Don’t Follow Your Passion | Ben Horowitz’s Advice for New Graduates
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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 wanna 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 wanna be liked, and the easiest way to be liked is to tell people what they wanna hear. And you know what everybody wants to hear? What they already believe to be true. And so the last thing they wanna hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system. So it's very hard to even bri
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, innovation, and why some of the most valuable opportunities come from pursuing ideas that other people don't yet b
Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a beautiful speech. Very nice work. I'm going 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. 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 sca
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