When you're stuck in a rut, it's easy to say things like "I don't know what to do next." These kinds of negative thoughts can shut off the flow of intuitive information. Be open to the idea that you DO know what to do next. What is your inner voice telling you? pic.twitter.com/UvXQrGq6V2
This speech was originally delivered as the baccalaureate remarks to graduates from Princeton University on May 30, 2010.
Speech Transcript
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!
It is actually the law of attraction bringing them into your vibrational frequency where you interpret them and they feel like your thoughts that you are thinking do your year this you talk too much. You are trying to figure this stuff out too much.
In the constant chatter about it you overthink it and what mean by this is every subject is really two subjects. What is wanted and the absence of what is wanted so sometimes you might think you are talking about being more prosperous when actually what you are feeling is not enough prosperity and you are trying to convince the universe through your effort and through your words. The prosperity should be yours. so sometimes when you are talking about what you think is prosperity you`re actually just beating the drum of not having enough of something that you want and so that`s why you`re so wise when you say I need to be aware of how I feel so if the conversation is fun if it`s pleasant, keep doing it but if it`s not if it`s what we really here`s an easy way of looking at it. if it`s an effort to focus then there`s resistance present that you`re trying to overcome with your effort and you most likely doing yourself more detriment than you benefit because your desires are activated but you`re on the other end of the stick. Does the make sense to you?
All of us are focused with you toward the outcome that you are seeking and that if you are just relaxed, impulse come to you. Ideas will come to you. Rendezvous will be inspired with you.
Everything that you are wanting not just to get to the end result that you think you are looking for but for a really fun journey along the way to the never-ending result.
To t he never-ending result, just fun now, and we are to understand that grinding away on a problem, try to get a solution by pointing out with all the evidence and justification what`s wrong the problem is not the way you get to the solution. And the way you feel by now is probably giving you an awareness of that you say here you are in your physical body as an extension of source energy but that larger part that you are an extension are still exists in the non-physical realm in the vibrational realm and still stands in a pure by your standards vibration, in other words, there`s no resistance in that vibration of your core of source.
So when you identify that you want something source acknowledges that you want it knows that it is vibrationally yours and holds no vibration of doubt at all about it so the way you feel is your indication. Always one hundred percent of the time of the time of whether you are in tune with the way the larger part of you sees this whatever it is you`re thinking about or whether you`re not if you`re in turn with it.
Then you feel enthusiasm, or you feel at a minimum peacefulness and satisfaction. You feel clarity, you feel satisfaction about it you see, but if you are feeling doubt or worry or if you`re feeling like you need to justify it or explain it to someone or defend it if you are pointing out all of the reasons why it should be these reasons where it isn't feel so off to you then you`re practising a vibration that`s so different from the vibration of the source who is on it that you can feel that discord instead of that resonance with what you want. So then we began explaining to you that you are since you are vibrational beings that you`ve created a vibrational reality that will manifest into your experience if you will give it a little while and if you will not beat it to death with your doubt and fear and worry in other words, it will, whatever you want will occur, it will come into your experience. If you find vibrational alignment with it, and you can tell by the way you feel whether you`re finding vibrational alignment with your desire. Or whether you`re not in other words, the better you feel the more alignment and the more consistently you feel that alignment then the faster it`s coming and the more satisfying it is along the way. Some of you were not very excited about our explanation of your vibrational version and we don`t blame you because we know you didn`t come here to be vibrational versions, you came to be manifested versions. I'm supposed to be having fun right now. You came to enjoy your life, you came to feel the progress, you focused yourself into a time and space reality. Because it`s fun to measure distances and spaces and progress, it's fun to feel the evolutions of your beingness. That`s why you are here in this time-space reality. We are not trying to get you to go into the vortex we just feel good about what you`ve dreamed up and feel satisfied even though it hasn`t manifested. That is our message at all. Our message is about the surest fastest, funniest way for you to manifest your heart`s desire. Because the source within you is already focused upon your heart`s desire and in fact the reason that you can even feel negative emotion is because you`re not focused upon it, while the source within you is. Step two is the source becomes a vibrational equivalent of it, and law of attraction gathers all of the cooperative components and there is a vibrational version of what you want.
Now oh you want to realize it with your physical sense oh
You want to know about what real creation is about what real birthing is, You want to understand how things go from thought into manifestation. It's the debate that`s heavy in your world.
Talking about what`s happening right now, are you the realized of what and which you call source have created? Are you on your trajectory of well-being or you off of it and so that`s what we talk about all day every day/ (6:20)
