What Will You Do?

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

It's important to stop sometimes and think about what we're doing. So often, we get so caught up in the speed of life, in the urgency of our ambitions, in the need of right now, that we forget to stop and think. Every moment is a choice. And any one of those choices could be your "sliding doors" moment. Everything that we do, no matter how banal it may seem at the time, could alter the entire course of our lives. So we should choose wisely and thoughtfully and with care. And we should always make choices that come from a place of love and truth.

Because, as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, says at the very end of this commencement speech for the class of 2010 at Princeton, "In the end, we are our choices."