亚马逊网创始人杰夫贝索斯2010年在普林斯顿大学毕业典礼上的演讲:选择塑造人生（中英）
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.
聪明是一种天赋，而善良是一种选择。天赋得来很容易——毕竟它们与生俱 来。而选择却颇为艰难。如果一不小心，你可能被天赋所诱惑，这可能会伤害到你 所作出的选择。
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.
当我还是一个孩子的时候，我的夏天总是在德州祖父母的农场中度过。我帮忙 修理风车，为牛接种疫苗，也做其他家务。每天下午，我们都会看肥皂剧，尤其是 《我们的岁月》。我的祖父母参加了一个房车俱乐部，那是一群驾驶清风拖挂型房车的人们，他们结伴游遍美国和加拿大。每隔几个夏天，我也会加入他们。我们把房车 挂在袓父的小汽车后面，然后加入30名清风房车探险者们组成的浩荡队伍。我爱 我的祖父母，我崇敬他们，也真心期盼这些旅程。那是我大概10岁时的一次旅行，我 照例坐在后座的长椅上，祖父开着车，祖母坐在他旁边，吸着烟。我讨厌烟味。
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!”
在那样的年纪，我会找任何理由作些估测或者小算术。我会计算油耗还有杂 货花销等琐事。我听过一个有关吸烟的广告。但不记得细节了，广告大意是说，每 吸一口香烟会减少几分钟的寿命，大概是两分钟。无论如何，我决定为祖母作个估 算。我估测了祖母每天要吸几支香烟，每支香烟要吸几口等等，然后心满意足地得 出了一个合理的数字。接着，我碰了碰坐在前面的祖母的头,又拍了拍她的肩膀， 然后骄傲地宣称，“每天吸两分钟的烟，你就少活9年!”
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.”
我清晰地记得接下来发生了什么，而那是我意料之外的。我本期待着小聪明和算术技巧能贏得掌声，但那并没有发生。相反，我的祖母哭了起来。之前一直在默 默开车的祖父把车停在了路边，走下车来，打开了我的车门，等着我跟他下车。我 惹麻烦了吗？我的祖父是一个智慧而安静的人。他从来没有对我说过严厉的话，难道 这会是第一次？还是他会让我回到车上跟祖母道歉?我以前从未遇到过这种状况，因 而也无从知晓会发生什么。我们在房车旁停下来。祖父注视着我，沉默片刻，然后 轻轻地、平静地说：“杰夫，有一天你会明白，善良比聪明更难。”
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.
今天我想对你们说的是，天赋和选择不同。聪明是一种天赋，而善良是一种选 择。天赋得来很容易——毕竟它们与生俱来.而选择则颇为不易。如果一不小心， 你可能被天赋所诱惑，这可能会伤害到你作出的选择。
This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. Fm 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.
在座各位都拥有许多天赋。我确信你们的天赋之一就是拥有精明能干的头脑。 之所以如此确信，是因为入学竞争十分激烈，如果你们不能表现出聪明智慧，便没有资格进入这所学校。
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 coining 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.
你们的聪明才智必定会有用武之地，因为你们将在一片充满奇迹的土地上行 进。我们人类，尽管沉重前行，却终将令自己大吃一惊。我们能够想方设法制造出 清洁能源，也能够将原子一个一个地组装成微型机械，使之穿过细胞壁，然后修复 细胞。这个月，有一个不同寻常却必然的事情发生了——人类终于合成了生命。在 未来几年，我们不仅会合成生命，还会按说明书使用它们。我相信你们甚至会看到 我们理解人类的大脑，儒勒凡尔纳、马克吐温、伽利略、牛顿——所有那些充 满好奇之心的人都希望能够活到现在。作为文明人，我们会拥有如此之多的天赋， 就像是坐在我面前的你们，每一个生命个体都拥有许多独特的天赋。
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
你们要如何运用这些天赋呢？你们会为自己的天赋感到骄傲，还是会为自己的选 择感到骄傲？
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