Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025!
Thirty-two years ago I was sitting where you are now. At least, I assume I was. I can't really remember anything about my own graduation. I was too hung over.
The main thing I remember from that time in my life is that I had no plan. I had a degree in English, no job, and no idea what I even wanted to do. I would have liked to work hard on something I cared about. But I didn't have anything I cared about, and it took me a decade to find one.
Maybe I can help you do that faster. Maybe I can help you figure out what to work on.
You fall into three groups. Some of you already have all kinds of ambitious plans. You're already admitted to med school for the fall, or whatever. Others of you have no ambitious plans and no desire to have any. You just want to have a happy life, and that's cool. But in the middle, there's a group who wish they had ambitious plans, but don't. This speech is for you. I'm going to tell you how to get ambitious plans.
The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.
This fact is so terrifying that a lot of people try to remain in denial about it. (I certainly did.) But it's also exciting. You can go in any direction now.
I didn't realize that, so I looked for more tracks. I looked for a job at a big, well-known company that I hoped would train me to do something, but I didn't know or care what, really, just so long as I was on some new set of tracks. The fall after graduation I was on the night shift at Fidelity Investments customer service, answering people's questions about why the value of their mutual fund went down.
This wasn't fun or interesting to me. So why did I do it? Two reasons: I didn't know any better, and I didn't think I had any particular aptitude for any kind of work, so I was delighted that anyone would pay me to do anything.
So I'm going to tell you about a trick you can pull right here at the point where the train tracks end. You can reinvent yourself. I wish I’d known I could do that. I was lazy in college and got bad grades. But the real problem was that I believed them: I believed that mediocre grades meant I was a mediocre person. And that stuck with me for years. I'm sure most of you have done better in school than I did, but maybe there are some of you who are feeling a little unsure of yourself. But here's the thing: you don't have to tell people that. They don't know. So if you want to, you can just decide to shift gears at this point, and no one's going to tell you you can't. You can just decide to be more curious, or more responsible, or more energetic, and no one's going to go look up your college grades and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's supposed to be a slacker."
If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have realized that there are many different kinds of jobs you can get after college, some much more interesting than others. And if I'd known I could be more ambitious, I would have tried to get one of the more interesting ones.
The truth is there are thousands of different places you could go work, and you have to consider them all and figure out which is the best. But that sounds impossible, right? You only had to choose between 60 different majors, and now you have to choose between thousands of different jobs? How do you even do that? The first step, is to acknowledge that you have to. You can't just drift into the open mouth of Fidelity, like I did.
Ok, then what? How do you search through thousands of options? To be honest, you can’t. You have to use some kind of trick for narrowing them down. My favorite trick is people. Talk to people. Get introduced to new people. Find the people that you think are interesting, and then ask what they're working on. And if you find yourself working at a place where you don't like the people, get out.
That was how I finally figured out what to work on. I found the startup people, and I realized that startups were what I was interested in. Once I did, I got more ambitious. I decided to write a book about startups. And having my own project made me even more ambitious. Finally I was working on something of my own! But most people I told about this project didn't get it. I wasn't an author or a startup person. How could I be writing a book about startups?
Which leads me to my final point about getting ambitious plans: you have to be immune to rejection. People are going to dismiss you at first. If that's enough to stop you, you're doomed. So you have to learn to ignore it. And that's harder than it sounds—social pressure is so powerful. But everyone who does ambitious things has to learn how to resist it.
If you have ambitious plans, a lot of people will be skeptical. You'll seem like you're getting above yourself, except perhaps to your parents. And even they will usually be too conservative. Plus, most ambitious ideas seem wrong at first. If a new idea was obviously good, someone else would have already done it.
When we started Y Combinator, everyone treated it as a joke. We were funding kids right out of college and only giving them small amounts of money. How could these startups ever succeed? Now everyone knows it's a good idea to fund young founders, but twenty years ago, it just seemed lame. But we didn't care what people thought of us. We knew we were onto something. In fact it was good that we seemed lame, because that meant it took several years before people started to copy us.
I’ll admit I wasn’t then as immune to rejection as I've become now. It's something I've learned from lots of practice. But I've gotten good at it now. So I'm proof that you can learn not to care what other people think.
Now I have some good news: I'm almost done. I hate long speeches and I bet you do too. And frankly, if you can remember what I've told you so far, that will be enough. So let me remind you what I've told you: you've been able to go through life so far without steering much. If you want to, you can become more ambitious now, but to do that you have to start steering. You can't just drift. There’re a huge number of options, and you have to actively figure out which is the best for you. And the best way to do that is people. Find the interesting people.