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Don’t Follow Your Passion | Ben Horowitz’s Advice for New Graduates
00:19:22
In this commencement address to Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science Class of 2015, Ben Horowitz challenges some of the most common advice given to graduates. Rather than urging students to “follow their passion,” Horowitz argues that people should focus on developing their strengths and making meaningful contributions to the world. Drawing on stories from his own time at Columbia, the founding of technology companies, and investments in startups like Airbnb, he explores the importance of independent thinking, conviction, and pursuing ideas that others may initially dismiss. Along the way, Horowitz discusses technological progress, entrepreneurship, opportunity, and why he believes today's graduates are entering a world defined less by unprecedented challenges than by unprecedented possibilities.
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Thinking for yourself sounds both simple and trivial, but in reality, it's extremely difficult and it's profound. And here's why. As human beings, we want to be liked. It's anthropological. If people didn't like you in caveman days, they would just eat you. So you really have a natural built in instinct to want to be liked. And the easiest way to be liked is to tell people what they want to hear. And you know what? Everybody wants to hear what they already believe to be true. And so the last thing they want to hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system. So it's very hard to even bring that kind of stuff up. But those are the things. Those are the only things. Things that you believe that everybody around you doesn't believe when you're right, that create real value in the world.
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Follow your passion may be the most common piece of career advice graduates receive. Ben Horowitz disagrees. In this commencement address to Columbia University's FU Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Ben argues that passion is often a byproduct of mastery, contribution, and achievement, not necessarily the starting point. Drawing on his own experiences as a student entrepreneur, investor, and technologist, he shares lessons on independent thinking, conviction and innovation, and why some of the most valuable opportunities come from pursuing ideas that other people don't yet believe.
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Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a beautiful speech. Very nice work. I'm going to take my hat off, if that's okay with you guys, because I don't want to get too excited and have it spill, even though it is an awesome hat. So, first of all, thank you, class of 2015, for inviting me to speak. It's such a great honor. And when I got the invitation, I started thinking back to when I was in Columbia. And I remember getting to Columbia and I was immediately super stressed out because I realized that I now had to figure out at some point what I was going to do with my life. And that was, like, super scary. Some of you might be going through that now a little bit, but not to bring that up or anything. And I remember when I kind of first got the first clue of what I might do. I was taking a class over in the mud building, which somebody was telling me today, Woo. Mud. Somebody was telling me today, mud is great if you like prisons in Catholic school. And I was in this class and they were talking about this guy, Alan Turing, and they were talking about how he had proven that if you built a machine that was what he called a Turing machine, that it was theoretically impossible to build a machine that was computationally more powerful. And I was like, it just like melted my mind when I heard it because I couldn't even imagine what he was talking about because it was 1984. And you have to remember, in 1984, computers weren't even really a thing. And so the idea of, like, a machine that could do anything was just, like, so far fetched because all of our machines were like these special purpose machines. Like, we had a special purpose machine for doing math, and your parents will remember, it was called a calculator. And then we had one for word processing called a typewriter, and we even had one for video called a television set. And so the idea of, like, okay, now you're going to have a machine that can do absolutely anything. And this guy had figured that out 40 years ago, and I didn't even know about it. Like, I had no idea. It was like this secret to the universe, which they were just saying, oh, here. Oh, by the way, there's a machine that's like limitless and you can do anything on it. And I was just like, no way. Translate espanol. No way, Jose. For the parents. That's a Kanye west reference. But it was kind of at that point in my life where it was like, for those of you who are Phineas and Ferb fans, it was like that time when Phineas goes, I know what I'm going to do today. I'm going to major in computer science. And so I ran over to Carmen and I was just so excited to tell my friends. I was like, man, they're going to be just, like, so fired up for me. I figured it out. I'm not going to be stressed anymore. And I'm like, guys, I'm going to major in computer science. And one of my friends said, wow, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And I'm like, why? He said, you're at Columbia University. That's like a trade. You can learn that at devry. They'll teach you how to build computers, fix them, program them, like, you should major in something real. And I was just thinking to myself, I was like, I'm talking about a limitless machine. You're like talking about a