Transcription
Do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day. Work hard. Like, I mean every waking hour. That's that's the the thing I would I would say.
Now is the time to take risk. Dream big. Align your passion and purpose in life with a goal. If you focus on the goal, you will overcome all obstacles. If you focus on obstacles, you will never reach your goal. You should never be satisfied and you should be always frightened and on the K. Always puts you in question is what we do really enough? Are we doing good innovations? Are we managing in the right direction? What can go back? Everyone gets opportunity in their life, so will you. The questions you will need to answer: Do you have courage to relentlessly chase it down?
I have a story about following dreams, or maybe more accurately, it's a story about finding a path to make those dreams real. Well, by far the best investment you can make is in yourself. But it it's just hugely important and you, if you invest in yourself, nobody can take it away from you. I mean, you that people should do what they believe is the right thing to do. However, usually that's also the most difficult thing to and it's the riskiest thing to do. But if they believe in something, they should pursue it. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion and I'm proud of that choice. 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.
I believe in that all of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts, uh, you know, uh, not uh, an is um. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart. I cannot invent and pioneer if you cannot accept failure. To invent, you need to experiment, and if it's if you know in advance that it's going to work, it is not an experiment. And so that's a very important thing. You you know, it's the they are inseparable twins, failure and invention. So, you know, it's always embarrassing to fail, but you have to say, no, that's not how this works. Uh, you need to work. If depending upon how well you want to do, particularly if you're starting a company, you need to work super hard. So what what does super hard mean? Um, well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, uh, in instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a a small office and we slept on the couch. Um, and we we showered at the the YMCA. Um, and we're we're so hot up. We had just one computer. So the the the the website was up during the day, uh, and I was coding at night, 7 days a week, all the time. And I mean, if you do the simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, uh, you'll get twice as done as much done in the course of a year as the as uh, the other company.
The final thing I would encourage you to do is is is don't don't just follow the trend. Now is the time to take risk. Uh, you don't have. Yeah, you don't you don't have you don't have kids. As you get older, your obligations increase. So you, and once you have a family, you start taking risk not just for yourself, but for your family as well. It gets much harder to uh, do things that might not work out. Um, so now is the time to do that, uh, before you before you have those obligations. So I would I would encourage you to take risks now. Do something bold. Um, you won't regret it.
I was 16 years of age when I left studies. I I was a good student, but because of my family circumstances, I had to drop out of school. I left home having learned two core values from my father. First, commitment to the promises you make to yourself, and commitment to the promises you make to others. Both of these have to be in absolutely harmony. Second, avoid over-analysis of situation and have the courage to make quick decisions based on your natural instincts. An essential part of my learning throughout is that everyone gets opportunity in their life, so will you. The two questions you will need to answer: Can you connect the dots early enough to recognize the opportunity coming at you? And then, do you have courage to relentlessly chase it down? All that we had was raw enthusiasm. All that we had was a belief in ourselves. Rest is the history.
First of all, I think, uh, in a business which is successful, as is his business, I always say to my team, you should be thinking, uh, that the worst is coming, and you should be, uh, never, uh, you should never be satisfied. In a way, state of mind is to be, uh, positive paranoid and always in a situation, think of what can go wrong. So on one hand, we try to be thinking of the worst, but on the other hand, we are optimistic. I try to be optimistic long term, but pessimistic short term, and that's a good state of mind.
I had learned to program in college. I didn't love programming, but it was fun and I was good at it. At this point in my life, I thought I was making real progress on my journey of self-discovery. I had found a cause. I was pretty happy with my life. My wife was not what she saw was a college dropout who spent too much time in the mountains doing foolish things. She wanted me to work full-time as a computer programmer or go back to college and finish my degree. We compromised, sort of. I took several classes, but the only one I can remember was a sailing class taught at Berkeley Marina. Once again, I fell in love and began a lifelong affair with the Limitless, omnipotent Pacific Ocean. When my class was over, I wanted to buy a sailboat. My wife said this was the single stupidest idea she had ever heard in her entire life. She accused me of being irresponsible and she told me I lacked ambition. She kicked me out and then she divorced me. This was a pivotal moment in my life. My family was still mad at me for not going to medical school, and now my wife was divorcing me because I lacked ambition. It looked like a reoccurrence of the same old problem. Once again, I was unable to live up to the expectations of others. But this time, I was not disappointed in myself for failing to be the person they thought I should be. I discovered things that I loved. Their dreams and my dreams were different. I would never confuse the two of them again.
