比尔•盖茨夫妇斯坦福大学毕业演讲

　　MELINDA GATES: So let your heart break.

　　It will change what you do with your optimism.

　　On a trip to south Asia, I met a desperately poor Indian woman.

　　She had two children and she begged me to take them home with me.

　　And when I begged her for her forgiveness she said, well then, please, just take one of them.

　　On another trip to south Los Angeles, I met with a group of the students from a tough neighborhood.

　　A young girl said to me, do you ever feel like we are the kids' whose parents shirked their responsibilities and we are just the leftovers? These women broke my heart.

　　And they still do.

　　And the empathy intensifies if I admit to myself, that could be me.

　　When I talk with the mothers I meet during my travels, there's no difference between what we want for our children.

　　The only difference is our ability to provide it to our children.

　　So what accounts for that difference?

　　Bill and I talk about this with our own kids around the dinner table.

　　Bill worked incredibly hard and he took risks and he made sacrifices for success.

　　But there's another essential ingredient of success, and that is luck.

　　Absolute and total luck. When were you born? Who are your parents?

　　Where did you grow up? None of us earn these things. These things were given to us.

　　So when we strip away all of our luck and our privilege and we consider where we would be without them, it becomes someone much easier to see someone who is poor and say, that could be me.

　　And that's empathy. Empathy tears down barriers and it opens up whole new frontiers for optimism.

　　So here is our appeal to you all. As you leave Stanford, take all your genius and your optimism and your empathy, and go change the world in ways that will make millions of people optimistic.

　　You don't have to rush. You have careers to launch and debts to pay and spouses to meet and marry.

　　That's plenty enough for right now. But in the course of your lives, perhaps without any plan on your part, you will see suffering that's going to break your heart.

　　And when it happens, don't turn away from it. That's the moment that change is born.

　　Congratulations and good luck to the class of 2014!