> 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..
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I lived and worked for two years in the Philippines amongst some of the poorest people in the world. These people were constrained in many ways as you describe in job choices, educational attainments, opportunity for travel etc. But regardless of how poor they were they still had the choice of to be kind or clever, to forgive or seek revenge, to pursue worthwhile activities or fritter away their time/money on drugs and alcohol, etc. There were many many very happy people I met in the worst of slums.
The most important choices we make in little have absolutely zero to do with how much money we have.
For a more extended essay on the topic, read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl who survived a Nazi concentration camp.
To pull one quote off its Wikipedia page:
"Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp."
> He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
A key insight in ethics is that truly ethical decisions almost always go against the person making the decision.
A situation such as a concentration camp brings out the worst in some and the best in others in very stark contrast because of the environment, not because of the people in it. In less polarizing circumstances those on opposite ends of the spectrum might very well get along just fine.
A couple of movies and books bring that out really well, 'Der Faelscher' for instance, and the diary portion of the Odessa file as well as plenty of first hand accounts, such as the one you reference but also many others. The scary thing is that such an environment will also bring out the worst in otherwise decent people, and that our society in some ways does the same thing to its inhabitants, even if not on such a drastic scale.
The speech emphasizes making good choices, which has nothing to do with the quantity of choices of available. The billions of dollars, in the context of his speech, is a gift, while leaving a job and starting an online bookstore is one of the choices that defines his life.
> 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?".
Being "clever or kind" isn't mutually exclusive, but being "clever at the expense of others, or kind" is. It's a good point in my opinion. It's easy to forget the human element.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
That was fun to read. Afterward I looked for another commencement speech, and read Bill Gates' speech at Harvard. It's interesting to compare and contrast them.
> There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning.
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.
"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.
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).
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.
I know enough German for the idea of Jewish people talking about Mensch vs. Unmensch to make me feel uncomfortable; probably because while I do understand the language, I still lack the cultural references. Anyone care to enlighten me? I read the wikipedia entry, but that somehow isn't enough. I'd love to hear from people using this word in everyday life.
This latter one is instructive, as it contrasts Bill Murray with Mickey Rourke, who the author refers to as a douchebag.
And, perhaps this is as good a way as any to understand the usage of "mensch": consider it the antonym to douchebag.
You know how there are some people that make you almost instinctively say to yourself, "Man, he's a real douche!"? On the flip side, there are people of whom you'll say "What a mensch!"
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..