说过。想到建立一个拥有数百万种图书的在线书店，这在现实世界是不可能存在的，这个想法让我非常兴奋。

I 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 aluminum foil, 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 I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I was going 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.

我刚刚过了30岁生日，结婚一年了。我告诉我的妻子麦肯齐，我想辞去工作，去做一件疯狂的事情，很可能不会成功，因为大多数创业公司都不会成功，而且我也不确定之后会发生什么。麦肯齐也是普林斯顿大学毕业生，坐在第二排这里，她告诉我应该去尝试。小时候，我是一名车库发明家。我曾用装满水泥的轮胎发明了一个自动闭门器，用伞和铝箔做了一个效果很差的太阳能烹饪器，还用烤盘做了闹钟来捉弄我的兄弟姐妹。我一直想成为一个发明家，而她希望我追随自己的梦想。我当时在纽约一家金融公司工作，和一群非常聪明的人一起工作，我很崇敬那位才华横溢的老板。我去找我的老板，告诉他我要创办一家在互联网上销售图书的公司。他带我在中央公园长时间散步，认真听我讲，最后他说，这听起来是一个非常好的主意，但对于一个已经有一份好工作的人来说，可能是一个更好的主意。这个逻辑对我来说有些道理，他说服我在做最终决定前考虑48小时。从这个角度看，这真的是一个艰难的选择，但最终我决定要试一试。

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. So 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.

我曾认为尝试并失败不会让我后悔，而不尝试会让我一直为这个决定而感到困扰。经过深思熟虑，我选择了更不安全的道路，追随自己的热情，我为这个选择感到自豪。因此，从某种意义上说，你的生活，你完全自己打造的生活开始了。你将如何运用你的天赋？你会做出什么选择？惯性会是你的指导，还是你会追随你的热情？你会遵循教条还是会做出原创？你会选择舒适的生活还是充满奉献和冒险的生活？你会在批评面前退缩还是坚守信念？你会在错误时逞强还是道歉？你会防范心灵受到拒绝还是在爱情中行动？你会选择安稳还是会冒险一点？当困难时，你会放弃还是会坚持不懈？你会成为愤世嫉俗的人还是成为一个建设者？你会以牺牲他人为代价来表现聪明还是善良？我敢做出一个预测。

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.

当你八十岁时，在一个安静的反思时刻，只为自己讲述你生命故事中最私人版本的时候，最简洁而有意义的讲述将是你所做的一系列选择。最终，我们就是我们的选择。创造一个伟大的故事给自己。谢谢你，祝你好运。