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  • (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,

  • Jeff Bezos: capture those and then go beyond that.

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

  • Jeff Bezos: disappears while you're reading it.

  • Jeff Bezos: You're not thinking about the ink and the glue and the

  • Jeff Bezos: stitching and the paper.

  • Jeff Bezos: You're entering the author's world and the physical object

  • Jeff Bezos: just goes away. And that's what we wanted to

  • Jeff Bezos: achieve with Kindle, to have a device so simple that

  • Jeff Bezos: it too would disappear and let you enter the author's world.

  • Jeff Bezos: Failure is an essential component of innovation and

  • Jeff Bezos: invention. If you know it's going to work,

  • Jeff Bezos: it's not an experiment.

  • Jeff Bezos: And so if you want to invent, if you want to innovate,

  • Jeff Bezos: failure is part and parcel with that.

  • Jeff Bezos: There is no escape from that.

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

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

  • Jeff Bezos: decisions and hard work, but not in your gifts.

  • Jeff Bezos: Celebrate your gifts.

  • Jeff Bezos: Enjoy them.

  • Jeff Bezos: But don't take pride in them.

  • Jeff Bezos: 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.

  • Jeff Bezos: And my worst memory of Princeton is starting my problem sets

  • Jeff Bezos: in partial differential equations. (laughter)

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

  • Jeff Bezos: it's their freshman week, and they are starting at Princeton --

  • Jeff Bezos: I think the advice as to what to focus on is pretty simple,

  • Jeff Bezos: which is to figure out -- which is not always easy -- but

  • Jeff Bezos: try to figure out what you're genuinely interested in.

  • Jeff Bezos: And then pursue those things. Alternative techniques might be

  • Jeff Bezos: to try to figure out what you think is going to be most

  • Jeff Bezos: lucrative. And I think those techniques tend

  • Jeff Bezos: 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

  • Jeff Bezos: something that you genuinely love and then wait for the wave

  • Jeff Bezos: 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)

(music)

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