DOCX《外语系2014-2015年春季学期电台广播第七、八周听力原文》

ll understand that it'

s harder to be kind than clever. 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. 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. 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. How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices? 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. 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'