亞馬遜創始人普林斯頓大學演講：選擇比天賦更重要！

今天普大為大家推薦的演講是亞馬遜創始人、新的世界首富Jeff Bezos（傑夫·貝佐斯）作為普林斯頓大學榮譽校友為畢業生們所帶來的精彩演講——選擇遠比天賦更重要。對我們人生影響更大的不是聰明才智，而是我們作出的一個又一個選擇。

沒錯，如果你之前有聽說過一條「天價離婚」的新聞，那麼當事人就是這位傑夫·貝佐斯。去年七月，福布斯公布了全球富豪榜榜單，貝佐斯以1500億美元的身家傲居群雄，成了世界上最富有的人。不過這場離婚後，他的財產要和妻子對半開，世界首富的位置應該是保不住了。把私生活拋在一邊，今天我們來聆聽他的智慧。

亞馬遜總裁傑夫貝佐斯普林斯頓大學畢業中英文演講稿全文：

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.

孩提時代，我總是在德州祖父母的農場中度過夏天。我幫忙修理風車，為牛接種疫苗，也做其他雜活。每天下午，我們也看肥皂劇，特別是《光輝歲月》。祖父母參加了一個房車俱樂部，一群人駕駛 Airstream 房車，結伴遊歷美國和加拿大。每隔幾個夏天，我們會加入一次旅程。把房車掛在祖父的小汽車後面，融入 300 余名 Airstream 探險者的浩蕩隊伍中，就這樣出發。我愛祖父母，心懷敬仰，很期盼這些旅程。在我大約 10 歲時，有一次很特殊的旅程。那次我胡亂坐在后座上，祖父開著車，祖母坐在他旁邊。整個旅程祖母都吸著煙，我討厭煙味。

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.」

當年，我總是想盡辦法去做估測或小算術。我會計算油耗還有雜貨花銷等雞毛蒜皮的小事。我聽過一個與吸煙相關的廣告，但記不清細節了。廣告大意是，每吸一口香煙會減少幾分鐘壽命，好像是兩分鐘。管它幾分鐘呢，我決定為祖母做個算術。我估測了祖母每天吸幾支香煙，每支香煙吸幾口等等，然後心滿意足地得出了一個合理的數字。接著，我把頭探入汽車前排，拍了拍祖母的肩膀，驕傲地宣稱：「如果每吸一口煙少活兩分鐘的話，你的壽命已經少了九年！」我清晰地記得接下來發生的事，是我意料之外的。憑藉聰明的大腦和算術技巧，我期待贏來誇讚：「傑夫，你真聰明。你應該做一些更需要技巧的算術，比如一年有多少分鐘，以及做些除法。」我的期待並沒有發生。相反，祖母突然哭泣起來，我坐在后座茫然無措。祖父一直在默默開車，聽到祖母的哭聲，把車停在高速路邊。祖父走下車來，打開車門，等我跟他下車。我惹麻煩了嗎？祖父是一個智慧而安靜的人。他從來沒有對我說過嚴厲的話，難道這會是第一次？還是他會讓我回到車上給祖母道歉？我以前從未遇到過這種狀況，無從知曉會有什麼後果發生。我們在房車旁停下來，祖父注視著我，沉默片刻，然後輕輕地、平靜地說：「傑夫，有一天你會明白，善良比聰明更難。」

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.

今天我想對你們說的是，天賦和選擇的不同。聰明是一種天賦，而善良是一種選擇。天賦得來容易 —— 畢竟與生俱來。而選擇頗為不易。一不小心，你可能會被天賦所誘惑，而這可能會損害到你的選擇。在座各位都擁有眾多天賦。我確信你們的天賦之一就是擁有精明能幹的頭腦。之所以如此確信，是因為入學競爭如此激烈，如果你們不聰明，便不會有資格進入這所學校。

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?

你們將在一片充滿奇蹟的世界上前行，聰明才智必能派上用場。我們人類，儘管跬步前行，卻終將令自己大吃一驚。我們能夠想方設法製造清潔能源等等，也能夠一個原子一個原子地組裝微型機械，使之穿過細胞壁，去修復細胞。這個月，有一個非常激動人心卻又不足為奇的消息 —— 人類終於合成了生命。在未來幾年，我們不僅會合成生命，還能將之工程規範化。我相信你們甚至會看到人類大腦被徹底理解。儒勒·凡爾納、馬克·吐溫、伽利略、牛頓 —— 所有那些充滿好奇之心的人都希望能夠活在現在。作為文明人，我們擁有如此多的天賦，就像是坐在我面前的你們，每一個生命個體都擁有眾多獨特的天賦。如何運用這些天賦？為自己的天賦感到驕傲，還是會為自己的選擇感到驕傲？

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.

16 年前，我萌生了創辦亞馬遜的想法。當年，互聯網使用量以每年 2300% 的速度增長，我從未看到或聽說過任何東西增長如此快速。有個想法令我異常興奮 —— 創建涵蓋幾百萬種書籍的網上書店，這東西在物理世界根本無法存在。那時我剛滿 30 歲，結婚才一年。我告訴妻子 MacKenzie 想辭去工作，然後去做這件瘋狂的事，很可能會失敗，因為大部分創業公司都如此，而且我不確定之後會發生什麼。MacKenzie （也是普林斯頓畢業生，就坐在下面第二排）告訴我，我應該放手一搏。少年時期，我是一名車庫發明家。我曾用水泥填充的輪胎製作自動關門器，用雨傘和錫箔製作太陽能炒鍋（雖然不太好用），我還用煎鍋做了一個警報器來嚇唬鄰居。我一直想做一個發明家，MacKenzie 支持我追隨內心的熱情。

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.

我當時在紐約一家金融公司工作，同事是一群非常聰明的人，老闆也很有智慧，我很敬佩他。我告訴老闆我想開辦一家公司，在網上賣書。老闆帶我在中央公園漫步良久，認真聽我講完，最後說：「聽起來真是一個很好的主意。然而，對那些目前沒有謀到一份好工作的人來說，這個主意會更好。」這一邏輯對我而言頗有道理，老闆說服我做出最終決定之前再考慮 48 小時。那樣想來，這個決定確實很艱難，但是最終，我決定拼一次。我認為自己不會為嘗試過後的失敗而遺憾，倒是有所決定但完全不付諸行動會一直煎熬著我。深思熟慮後，我選擇了那條不安全的道路，去追隨內心的熱情。我為自己的決定感到驕傲。

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?

明天，非常現實地說，從零塑造自己人生的時代，即將開啟。你會如何運用自己的天賦？又會做出怎樣的抉擇？你會隨波逐流，還是追隨內心的熱情？你會順從於教條，還是保持初心？你會選擇安逸的生活，還是奉獻與冒險的人生？你會屈於批評，還是會堅守信念？你會掩飾錯誤，還是會坦誠道歉？你會因害怕拒絕而掩飾真心，還是會在深愛中勇往直前？你想要波瀾不驚，還是想搏擊風浪？你會在嚴峻的現實之下選擇放棄，還是會義無反顧前行？你要做憤世嫉俗者，還是踏實建設者？你要不計一切地展示聰明，還是選擇善良？

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!

我要做一個預測：在大家80歲追憶往昔的時刻，一個人靜靜對內心訴說人生故事時，其中最為充實、最有意義的那段故事，會是大家做出的一系列選擇。最後， 是選擇塑造了我們，為自己塑造一個偉大的故事吧。謝謝，祝福好運！

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