We are What We Choose

[Also fantastic]

"We are What We Choose"
Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Princeton Class of 2010
Baccalaureate
May 30, 2010

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!

the windmil farmer

Upon Discovering That I Do Not Know

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I want to be. Like, duh, I'm in my mid-twenties. That is basically all we think about. When I was younger I thought that I would be famous and impact people in a large-scale way. More and more, however, I'm realizing that some of the most important ways I can make an impact will be measured on much smaller scales.

Dave Eggers has found a way to combine the large with small scale, impacting lives of children. I have been thinking a lot about him lately, about how he chose to do what he loved to help people. And I think that is the best way to live my life.

rose and me

from their new album whale and bird--bless these brazilians

Paul Yoon = yes please!

Sarabande put out a collection of Paul Yoon stories called Once the Shore. Though I've only read the stunning title story, I imagine the rest of the book is just as glorious. Rumpus interviewed him and I love how he closes the interview:

I recently read Don Lee’s brilliant new novel, Wrack and Ruin, and what stays with me the most from that book are these moments we’re talking about. There’s an amazing narrative force to that story but once in a while it pauses, briefly, and he reveals these surprising scenes of intimacy and tenderness. (Both of which can be a form of kindness, I think.) It gave the story breath and silence and I admire that so much. The way Terrence Malick does in his films. They stay with me, these small moments I have read about or witnessed or experienced; they last a minute, perhaps, even less, and yet you become connected to another person through that act. I mean, in the end, it’s a form of love, isn’t it?

Years ago I was on the coast of Belize and I had stumbled on my very first coconut and I had no idea how to break open the husk. I was holding a machete—that was a first, too—and practicing my swing when a neighbor, an old woman, appeared, smiling, and without a word placed the coconut on the sand between her legs, took the machete from my hands, bent her knees, and broke open the husk in seconds. Then she smiled once more and walked back to her house. I never saw her again. But I will always remember her, the shape of her body and her stance and her arm swinging.

I think that, at the bottom of it all, these small moments is what this blog tries to capture. And that I love.

good

emiliana torrini

also, let's all go to iceland

Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

Sometimes I Miss Virginia

"Now to sum up," said Bernard. "Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think on board a ship going to Africa) we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, 'Take it. This is my life.'

"But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not see. You see me, sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples. You see me take my napkin and unfold it. You see me pour myself out a glass of wine. And you see behind me the door opening, and people passing. But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story--and there are so many, and so many--stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notebook paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably."

-Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Take Care of Yourself

I received an email telling me it was over.

I didn't know how to respond.

It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me.

It ended with the words, "Take care of yourself."

And so I did.

I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),

chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.

To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.

Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me.

Answer for me.

It was a way of taking the time to break up.

A way of taking care of myself.

In 2007, Sophie Calle did what all of us have always wanted to do but didn't have the talent or social clout to pull-off. She asked all the women she knew--or at least 107 of them--to interpret why he was just not that into her. Sure we run over the details of break-ups with our close friends, but we quickly become conscious of the fact that even our best friends grow sick of hearing about it. But when Sophie Calle was broken-up with, she wanted answers. And not from him, but from them: other women. She displayed the replies--a mixture including installations, poems, an operetta, and a copy-edited version of the email--on the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale. We missed her show in NYC this past summer, but maybe if we're really lucky we can catch it in Brazil.

See more information on her show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC here.

Kind of in Love

With Laura Gibson.

Who is with me?

yes, yes please

For one human being to love another: that is the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

It's About the Leaf

This morning my parents and I drove out to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, enjoyed a late brunch at Hank's Place, and then headed across the street to the Brandywine River Museum, one of my favorite places to go as a kid right up there with nearby Longwood Gardens. The museum is built right on Brandywine River not far from the battlefields of the same name and I swear each time I have gone--including today--the weather has been chilly and drizzly. Perfect museum weather, if you ask me.

We lucked out on the temporary exhibits because they happened to be showing off some beautiful original illustrations from Caldecott Medal winners, including Maurice Sendak illustrations from Where the Wild Things Are, Barbara Cooney illustrations from The Ox-Cart Man (and I have to add that my favorite of hers is Miss Rumphius), and John Schoenherr illustrations from Owl Moon. The main attraction at this gallery, though, is the collection of N.C. Wyeth & Andrew Wyeth artwork. N.C. is probably best known for his illustrations of classics like Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island,

which I think are gorgeous, and I'm pretty sure Andrew's most recognizable piece is "Christina's World."

I'm especially impressed by Andrew Wyeth's tempera paintings, which each took four to six months of layering and layering and layering paint to create incredibly precise, realistic landscapes and still lifes, which I know because we also lucked out on the 2pm tour of the Andrew Wyeth gallery guided by his granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth. Let me tell you, Victoria is intense. She's a bit of a firecracker and full of great stories about her family and Andrew Wyeth's work. For example, she told us that Andrew's wife titled and framed all of his paintings throughout his career, which I thought was really interesting. Also, when Andrew went to Victoria's college graduation, he showed up in black lycra spandex shorts, a black turtleneck sweater, and a light blue, puffy L.L. Bean lady's winter coat. Also, Andrew insisted on painting simple stuff, taking as his subjects his friends and neighbors and his neighborhood's rolling hills and dilapidated barns and expansive fields--he wanted to paint only what he knew and loved most. Another thing I love that Victoria told us: Andrew never used black paint. He always used colors, layers and layers of colors to create the black on his canvases. And another: He loved fall and winter, finding inspiration and fullness in what other people found barren and lifeless: overcast skies, muddy roads, fields of snow.

I think one of my favorites was this piece from the Helga series:

Andrew spent many years studying Helga and produced some really wonderful images of her. Andrew once told Victoria who told us today that this painting isn't so much about Helga as it is about the leaf floating in through the window, which may or may not be true but it's a lovely idea, I think.

I wish I could bring all of you here and show you around places like this museum and Longwood Gardens and Valley Forge. I'm reminded each time I come home of how much history and beauty there is in this area. I just love it.

I Am Not a Robot

Courtesy of a new acquaintance of mine, who shared this song with my friend Adam and I along our eight-hour drive from Athens to Philly this morning. Thanks, Louise!

Appalachia Waltz

I have been in the Appalachian mountains before, in Pennsylvania as a teenager and in Virginia as an adult, but only as a visitor--camping on them, hiking over them, or driving through them. Tonight I am grateful to be living among these hills, even if only for a short while, which is why I am listening to Mark O'Connor's "Appalachia Waltz" over and over and over...

OMG Edible Crayons

Using a variety of natural ingredients including crushed nuts, seeds, dried fruit, melted marshmallows, AND fruity pebbles (for sweetness instead of sugar), Luxirare made these edible crayons that read and look quite delicious. Be sure to check out the website for fantastic photos of the entire process.

gorgeous

i found this courtesy of a lovely friend's blog. it makes me feel like everything is possible. such, such beautiful things happening

4 times in a row and counting

I can't imagine a time when this song will get old. And it just feels so good to listen on repeat right now.



I remember a conversation I had with AS about Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Her professor had her take that title and write an original poem. And now I think about it when people use: love.

I think I mean: dependance and commitment. But all the time I am delighted to find that it means other things too. Like acceptance and warmth and fuzzy cheeks. Or shiny. Or surprise. Tonight it meant: longer than expected.