亚马逊CEO杰夫·贝索斯(Jeff Bezos)的两篇文章,可以反应他看到事情的方式和角度.一篇关于善良,一篇关于Kindle
转这两篇文章的目的有两个:
我对 Bezos 的思维方式感到好奇, 例如他”聚焦于十年后仍然不会改变的事物” 我觉得思维挺强悍. 我会不断扩充这部分的内容到我的博客
最近发现互联网并不是”痕迹”永远不会消失.我在微信公众号上体验是越来越有鲜明观点的文章很快会被下线,我知道他们还是会在互联网某一个地方,但对于我来说搜索成本太高. 所以我觉得: 原封不动把文章抄下来不是窃取,不是盗版,反而是保护这文章的一种方式.
善良比聪明更重要
那一句”著名的” 善良比聪明更重要 来自 亚马逊CEO Jeff Bezos 在2010年学士毕业典礼上发表演讲
中文尝试自己翻译, 翻译真是一件投入跟回报不成正比的事情,而且充满着作者和译者两人的主观视角.
关于kindle
一开始是看了 孟岩的文章: 贝索斯为什么做 Kindle, 发现原来这个问题在知乎 在2011年就有一群人讨论过. kindle 在2007年,面世, 2011已经是第四代产品. 现在已经2018年底, 看着当时人的观点,再看看8年后自己的想法. 我惊讶的是,kindle 的定位就是 Bezos 一开始说的:
Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading
时间碎片化, 高效阅读,知识快速入门这些无处不在的焦虑感,不知道从什么时候起,已经变成我们的日常生活.停下来,看看Jeff的看法.
善良比聪明更重要
英文演讲全文+我的翻译
2010 Baccalaureate Remarks
by Staff
May 30, 2010 4:35 p.m.
“We are What We Choose”
Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010
Baccalaureate
May 30, 2010
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.
在我还小的时候,我暑假常常与在德克萨斯州的祖父母一起,他们有一个大牧场, 我帮助他们修理风力发电机,给奶牛打疫苗,和其他杂活.下午的时候还一起看肥皂剧,例如 Days of our Lives. 我的祖父母加入了一个房车俱乐部,那是一群驾驶Airstream拖挂型房车的人们,他们结伴遍游美国和加拿大. 每隔几个夏天,我们会加入其中.我们把房车挂在祖父的小汽车后面,然后加入300余名Airstream 探险者们组成的浩荡队伍.我崇拜着我的祖父母,也十分期待这样的旅行. 在我大概10岁时的一次旅行,我被安排到一个车座后面一个大板凳上.我的祖父母在开车,祖母坐在副驾驶上,她途中始终在吸烟,而我挺不喜欢烟味.
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,我喜欢耍小聪明. 一有机会就会做一些数学上的推断和估算.例如我已经估算出每英里汽油的消耗,这些对我来说就像杂货店每天计算开支那样自然.我听到过关于吸烟的一些辩论活动,具体细节忘记了,但一个基本的观点是:每一口烟大概会损耗你几分钟的生命.我觉得应该是两分钟左右.于是我对我的祖母做了估量.估计她一天大概抽烟的数量,每一根烟需要吸多少口等等.当我乐滋滋地估算出最后地结果时,我把我的头往前座伸,拍拍祖母地肩膀, 自豪地说:”两分钟一口,你已经被烟夺去了大概九年的生命.”
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.”
本来我期待我可以因为我的聪明和估算能力而受到夸张,”Jeff,你真聪明.你一定做了一些巧妙的估计才能算出这样答案.” ,但实际上发生的让我现在记忆犹新: 我的祖母突然大哭,而我坐在后车位上,大脑一片空白.正当我的祖母在哭泣的时候,我的祖父安静的把车停到了路的边沿.他下车打开我这边的车门,并示意我跟着他.我下车,在后面跟着他. 一路忐忑:我是做错了什么吗? 我印象中我的祖父是个有智慧,话不多的人.他从来没有严厉的批评我,这一次会是第一次么? 或许他会要求我待会回去向我的祖母道歉.一路上我只能不断猜测.我们在一辆拖车旁停了下来,我的祖父安静的看看我,他轻轻的向我说了这么一句: Jeff,有一天你会体会到,能够聪明却选择宽以待人是多么难的一件事.
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.
今天我想讨论的是关于天赋和选择之间的区别.天赋是与生俱来的,智力超群是天赐的,得来毫不费劲.但宽以待人确实是我们后天的选择,它需要你的深思熟虑,常常还会为此感到煎熬.有时候你会被你的天赋所诱惑,作出坏的选择, 一些跟你初衷违背的选择.
This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. 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.
在座的各位,一路经进入这所大学到通过重重考验最终顺利毕业,别谦虚,你们是很聪明的一群人.
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.
在以后的人生道路上,你们的头脑将是你们重要的伙伴.我们人类,尽管单调,但我们的创造力经常会使我们吃惊.例如我们总会找到发明清洁能源的方式,可以通过操纵原子精度的微型机器人进入我们的细胞做一些修复工作,甚至未来我们可以设计生命本身而不仅仅是合成.Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton 这些已经逝去的伟大人物会很乐意生活在现在并见证着这些的事情的发生.在工业文明时代,我们创造了很多优秀工具,它们就像你我身上与生俱来的天赋.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
但问题是,你要怎么去使用它们? 你会因为拥有这些工具而感到骄傲,还是会为你使用这些工具, 根据这些工具作出的选择而骄傲?
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.