washing machine. But I was so frustrated, I couldn't even really explain to him why. But it was at that point, at my, like, height of frustration, that I learned the most valuable lesson that I learned at Columbia, which is don't listen to your friends. And the more, the more generalized, the more generalized case of don't listen to your friends is think for yourself. And thinking for yourself sounds both simple and trivial. But in reality, it's extremely difficult and it's profound. And here's why. As human beings, we want to be liked. It's anthropological. If people didn't like you in caveman days, they would just eat you. So you really have a natural built in instinct to want to be liked. And the easiest way to be liked is to tell people what they want to hear. And you know what? Everybody wants to hear what they already believe to be true. And so the last thing they want to hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system. So it's very hard to even bring that kind of stuff up. But those are the things. Those are the only things. Things that you believe that everybody around you doesn't believe when you're right, that create real value in the world. Everything else people already know. There's no value created. It's just business as usual. So it's so important to think for yourself. And I see this in my business every day. So my business is I fund people who have company. So if you like, some of you probably have company ideas, and you might come to me and say, I've got an idea. And the biggest thing that I'll look for when you come to me with an idea is, have you thought for yourself? Is it something that you know that nobody else knows, or is it something that everybody knows? And I'll give you an example. So, for example, if you came to me and said, hey, I've got an idea to make batteries and cell phones last longer, I would go, well, that's a pretty good idea. But I'm not going to fund it because everybody thinks that's a good idea. And because everybody thinks that's a good idea, companies like Google and Apple and Samsung with tons of resources will just build that. So. So it's not really a new value creation for like a new person. And you contrast that with an idea that came to me about five years ago. A young man by the name of Brian Chesky came up to me and he had this idea that he was going to have an air mattress in his apartment that he rented to people, and it was going to be like an air bed and breakfast. And I was like, wow, that's a horrible, horrible idea. Because who would want to rent an air mattress out of somebody's apartment? Like, probably a serial killer. But Brian had a secret, and his secret was one he had run the experiment. He had actually tried It. And a whole lot of people wanted to rent that air mattress, and they weren't serial killers. And then beyond that, once he did that, he went and he studied kind of the history of hotel chains, and he found that hotel chains were a relatively new concept and that before hotel chains, people stayed at inns and bed and breakfasts. And that the problem with inns and bed and breakfasts were they were like a box of chocolates. You had no idea what you were going to get. It was like, one day you might have something good, and the other day you might have marzipan, cherry or some weird stuff. And so he thought, wow, with the Internet, we can make every one of those little cherries chocolates in the box transparent, and you can know what you're getting. And then you'd get all, like, the greatness of the bed and breakfast and all the goodness of the hotel chain all in one. And so he had figured out that secret. And it was an interesting secret because it wasn't. It was something that probably everybody in the world knew at one point, but they had all forgotten. Everybody had forgotten why we had hotels. And, you know, that ended up being. Now, I think they rent more nights every night in New York than Hilton hotel just five years ago. And it was all based on him believing something that nobody else believed. So in that spirit, what I'd like to give is a few unconventional graduation thoughts, and I'm titling them. Do not follow your passion, and the world is not going to hell in a handbasket. And the class of 2015 is not required to save it. I told you it was going to be unconventional. So don't follow your passion. Now you're probably thinking that's a really dumb idea, because everybody who's successful, and if you poll a thousand people are successful, they'll all say that they love what they do. And so the broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you'll be successful. But we're engineers, and we know that that might be true. But it also might be the case that if you're successful, you love what you do. You just love being successful, and everybody loves you. It's awesome. So which one is it? Well, I think to figure it out, you kind of have to go back in time. You have to back off when you were successful to, like, right now when you're graduating and as the class of 2015. And the first tricky thing about passions are they're hard to prioritize. Which passion is it? Are you more passionate about Math or engineering? Are you more passionate about history or literature? Are you more passionate about video games or K Pop? These are tough decisions. How do you even know? On the other hand, what are you good at? Are you better at math or writing? That's a much easier thing to figure out. The second thing that's tricky if you're going forward in time with this follow your passion idea is that what you're passionate about at 21 is not necessarily what you're going to be passionate about at 40. Now this is true for boyfriends as well as career choices. The third issue with following your