Jeff Bezos to Princeton's class of 2010 :"We are What We Choose"

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml

by yarapavan • 16 years ago

182 45 16 years ago

princeton.edu

yarapavan• 16 years ago

From the article:

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?

ostso• 16 years ago

That seems like a fairly cliché series of dichotomies. Life isn't black and white; if choices were always this clear-cut then they wouldn't be hard.

yewweitan• 16 years ago

Agreed. But motivation seems to be pretty black and white (you're either making it happen or not), at least in the short term, and cliches (or rather, heuristics) are the best way to keep the motivation revving.

paraschopra• 16 years ago

Yes, but you need extremes in order to sift through shades of grey.

Andi• 16 years ago

I like this part of the speech. This is the real advice, BECAUSE it plays with black and white.

So you have to ask yourself: WHY do I tend to answer the left question with YES instead of the right one? What is the real cause for not making hard decisions? You should not just ask those questions to your mind, but to your body as well.

No success without the right body and health state.

The question for your life is: How big is your freedom (go to the limits and test it)? If it is not big enough, trying to stay HUMBLE is often the hardest decision.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

> trying to stay HUMBLE is often the hardest decision.

Golda Meir comes to mind (to Moshe Dayan): "Don't be so humble, you're not that great".

Artifex• 16 years ago

Video of the speech (starts at 5:45 roughly): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmavNoChZc

ptm• 16 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmavNoChZc#t=6m15s

nickelplate• 16 years ago

This hit me pretty hard.

drguildo• 16 years ago

Me too. My gag reflex, mainly.

grasshoper• 16 years ago

The boss he's talking about is David E. Shaw.

jgrahamc2• 16 years ago

I would choose to be a mensch. That's what I keep striving for.

Tichy• 16 years ago

What's that?

ErrantX• 16 years ago

Google is your friend :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensch

jgrahamc2• 16 years ago

It's a Yiddish word that I picked up when living in the US (and working/living around many American Jews). It roughly means "an honorable person" and I've heard it used as an honorific term to describe another person (as in, "he's a mensch").

MW says: "a person of integrity and honor". It's my desire that people might view me as a mensch one day.

gsk• 16 years ago

You're probably aware of this. In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' Nietzsche's speaks of Übermensch as being the goal to strive for (Übermensch has been roughly translated as Beyond Man or overcoming the shackles of being human).

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Jeff Bezos seems to suffer from selection bias. We don't always have those choices, count yourself lucky if you do and then make the right ones but don't fret about it if you do not.

Not all of us will become billionaires by simply making 'the right choices', plenty of people made the choices the right way and ended up average or dirt poor.

Count your wealth in the number of smiles you see when people meet you again after not seeing you for a while.

kylemathews2• 16 years ago

Huh? Everyone has to make the choice between being clever or kind. The point of the talk wasn't "make the right choices and you'll end up a billionaire." The point of the story was the quality of your life, your own happiness, and your real worth is determined by the choices you make, not what gifts you have because, as Jeff pointed out, they're just gifts after all, you didn't earn them.

His implicit point was an average intelligent person with average wealth can be just as satisfied with his/her life as a highly intelligent, highly gifted billionaire provided they both made quality choices about how they lived their life.

Edit: clarified last sentence.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

That's easy to say when you have a few billion in the bank. But most people simply don't have the liberty of choice at all, their lives are driven by requirements, not by freedom of choice.

Freedom of choice is for the most part an illusion, it is only true freedom if you determine what's on the menu. To be able to choose 'left' or 'right' when you want 'straight', 'down', 'reverse' and so on as valid choices but you don't have them because of the constraints placed on you by every day life is a false kind of freedom presented in those limited choices.

So, in practice, your average billionaire has more (many more) choices available to him than those lower on the financial ladder. The reason Jeff Bezos had the choice to give that speech or not is not because he's particularly happy, but because he's rich.

nandemo2• 16 years ago

> Everyone has to make the choice between being clever or kind.

I was baffled by this remark; since when being clever or kind are mutually exclusive options? According to the transcript he said "will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?".

dannyr• 16 years ago

jacquesm,

I'm actually really curious about your life experiences. I remember arguing with you last time similar to this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373349).

You seem to be always against advising people to make bold choices to pursue their dreams.

I grew up in a poor family in the Philippines. I have lived with the poor and I have seen many people rose from poverty because they chose to. My mom who never finished grade school is the best example for that. I have also seen so many people who just never made an effort to rise out of poverty.

I just can't imagine a world full of people with the same views as yours. People who keep telling others that they don't have a choice - "be content to where you are now because that's as far as you can get" or "it may have worked for others but it doesn't mean it's going to work for you".

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

> You seem to be always against advising people to make bold choices to pursue their dreams.

On the contrary, but there is a right time for everything.

Pretending that a class of graduates has something to learn from a guy that basically is standing before them not because of how ethically he lived his life and how happy he is but because he simply is rich (and therefore successful by our most common yardstick, wealth) is dishonest.

If you'd go out and find someone that has actually managed to achieve such a state of mind from hardship (say Nelson Mandela) then I'd be all for it.

My life experiences are one long series of bold moves, and I wouldn't have it any other way but I'm very careful to tell other people to 'do as I do', everything has its price and you have to make people aware of the price before you tell them to purchase the wares.

