We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
When you are eighty 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.
Interpretation
Our lives are defined by the choices we make over time.
This quote emphasizes the significance of the choices we make throughout our lives, suggesting that when we reflect on our past, the essence of our existence will be captured in those choices. Jeff Bezos highlights that our identities and life stories are shaped not by external circumstances, but by the decisions we consciously choose to take.
In practice
During a graduation speech to inspire students to consider their future choices.
We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Work hard, have fun and make history.
If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.
I don't look at myself as a commodity, but I'm sure a lot of people have.
You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century.
The lamb misused breeds public strife And yet forgives the butcher's knife.
I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.
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