Jeff Bezos's Graduation Speech at Princeton

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!