Is that people should do what they believe is the right thing to do. However, usually that's also the most difficult thing to and it's the riskiest thing to do. But if they believe in something, they should pursue it. Nobody has ever achieved anything big in business or in any walk of life without courage. Of course, whenever you do anything big, you do feel a little scared, but you've got to conquer fear to discover the hidden hero within you. With courage, with self-belief, and the can-do spirit, you overcome any adversity. I want to realize that achieving your potential is the quest of the ordinary. Conquering the impossible is your destiny. There is no substitute to hard work. Even more important to pursue excellence. Aim at being the best. Pursue excellence and success will chase you. The future belongs to you. Today you have a fabulous platform that will enable you to achieve multiples of what has been achieved by my generation. It is very important to be positive and optimistic in life. Dismiss the prophets of doom. Have self-confidence. Believe in yourself. Confidence. Yes, yes, we can and we will.
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I was going 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.
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. 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 in the end. We are our choices. Build yourself a great story 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, an 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 swashbuckly? When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? You know, we all have adversity in our lives. You, I, I, I would, I doubt if you really, you know, if you know somebody, any friend or anybody that you talk to, uh, there's no lack of adversity. And by the way, that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up. You fall down, you get back up. It always happens.
Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream, and you know how if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking, "What if we could download the whole web and just keep the links?" And I grabbed a pen and started writing, and we made a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it. But when I started, it was not my intention to build a big company. One crazy idea gave birth to a giant company. I call it a crazy idea because at the time, everyone told me it was a crazy idea. The idea was to build the world's first relational database. The collective wisdom of computer experts was that while relational databases could be built, they would never be fast enough to be useful. I thought all those so-called computer experts were wrong. And when you start telling people that all the experts are wrong, at first they call you arrogant, and then they say you're crazy. So remember this, graduates: When people start telling you that you're crazy, you just might be on to the most important innovation in your life. This is one of those times when the experts were wrong. Arrogance and insanity turned out to be innovation in disguise. The Oracle database proved to be a defining technology at the dawn of the information age.
Technology, and especially the internet, can really help you be lazy. Lazy? What I mean is, a group of three people can write software that then millions can use and enjoy. Can three people answer the phone a million times? Find the leverage in the world so you can be truly lazy. I know it seems like the world is crumbling out there. It's actually a great time in your life to get a little crazy. Follow your curiosity and be ambitious about it. Don't give up on your dream. The world needs you. All, each of you has a chance to discover who you are rather than who you should be. A chance to live your dreams, not the dreams of others. You. It is said in the Gita, "It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection." Purpose is identifying as something that you see as your destiny 10, 20, or 30 years from now. It is my power of purpose that keeps alive my will to win. My young friends, the rate at which science, technology, economics, and geopolitics is merging, the only way you stay on top of this is by ensuring you are continuously learning. Therefore, develop a passion for learning. This is the only way you never cease to grow. Try to make a difference. When you're a founder, or you're the chairman, or the leader of a company, every tough decision is a lonely decision. Most of the time, it's disagreement on what should be done. Uh, go against your colleagues and do what you believe is right, or or uh, fall in line with what they say, which which is often a difficult thing because you should be doing what you believe is right.
Well, by far the best investment you can make is in yourself. It's just hugely important, and you, if you invest in yourself, nobody can take it away from you. I mean, you, for example, communication skills. I tell the students that come, if they just learn to communicate better, both in writing and in person, they increase their value at least 50%. You know, the most important thing is really who you associate with. You want to associate with people that are better than you are. I mean, basically, you'll go in the direction of the people that you associate with. And and you want to have the right heroes. Uh, you want people, if you want to emulate somebody, you better pick very carefully who you want to emulate. And, uh, obviously, you can't pick your parents. Uh, uh, they're going to have an enormous influence on you, but you don't get a choice on that. But you get choices as you go down the line, and you who you, uh, who you admire, who you, who who you want to copy. And the most important for most people in terms of that decision is their spouse. It's also important in terms of a partner in business, but the partner in life is is the most important. You you want to pick a spouse that's a little better than you are.
There there are a lot of negative things in the world. There's a lot of terrible things that are happening all over the world all the time. Uh, there are lots of problems that need to get solved. So lots of things that are, yeah, that are miserable and kind of get you down. But that life cannot just be about solving one miserable problem after another. Can't that can't be the only thing. There need to be need to be things that inspire you, that make you glad to be to wake up in the morning and be part of humanity. My young friends, I wish you the best. May all your aspirations come true, and may you take our nation to great heights. And looking at your energy, optimism, and self-confidence, I am assured that the future is in good hands. I am thankful to each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart.
Soon many of you will begin a new job. I hope it interests you and challenges you and rewards you with a sense of purpose and satisfaction. But if it doesn't, keep searching. It's out there. It might take a while, but keep searching until you find a job that ignites your passions, like I did. Even better, you just might find one that you love. It is because of each one of you that we are who we are today. I wish and I pray, may good luck and fortune shine on each and every one of you, and may every day be even more fulfilling and rewarding for all of us. All the very best. Good luck. God bless and thank you very much for everything.