16年前,亚马逊的创建还只是脑海中的一个想法.互联网当时的增长速度是一年23倍.我从来没有见过任何事物增长如此快速.而在现实世界中,你压根看不到一个拥有几百万书籍的书店,但互联网可以让这个想法变成现实.一想到这,我就兴奋无比.当时我30岁,结婚了一年,我把我这个念头跟我的妻子MacKenzie 说,同时还提到辞掉我现在的工作.这是疯狂的,因为大部分想法不会变付诸于行动,即使开始了,大部分也是以失败告终. 我也不知道未来会发生什么. 我的妻子,跟我说,我支持你.我年轻的时候就喜欢在车库捣鼓发明,例如一个 靠近沼泽路会自动填充装置,一个不大成功的太阳能炊具, 一个烤盘告警器来恶搞我的兄弟姐妹.我一直想创造出一些什么新的东西,而我的妻子,希望我可以去做我认为应该做的事情.
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.
当时我还在纽约一家金融公司,我工作的伙伴,都是一群聪明的家伙,对我的老板更是佩服.当我把我想通过在互联网卖书的这个想法跟他说时,他带着我在中心公园一起走走.一边散步一边倾听我的想法.最后他说:要是一个人没有工作,或者工作一般,这本来会是个不错的尝试.但你拥有的是一份很好的工作.他的确一语中的,他让我我不急于做决定,回去再好好想想. 从当时那个角度来看,选择是困难的.但最后,我觉得我还是需要尝试一把,因为我不认为我会为了这样的尝试后悔,即便最后失败.相反的,我会被因恐惧而不敢付诸行动这样软弱的表现而一直纠缠不能心安. 经过深思熟虑, 我选择了一条不安的道路去追随我的热情,而这让我无比自豪.
Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life – the life you author from scratch on your own – begins.
明天,你们就开启全新的篇章,在新的场景里导演自己的故事.
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
你会如何发挥你的天赋?你会作出什么样的选择?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
你会习惯性地走以前地路? 还是追随着你的热情所在?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
你会被教条所牵引? 还是你会开辟新的东西?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
你会朝着抵抗力最小地路线走,还是把它当作一场可以期待地冒险?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
你会因为指责而变得畏畏缩缩,还是在信念面前更加勇敢?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
你会刻意掩饰你的失败,还是大方地说:我错了?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
你会因为害怕拒绝而固步自封,还是像坠入爱河一样无所畏惧?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
在生活的游戏上,你是在寻求”不输”? 还是敢为了可能的成功而造势?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
当困难来临时,你是简单的放弃,还是愿意挣扎?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
你是愿意成为历史的旁观者,还是参与其中?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
你是利用他人达到你的目的,还是愿意展现你的慈悲?
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!
上面的问题,我都不知道你们的选择是什么.但我愿意做一个大胆的预测:当你80岁在椅子上,用个人最简洁的视角回望人生时,你会发现是你的人生紧凑,不断延伸下去的是你作出的一系列选择.(它们就像一个点一样串联成你的人生). 毕竟在最后,我们是被我们的选择所塑造.尝试给自己书写一个伟大的故事,感谢你们同时也祝福你们.
2007年致股东信: Kindle 是什么
英文
We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry-I’m convinced it makes me more productive-but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.
I realize my tone here tends toward the missionary, and I can assure you it’s heartfelt. It’s also not unique to me but is shared by a large group of folks here. I’m glad about that because missionaries build better products. I’ll also point out that, while I’m convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon, Amazon has no sinecure as that agent. It will happen, but if we don’t execute well, it will be done by others.
中文翻译
我们人类自身的演化是跟我们使用的工具相互成就的: 我们改造我们使用的工具,工具反过来塑造我们.写作是一项已经延续了几千年的手艺活,它蕴含的巨大信息量无疑给我们带来深刻的影响. 500多年前,Gutenberg的活字印刷术发明是书籍成本(下降)重要的转折点. 实体书籍成为我们合作和学习的重要载体.而最近(20多年)来,互联网工具如 家庭电脑,笔记本,智能手机,智能平板渐渐成为我们新的载体并影响我们.但我认为这些只需短暂注意力的设备正把我们推向信息碎片化的境地.(这句话特难翻译).尽管我的BlackBerry让我更有效率,我也很需要它,但这不意味着我会希望在上面阅读一本300多页的文献.当然我也不想为了因此随身携带我的笔记本(这句话不能直译,在台式机笔记本阅读体验一点都不差,唯一的缺点就是不便携). 正如我在这封信上提到的,人们会对那些随手可达,衔接自然的事情形成一种正向的反馈,假如我们的工具很容易给我们提供碎片化的信息,那我们会”下意识”地去接受,这样我们会跟”长时间的专注阅读”渐行渐远. Kindle是为了改善这种尴尬的情况诞生的(我自己加的,尴尬的地方在于我们被自己的工具所奴役), Kindle存在的目的就是希望可以提供给你长时间专注的阅读体验.我寄望于Kindle和它的后继者能在未来很长的时间里,能稍微抵消带来的信息碎片化工具的增长趋势,使得我们能获得更持久专注阅读的能力.
我意识到我现在就是一个传教士般的碎碎念, 但这的确是我内心的感受.它也不会成为我独特的感受,因为我把它分享给了你们.我也很高兴我们可以因为使命感去创造更好的产品.当然我需要指出,虽然Amazon还没有专门部门来做这一方面的事情,但我相信书籍这种载体,已经到了下一步演变的边缘.迟早的事情.在这个过程中,假如我们没有把它做好,总有人会的.
