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Comment by ju2tin | Hacker News Reader

Nowhere near as good as Steve Jobs' address at Stanford a few years back, which remains the gold standard for these things.

This one seemed mainly like Jeff congratulating himself on the neat things he's done, with very few actionable take-aways for the audience. The ending in particular, with its repetitive "Will you A, or will you B" device, smacked of laziness, as if it were hastily dashed off the night before.

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I beg to differ. I'll say it's on par with Steve Jobs'. To me, both relate their life stories, not self congratulations. You can argue the same with Steve's self-credit of the Mac with his newly acquired love for fonts.

His "A or B" at the end is where it resonants with me. As other hn reply points out, life is never not as black and white as he states, but nonetheless, it does give a good guidance. I wouldn't call it "hastily dashed off the night before".

Most graduation speeches are fairly formulaic; regurgitations of the same few bits of inspirational wisdom that we all already know (but can occasionally afford to be reminded of, in the appropriate setting). Even the speeches which acknowledge and play with the formula are still pretty formulaic.

The Steve Jobs version of the speech wasn't really any better than the Jeff Bezos version, and neither of those is any better than the version given by some guy you've never heard of at some fifth-rate school in the middle of nowhere.

I thought David Foster Wallace's speech was exceptional.

http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallac...

That was fun to read. Afterward I looked for another commencement speech, and read Bill Gates' speech at Harvard. It's interesting to compare and contrast them.

> There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning.

http://humanity.org/voices/commencements/speeches/index.php?...

think it just depends on where you are personally. bezos' speech really speaks to me, probably because i sometimes struggle with being kind despite cleverness and i'm often riddled with doubt about my decision to pursue a dream instead of keeping my good, stable job.

apples to pinecones.

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