I think you are completely misreading me in what I wrote back then, I made it pretty clear in this sentence:

"Yes, so it worked for you. Great. It worked for me too, 23 years ago, one idle day in July. But that does not mean it will work for everyone."

To put out the advice to quit to someone without further knowledge of their situation is short-sighted, at a minimum you should spend a good bit of time to ascertain that that really is what's best for them, off the cuff advice like that can be very harmful.

If you want to know more about my life experiences feel free to read: http://jacquesmattheij.com/ .

Arun2009• 16 years ago

> 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.

I keep coming across this theme again and again. "One day you will tell your grandchildren..", "When you're lying in your deathbed..", etc. As if the younger human has an obligation to work to create the perfect set of memories for the older one, which then would be enjoyed for at best a few years. Toil for 50 years of your life to create the perfect last 2 years!

It's perverse, really. We seem to enjoy imagining ourselves enjoying the memories of our present lives..

mbateman• 16 years ago

I think it's (hopefully) just a dramatic way of pointing out that and how all of your days have added up to something, instead of being random disconnected bits. Of course they are adding up as you go, too, they don't just suddenly sum up at the end.

zaidf• 16 years ago

I smiled when I came across that line because I frequently use it--even down to the 80-year old number.

It helps put things in perspective, especially with respect to fear. We fear so many things and not do it. And yet, a lot of the fear is just imaginary--something the 80 year old you can see looking back but the current you cannot.

So I ask myself "what would the 80 year old me think of it?" and if it says to do it, I try to do it.

Example: you want to take a temporary crappy job to get back to your feet but you're afraid friends will see you working there and lose respect.

Present me: afraid I'll lose my friends, ego hit

80-year old me: proud I followed my dream!

Now I totally understand if this doesn't work for you and don't expect it to work for everyone or even most people. But I just thought I'd provide some background on how people who do use this to motivate themselves are using it.

sreque• 16 years ago

I think it's because many of us believe there is life after death, and being able to reflect positively about your mortal life when at its end is a good sign that you're off to a good start for the next!

sbaqai• 16 years ago

Bezos mentioned this idea elsewhere, but I think he's using it as a framework to evaluate present decisions in absence of external pressures that typically cloud judgement. When you think with a long enough time horizon, some of the external 'trappings' of success (money, prestige, status, pride, security, etc) seem to fall away.

Before Amazon, he was a VP at DE Shaw. You can argue that if he stayed at his hedge fund job, he'd have enough money to buy all the material possessions he has now. I doubt he'd drive a different car, live in a different house, etc.

Its easy to risk it all, when you have nothing to lose. But he had pretty much everything to lose. I think most people at that point would look around, realize they're richer than most of their friends, and stay at their jobs.

If you think ahead to when you're on your deathbed, you're back at a point in your life where you have nothing to lose. You won't care about external pressures. You will have wished to have invested your time on matters that improved your quality of life with compounding interest. I'd like to believe that Jeff Bezos isn't just happier today for choosing to start Amazon- as he gets older, it will only make him that much more content.

ju2tin• 16 years ago

Nowhere near as good as Steve Jobs' address at Stanford a few years back, which remains the gold standard for these things.

This one seemed mainly like Jeff congratulating himself on the neat things he's done, with very few actionable take-aways for the audience. The ending in particular, with its repetitive "Will you A, or will you B" device, smacked of laziness, as if it were hastily dashed off the night before.

fuzzythinker• 16 years ago

I beg to differ. I'll say it's on par with Steve Jobs'. To me, both relate their life stories, not self congratulations. You can argue the same with Steve's self-credit of the Mac with his newly acquired love for fonts.

His "A or B" at the end is where it resonants with me. As other hn reply points out, life is never not as black and white as he states, but nonetheless, it does give a good guidance. I wouldn't call it "hastily dashed off the night before".

arthurdent2• 16 years ago

think it just depends on where you are personally. bezos' speech really speaks to me, probably because i sometimes struggle with being kind despite cleverness and i'm often riddled with doubt about my decision to pursue a dream instead of keeping my good, stable job.

apples to pinecones.

hugh3• 16 years ago

Most graduation speeches are fairly formulaic; regurgitations of the same few bits of inspirational wisdom that we all already know (but can occasionally afford to be reminded of, in the appropriate setting). Even the speeches which acknowledge and play with the formula are still pretty formulaic.

The Steve Jobs version of the speech wasn't really any better than the Jeff Bezos version, and neither of those is any better than the version given by some guy you've never heard of at some fifth-rate school in the middle of nowhere.

zackattack• 16 years ago

I thought David Foster Wallace's speech was exceptional.

http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallac...

arthurdent2• 16 years ago

"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."

This really speaks to me. For a long time it was just a really obvious overrepeated cliche to me. Then recently I've been going through a rough patch with my startup, and hearing/reading it from other people has become critical to my motivation to keep going forward.

With stability, money in the bank, and a dream, it was easy to say "I'll be happy even if i try and fail, but i don't want to live with not trying; wondering will eat me up."

All of the sudden, trying and failing, it became really hard to see how failure was a better path. Hearing other people say it reminds me of why I wanted to take the risk.

kadavy• 16 years ago

IMHO, pales in comparison to the address of his Steveness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Jeff Bezos to Princeton's class of 2010 :"We are What We Choose"

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