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Video Closed Captions

(music)

Jeff Bezos:
My name is Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos:
I studied electrical engineering and computer science,

Jeff Bezos:
graduated in 1986 from Princeton, and my current job,

Jeff Bezos:
I'm the founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Jeff Bezos:
The Kindle is a wireless electronic reader.

Jeff Bezos:
We started working on it more than three years ago now,

Jeff Bezos:
more than, probably, almost five years ago now.

Jeff Bezos:
The idea is to take the key features of a physical book,

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capture those and then go beyond that.

Jeff Bezos:
The number one feature of a physical book is that it

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disappears while you're reading it.

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You're not thinking about the ink and the glue and the

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stitching and the paper.

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You're entering the author's world and the physical object

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just goes away. And that's what we wanted to

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achieve with Kindle, to have a device so simple that

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it too would disappear and let you enter the author's world.

Jeff Bezos:
Failure is an essential component of innovation and

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invention. If you know it's going to work,

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it's not an experiment.

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And so if you want to invent, if you want to innovate,

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failure is part and parcel with that.

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There is no escape from that.

Jeff Bezos:
If I were to go back in time and give myself one piece of

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advice as an undergraduate it would be: Take pride in your

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decisions and hard work, but not in your gifts.

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Celebrate your gifts.

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Enjoy them.

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But don't take pride in them.

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Take pride in your decisions and hard work.

Jeff Bezos:
My best memory of Princeton is finishing problem sets in

Jeff Bezos:
partial differential equations.

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And my worst memory of Princeton is starting my problem sets

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in partial differential equations. (laughter)

Jeff Bezos:
For anybody who is starting -- for anybody,

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it's their freshman week, and they are starting at Princeton --

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I think the advice as to what to focus on is pretty simple,

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which is to figure out -- which is not always easy -- but

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try to figure out what you're genuinely interested in.

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And then pursue those things. Alternative techniques might be

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to try to figure out what you think is going to be most

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lucrative. And I think those techniques tend

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not to work. It's very, very difficult to chase after a wave.

Jeff Bezos:
What's better is to plant yourself in the middle of

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something that you genuinely love and then wait for the wave

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to come find you.

(music)

Jeff Bezos:
That just makes the video better, you guys.

Jeff Bezos:
You realize that, right, if there's a little bit of laugther that you can't quite cut out.

Jeff Bezos:
It's like the "Today Show," and the cameramen can't help but laugh.

Mike Wood:
And then the boom drops in the frame.

Jeff Bezos:
(laughter)