How to be successful

Harker Research Symposium

May 17, 2014

Speaker: Vinod Khosla

I'm excited to talk to you.

and talk to you about some things you don't normally hear about.

Mostly people talk to you about how to be successful.

And I'll tell you about some things that I think are way more important than being successful.

These are the things that you hear about the conventional wisdom. Color inside the lines, behave properly, show respect, be thoughtful.

Hopefully I can tell you that all of these are the wrong thing to do.

Im mostly going to speak to you students your parents will cringe a little.

Your teacher will hate me But that's okay.

And I'm serious I'm not kidding.

They ask you to do these things so you don't fail.

I will suggest that you will not succeed until you fail enough times.

and so you have to do the opposite of what people tell you.

So let me tell you about the lessons your parents don't want you to hear about.

Hopefully by the time we are finish today I will convince you not to be afraid of failure.

Fail as often as you want but fail well.

What I mean is you don't fail by not doing anything and being lazy.

You fail by try and lots of things, working hard at trying lots of things.

And fail often and I'll get to why.

So everybody remembers I started Sun Microsystems

Together with Scott McNealy.

He spoke last year none of you remember.

Travis Scott and I also started another company called the data dump that failed.

We started at three months before we started sun.

Nobody remembered your failures.

Everybody remembers your successes expecially in retrospect.

So don't worry about your failures people forget about them.

Is there a great learning opportunities.

Another thing your parents don't why you to hear.

Now you think I'm kidding but I'm not.

Unless you challenge conventional wisdom, you will not try new things.

You will fit in the lines.

And so I always challenge my teaches.

I probably should have been thrown out of school a dozen times.

But I always did, to this day I don't take one expert forecast with respect I ignore them and hopefully you'll understand why.

When we get to the last slide of today's talk.

I just ignore what they tell me can and can't be done.

Mostly we limit ourselves, expecially young people. Not by what we can do. But by what other people think is possible or not possible.

And as soon as you start ignoring their forecast, Ignoring the experts you'll do better.

Challenge your teachers.

I got thrown out of many a class because I told the teacher they were wrong.

Then they often are.

I guarantee you there no good.

No matter how good your teacher, there wrong often enough.

And you should be thinking for yourself. Not accepting things as you're told to you by anyone.

I never followed any rules my whole life.

Okay.

Don't worry about your score.

The teachers want you to, your parents want you to.

What I'm suggesting is learn to explore and you can't do both.

All of academic education is geared to how well you score.

The more time you spend exploring instead of worrying about your scores, the better off you'll be long term you will be as students.

Nothing you learn is going to be irrelevant in 10-15 or 20 years.

I didn't engineering none of that is relevant.

It's not unimportant so don't get me wrong.

Its not that you shouldn't learn what you're being taught.

But learning to learn and learning to explore is way more important.

When you're doing that prep for that final and you find it interesting thought, you can prepare for the test or learn a bit more and I'm suggesting you should always try to learn a bit more.

No matter what the circumstance.

Again people think I'm not serious.

But I'm seriously urging all you young people to pay attention.

The more proper you are the more you'll fit in the less exordinary you will be, the less you will achieve.

You will become a good doctor, for Indian kids most mothers want you to become a doctor.

But being erelevant exploring is really important.

I know this sounds ridiculous but when my kids were 5 and 6. At one time I had 4 kids under the age of 5.

They were actually well behaved. So what I would do occasionally at the dinner table is pick up some food and throw it at them.

and my wife would go crazy but, you know learning there really aren't a lot of rules is very important and it gets ingrained into us that we should behave properly.

That we should stick by the rules.

Do what's expected.

There's a lot thats expected of you.

And usually its not the best thing for you.

I have to admit I actually beamed a professor with an eraser also once he was just wrong.

I don't recommend you do that to your teachers.

But challenging them is a good idea even if they get you in trouble occasionally.

Every time they have gotten in trouble with teachers, I defended my kids not the teachers.

