读亚马逊传记学点英文
这个月读书群读的第一本书是的传记 Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built，第二本书我选择了相同题材的The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon -- 有关亚马逊的传记。两本书都是讲两个巨头企业的成长史，而且都是有关电子商务，其中有些地方截然不同，有些地方又如出一辙，按主题读书的乐趣就在这里。
例如，马云同学高考考了三次才考上；而Bezos从小就是学霸，全奖上了普林斯顿。Bezos有令人印象深刻的大笑，马云出品了不少的金句和鸡汤。两个人对公司的管理都一样的“抠”，身上那股“疯”也有得一拼。两个人也有隔空对话的地方，例如马云说：“Nobody knows the future. You can only create the future." Bezos说: It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
在此和大家分享我对这本书印象比较深的一些地方，顺便学学英文。
1. Jeff Bezos的选择
这本书的开篇就引用了Bezos （发音是“Bay-zose,” not “Bee-zose”）2010年在普林斯顿大学演讲时的一段话：
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.
这段话呼应了他当初决定离开华尔街去创业的想法：
I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.
这段话让我想到了电影《练习曲》中说：
希望在20出头的生命里，做一件到80岁想起来都还会微笑的事。
当我们纠结于做什么样的决定的时候，可以想一想Bezos的分享。这不是什么“情怀” “洒脱”，自己认为是对的事情就去做，只有自己经历过了才知道那意味着什么。
2. Jeff Bezos读过的书
Steve Jobs推出了iTunes，抢走了Bezos的音乐生意，很多人说亚马逊在卖音乐这方面做的不够好和Bezos对音乐不感兴趣有很大关系。乔布斯“lived and breathed music"，可以说是他的个人兴趣引导了他在音乐市场的成功。
对于Bezos来说，让他痴迷的事情之一是书。书中提到：
Bezos didn’t just love books—he fully imbibed them, methodically processing each detail. Stewart Brand, the author of How Buildings Learn, among other works, recalls being startled when Bezos showed him his personal copy of the 1995 book. Each page was filled with Bezos’s carefully scribbled notes.
这本传记中也提到了一些书籍对Bezos以及亚马逊的影响，我把其中的5本挑出来和大家分享，这本书后的附录中也有Jeff's Reading List供读者参考。
1) Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
黑石雄一的《长日将尽》
At the time Bezos was thinking about what to do next, he had recently finished the novel Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a butler who wistfully recalls his personal and professional choices during a career in service in wartime Great Britain. So looking back on life’s important junctures was on Bezos’s mind when he came up with what he calls “the regret-minimization framework” to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career.”
2) Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton
沃尔玛创始人的自传
Bezos had imbibed Walton’s book thoroughly and wove the Walmart founder’s credo about frugality and a “bias for action” into the cultural fabric of Amazon.
3) The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
克莱顿·克里斯坦森的《创新者的窘境》
By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.
4) Good to Great by Jim Collins
《从优秀到卓越》
Bezos had absorbed the lessons of the business bible Good to Great, whose author, Jim Collins, counseled companies to acquire other firms only when they had fully mastered their virtuous circles, and then “as an accelerator of flywheel momentum, not a creator of it.
5) The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas
《黑天鹅效应》
The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species’ tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives. These stories, Taleb wrote, shield humanity from the true randomness of the world, the chaos of human experience, and, to some extent, the unnerving element of luck that plays into all successes and failures.
3. 传记怎么读？
这本书的作者Brad Stone在序言中说明了写这本书的目的：
It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.
这本书在亚马逊官网的评论中大多都是褒奖(61%的人给了5星），其中2%的读者给了一星。这一星评论中就有Jeff Bezos的妻子MacKenzie Bezos，赤裸裸地打脸。
MacKenzie Bezos对作者差评的主要原因是书中的一些内容和事实不符，观点不够平衡。
Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book.
The book is also full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction, and the result is a lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon.
MacKenzie Bezos也是小说家，她在评论中也提到：
One of the biggest challenges in non-fiction writing is the risk that a truthfully balanced narration of the facts will be boring, and this presents an author with some difficult choices.
这给我们如何读传记类的作品提了个醒: 传记不代表绝对真实发生的事情。How to Read a Book中提到如何读历史时提到：
A historical fact, though we may have a feeling of trust and solidity about the word, is one of the most elusive things in the world.
作者说：历史不代表就是事情的真相，而是历史学家凭借自己的经验和逻辑还原出来的“真相”，这个真相的演绎过程就免不了一些“编造”。
A good historian does not, of course, make up the past. He considers himself responsibly bound by some concept or criterion of accuracy or facts. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the historian must always make up something. He must either find a general pattern in, or impose one on, events; or he must suppose that he knows why the persons in his story did the things they did.
为了更好的了解历史，我们要读一读不同的叙述，让自己从不同的角度和层面看待历史。读传记类的作品和读历史有很多相似的地方 (they are special kinds of histroy")，我们在读这类作品的时候要想一想其中是否有biased的地方，作者这么写是不是有某种目的。
这个月我们读的两本传记书都属于“ordinary biography”，并不具备严谨性和权威性，但是读起来往往很有趣 -- 故事性极强，其中难免有作者自己的解读。
最后，关于如何读传记，How to Read a Book中提醒我们：
You should remember, of course, that if you wish to know the truth about a person’s life, you should read as many biographies of him as you can find, including his own account of his life, if he wrote one. Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying. As to the question, What of it?, we would only say this: biography, like history, can be a cause of practical, moral action. A biography can be inspiring. It is the story of a life, usually a more or less successful one—and we too have lives to lead.