Will You Be Clever at the Expense of Others or Will You Be Kind? — Jeff Bezos

In 2010, Jeff Bezos stood before Princeton's graduating class and told a story about being ten years old, rolling around in the back seat of his grandparents' car on an Airstream caravan trip, and deciding to do the math on his grandmother's smoking.

"At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!" he announced proudly, expecting applause for his cleverness. His grandmother burst into tears. His grandfather pulled the car over, walked around, and said one line that Bezos never forgot: "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

That line became the spine of the whole speech, titled "We Are What We Choose." Bezos's argument is simple and uncomfortable: cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they're given after all. Choices can be hard. And it is possible to seduce yourself with your gifts, to your choices' detriment.

He applied the same framework to his own life. He had started Amazon at 30, leaving a good job in New York after web usage statistics convinced him the internet was the future. His boss took him on a long walk in Central Park and told him it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job. Bezos gave it 48 hours, then took the less safe path. His reasoning: he would never regret trying and failing, but he would always be haunted by not trying at all.

The speech ends with a series of questions that read like a personal inventory, and they are worth sitting with even now:

"Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?"

And then the prediction: when you are 80 years old and narrating the most personal version of your life story to yourself, the most compact and meaningful telling will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

Sources

• "We are What We Choose" — Jeff Bezos's 2010 Baccalaureate Remarks — Princeton University
• Jeff Bezos on the differences between gifts and choices — GranneBlog (speech excerpts)