公众人物毕业演讲 第304期:亚马逊创始人贝佐斯普林斯顿大学毕业演讲(3)

 Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels 1.

你们的聪明才智必定会派上用场，因为你们将在一片充满奇迹的土地上行进。
We humans - plodding 2 as we are - will astonish ourselves.
我们人类，尽管跬步前行，却终将令自己大吃一惊。
We'll invent ways to generate 3 clean energy and a lot of it.
我们能够想方设法制造很多清洁能源。
Atom by atom, we'll assemble small machines that can enter cell walls and make repairs.
也能够一个原子一个原子地组装微型机械，使之穿过细胞壁，然后修复细胞。
This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable 4 news that we've synthesized life.
这个月，有一个异常而不可避免的事情发生了—人类终于合成了生命。
In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications 5.
在未来几年，我们不仅会合成生命，还会按说明书驱动它们。
I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain.
我相信你们甚至会看到我们理解人类的大脑。
Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton - all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now.
儒勒·凡尔纳，马克·吐温，伽利略，牛顿—所有那些充满好奇之心的人都希望能够活到现在。
As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.
作为文明人，我们会拥有如此之多的天赋，就像是坐在我面前的你们，每一个生命个体都拥有许多独特的天赋。
How will you use these gifts?
你们要如何运用这些天赋呢？
And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
你们会为自己的天赋感到骄傲，还是会为自己的选择感到骄傲？
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago.
16年前，我萌生了创办亚马逊的想法。
I came across the fact that Web usage 6 was growing at 2,300 percent per year.
彼时我面对的现实是互联网使用量以每年2300%的速度增长。
I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles
我从未看到或听说过任何增长如此快速的东西。创建涵盖几百万种书籍的网上书店的想法令我兴奋异常，
something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world - was very exciting to me.
因为这个东西在物理世界里根本无法存在。
I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year.
那时我刚刚30岁，结婚才一年。
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,
我告诉妻子MacKenzie想辞去工作，然后去做这件疯狂的事情，很可能会失败，因为大部分创业公司都是如此，
and I wasn't sure what would happen after that.
而且我不确定那之后会发生什么。
MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it.
MacKenzie，（也是普林斯顿的毕业生，就在第二排坐着）告诉我，我应该放手一搏。
As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor.
在我还是一个男孩儿的时候，我是车库发明家。
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 7, baking-pan alarms to entrap 8 my siblings 9.
我曾用水泥填充的轮胎、雨伞和锡箔以及报警器制作了一个自动关门器。
I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.
我一直想做一个发明家，MacKenzie支持我追随内心的热情。
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.
我当时在纽约一家金融公司工作，同事是一群非常聪明的人，我的老板也很有智慧，我很羡慕他。