We Are What We Choose: Gifts, Kindness, and the Power of Decision

all right welcome back to the daily mastermind George Wright the third here with your daily dose of inspiration motivation and education today is Monday and I hope you are off to a great start let me go ahead and get you started with the daily mastermind quote of the day so the quote of the day inside the mobile app is by Tony Robbins and the quote is there's always a way if I'm committed there's always a way if I'm committed now today because we generally talk about principles on Mondays prosperity and success principles I want to actually read you a a commencement address by Jeff Bezos he he spoke to the class graduating class of 2010 at Princeton University and I really loved what he had to say because his topic of his of his speech was we are what we choose And for those of you that may not know who Jeff Bezos is, obviously he's the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon. And his net worth is around $135 billion. And that puts him as the second wealthiest person in the world. So he qualifies himself as being someone who truly does know what it means to be successful. And, you know, he was giving this advice, this really well thought out advice, to the graduating class of Princeton, and I thought it's something that you might enjoy today. So I'm going to read it to you, give you a couple of thoughts, and we'll get you started off on a great week. So this is what he said. He said, 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 traveled across 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 of about 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. At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage, figuring out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. And I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can remember the details but basically the ad said every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off your life I think it might have been two minutes per puff And at that rate I decided to do the math for my grandmother I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, 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 and tapped my grandmother on the shoulder and proudly proclaimed, at two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life. 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, she said, you're so smart, you had to have some tricky, or he says, 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 back seat and I 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 besides the trailer, and 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. What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift. This is Bezos talking now. 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 the 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. And he's talking about the Princeton graduating class now. 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 admissions wouldn't have let you in. Your smarts will come in handy because you'll travel in a land of marvels. We humans, plotting 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 synthesized life In the coming years we not only synthesize it but we engineer it to specification I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, and Newton, all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive, most of all right now. As a civilization, we'll all 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 2300% 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 a cement-filled tire, 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 job. The 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 also 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. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life, remember he's talking about the Princeton graduates here, 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 and adventure Will you wilt under criticism or will you follow your convictions Will you bluff it out while 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 swashbuckling? When it's tough, will you give up or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expenses of others or will you be kind? I will hazard a prediction. When you're 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 all our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck. Now, I love that commencement speech. And the reason I do is because, not just because of who it comes from, because obviously credibility comes from individuals that we know have made good decisions, followed their passions and been successful, but also because of the framework that he put it in. And the bottom line is that we all have the ability to make choices. We all have the ability, and this is our prosperity principles, to create our life and to live our best life. And so many times we think that our life is determined by everyone else and everything else, and we forget that we are having the ability to make the choice, and the choices and the decisions we make will create our life. And so I really love that commencement of Jess, and what I'd love to do is I'd love to just challenge you to ask yourself, are you making decisions to follow your heart, your gut, your passion, and your convictions? Or are you following the crowd? Are you, as Napoleon Hill would say, drifting? And I hope you're becoming, even if you have been drifting, I hope you're becoming more and more aware that it's never too late to start living that life that you were meant to live. You just gotta make the choice and make the decision. I hope you'll make that decision. I hope you have an amazing week. I'm really looking forward to talking with you about some things we have this week. I've got some great ideas tomorrow for you on some tips on how to kickstart your dream building and so if you would for me please share this podcast hit me up on the or follow us here on the daily mastermind on facebook or instagram but share the episode help us share the message have an amazing week once again my name is george wright the third and this has been the daily mastermind talk to you soon North Baker.