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