passion is, excuse me, a little trouble with the throat, is you're not necessarily good at your passion. And has anybody ever watched American Idol? So you know what I'm talking about. Like, just because you love singing doesn't mean you should be a professional singer. And then finally, and most importantly, following your passion is a very me centered view of the world. And when you go through life, what you'll find is what you take out of the world over time, be it whatever, money, cars, stuff, accolades is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be, follow your contribution, find the thing that you're great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. And that is the thing to follow. Now, Speaking of the world. So this is generally the point in a graduation speech where I should say, the class of 2015 faces unprecedented challenges. There's ISIS, there's global warming. It sucks. Don't get me started on congressional gridlock. And I think all those things are true. But what's remarkable from historical standpoint about this time in the world to me are not the unprecedented challenges, it's the unprecedented opportunities. And let me just kind of talk quickly about the state of the world. So the number of people living in extreme poverty today is the lowest in the history of the world and one fifth of what it was in 1900. Child labor is in steep decline and fell 1/3 between 2000 and 2012 compared to the late 19th century. The number of hours that one has to work has fallen roughly in half. The percent of income spent on food has fallen in half since 1960. Life expense expectancy has increased six years between 1990 and 2012. Child mortality has fallen in half since 1990. People are getting taller, which is a measure of nutrition. People have grown more in the last hundred years than in the previous 2000. Speaking of ISIS, worldwide battlefield deaths are down 20 fold since the 40s. The homicide rate in the US is down half since the late 70s. Violent crime is down is one third of what it was in 1976. The global supply of nuclear weapons is down nearly five fold since 1990. And, and in 2014 was the first year in 40 that carbon emissions were flat. So it's not that bad. But the biggest opportunity is one that we've only begun to measure. And to explain this, I'd like to go back to when your parents and I were in college, because when we were in college, and they may have told you this and it may have scared you, so I apologize for scaring you, but we didn't have the Internet. There was no Internet. And so if we had an idea, like Brian Chesky had an idea and we wanted to find out about it, we couldn't Google it, but we did have a search engine. It was a different kind of technology. It was called a library. And it kind of sucked. There's actually an old search engine behind me, I'm looking at it there, but it kind of sucked because one, you couldn't access it from your dorm room because it wasn't even in cyberspace. It was in like actual space and you had to walk over there and then like you had to bring your credentials or they wouldn't even let you in. There was no logged out user experience. And then it was based on this really weird tech that was invented a long time ago called the Dewey Decimal System. And this tech was so old, like Dewey was named after the guy Dewey who like invented it. But like to make it seem high tech, they said it's like a decimal system. Like this is so high tech, we're using numbers, dude, and not just integers. Got decimals up in that boat. And then the user interface to it was so bad, it was called a card catalog. And it was so bad they had to like train you to use it. You couldn't just like go in and use it. You needed like hours and hours of classroom training. And so the net result of this was that looking stuff up was very discouraging because you couldn't look it up in milliseconds. It took hours. And that's if you were a Columbia student and you had a good library like Butler, it would take you hours to look things up. So it was very discouraging. Maybe if Brian Chesky was born, then he would never have even, he would have just said, forget this, I'm going to Taco Bell. I'm not figuring out where hotels came from. But think about it. That's for a Columbia student. Even worse for like a student who didn't go to Columbia and didn't have access to as good a library and, you know, might not even have that book in the library or even more. So imagine you grew up in Bangladesh or Sudan and you had all kinds of great ideas. You had no access, no search engine at all, no way to contribute your original ideas to the world. And then we fast forward to where we are now, and everybody who has a smartphone, which is pretty soon going to be everybody in the world, has the Library of Congress in their pocket. So that means a girl growing up in Bangladesh now has a better library than a student at Columbia or Harvard had 20 years ago. And so what might her idea be? What might she contribute? Well, I think that's going to be a lot up to you, because the world still isn't flat. There are issues. There are issues with power and issues with water and issues with food and issues with equal rights. But if you contribute, if you put your contribution into the world, if. If you think for yourself, then I believe that you will be the greatest generation. Because when we look back 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 500 years from now, you will be the generation that unlocked human potential. So congratulations, Columbia Class of 2015, and thank you for inviting me.
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Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.
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