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Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels.
你们将在一片充满奇迹的世界上前行，聪明才智必能派上用场。
We humans -- plodding 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 clean energy and a lot of it.
我们能够想方设法制造清洁能源等等。
Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will 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，去修复细胞。
This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life.
这个月，有一个非常激动人心却又不足为奇的消息 —— 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.
在未来几年，我们不仅会合成生命，还能将之工程规范化。
I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain.
我相信你们甚至会看到人类大脑被彻底理解。
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在现在。
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，我们拥有如此多的天赋，就像是坐在我面前的你们，每一个生命个体都拥有众多独特的天赋。
How will you use these gifts?
如何运用这些天赋？
And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
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 was growing at 2,300 percent per year.
当年，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 -- something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me.
我从未看到或听说过任何东西增长如此快速。有个想法令我异常兴奋 —— 创建涵盖几百万种书籍的网上书店，这东西在物理世界根本无法存在。
I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year.
那时我刚满 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, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that.
我告诉妻子 MacKenzie 想辞去工作，然后去做这件疯狂的事，很可能会失败，因为大部分创业公司都如此，而且我不确定之后会发生什么。
MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it.
MacKenzie （也是普林斯顿毕业生，就坐在下面第二排）告诉我，我应该放手一搏。
As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor.
少年时期，我是一名车库发明家。
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, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings.
我曾用水泥填充的轮胎制作自动关门器，用雨伞和锡箔制作太阳能炒锅（虽然不太好用），我还用煎锅做了一个警报器来吓唬邻居。
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，老板也很有智慧，我很敬佩他。
I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet.
我告诉老板我想开办一家公司，在网上卖书。
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 good job.”
老板带我在中央公园漫步良久，认真听我讲完，最后说：“听起来真是一个很好的主意。然而，对那些目前没有谋到一份好工作的人来说，这个主意会更好。”
