“Entrepreneurs are like juvenile delinquents who say, ‘This sucks. I’ll do it my own way.’” - Yvon Chouinard

Thanks @caitlinrhodes for sending this to me.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave the Baccalaureate address to Princeton University’s Class of 2010. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He was introduced by Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman.

Bezos spoke to the Class of 2010 about the difference between choices and gifts. Cleverness, Bezos pointed out, is a gift, while being kind to others is a choice. One’s character, he suggested, is reflected not in the gifts one is endowed with at birth but rather by the choices one makes over the course of a lifetime.

My roommates will be gone for the next week. I will be alone :)

This is over a year old, but I thought I’d share it anyways. You could substitute almost any Fortune 500 company’s name with American Airlines with this back and forth and it would still ring true.

1. Read this.
2. Look at this.
3. Read the response and follow up.

Working on a large corporate IT project myself, I totally empathize with the AA UX architect. Dustin is spot on when he says that, “some companies have a culture that just promotes bad taste and doesn’t encourage improvement”. I try to be patient in order to understand why we use the methods and processes we use to develop (as opposed to design but along the same lines), but after almost six months on the project  it’s obvious there are just too many tentacles to make any improvements. 

Oh well. It was an interesting exchange between Dustin and Mr. X.