I don't think they will tell you I've ever reprimanded them once for getting in trouble with teachers.

So this is a message to parents to Please support your kids.

Drop out of school.

You know, I let my daughter do that.

In 10th grade she was at Lake Weberton.

And she made a compelling case of why she should be allowed to drop out of high school.

I have to tell you it's the hardest decision for Indian parent exspecially, has to make.

She was so passionate she was so convincing she wanted to be a ski racer.

And study on her own.

And it worked out fine she got into Stanford one year ahead of her classmates.

And now she is 23 and she started her own little internet company.

It worked out fine.

Because she explored.

I know the parents are cringing.

So always always be on the edge of what's acceptable.

And that's what I mean about don't be proper.

Be on the edge because that's almost always wear all the interesting things happened in society.

At the edges of society.

At the edges of normal behavior.

Let me tell you what I mean this is one of my favorite examples.

People are asked how many lines does it take to connect all these dots?

With a straight line.

And there's a standard solution.

You can do it in five lines.

And most people come up with this Answer

When I say how do you go from 5 to 4 people have a problem.

And people have a problem because they forget they can go outside the boxes.

Nobody told you, you couldn't go outside of the boxes.

You can think outside the box

It's a shame the titles all um um.

You can go out of the boxes.

How can you do it with three lines?

But if you think outside the box you can.

Its amazing how much a brain is constrained by what's expected of us.

And how little we think outside the box.

So how about can you do it with one line.

My point is you don't need to color inside the lines, don't just color outside the lines.

Fold the paper, cut holes in it, burn it.

Think outside the box.

You know it does seem funny but it shows up everyday and behavior.

From anybody over the age of 30, they get fixed into this standard pattern of thinking.

I'm 57 so I can say it.

And I get in trouble for saying it, but most people fundamentally stop thinking anything new after the age of 45.

There's a few exceptions.

And I can point them out but don't let yourself get in this loop.

And parents step outside.

Do unusual things.

And it's very very very hard to get outside your comfort zone.

I ask myself a year ago what is the hardest thing for me to do? How do I get outside my comfort zone?

And I haven't been able to do it.

And I've been trying to convince myself I should get my ears pierced and wear earrings for a month or two.

Because it's outside my comfort zone.

And I can't get myself to do it.

And that is fundamentally wrong. It's the short coming in me.

When I see people who haven't changed their hair style in 20 years.

I think they ain't thinking anything new.

Don't get yourself in the same box, the older you get.

The more fixed a boxed you get yourself into.

The parents are thinking did I change my hairstyle?

My point is it's very important to push the edges.

To learn all the things a good school won't teach you.

So is failure so bad?

This is a Harvard Business School case they wrote about 2 years ago.

And you can't see what's at the top.

But right here it says, the first quote is from me saying the freedom to fail gives me the ability to succeed.

In fact if I wasn't accepting failure I wouldn't try most of the things I tried.

Because they're unreasonable and they're likely to fail anyway.

And then I wouldn't achieve them.

So fundamentally my willingness to fail and my lack of fear of failing Is what gives me the ability to succeed.

Because without that willingness to fail I wouldn't succeed.

This is why failure is so important to accept even embrace.

I like to say I really don't care what people think.

I get accused of all kinds of things.

I only care about trying what I think is worth trying.

Not my parents not my teachers.

And then just doing it.

The second thing that is important, is I see a lot of people adjusting their goals so that they can succeed.

Succeed and not fail.

I find in business that most people reduce their goals where they are less likely to fail.

But if they success the consequences of success are inconsequential.

I suggest, I love you take the opposite approach.

It doesn't matter if you fail but if you succeed it better be worth succeeding at.

Something that you can be proud of.

That you can think of as a real stretch for you.

a real achievement for you.

And you can't do that if you're trying to play it safe.

This is a quote from Samuel Beckett, I walk you through some of my best quotes on failure.

There's nothing in the world that prevents you from trying again and again and again untill you succeed.

This is one of my favorites.

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare It's because we do not dare that they are difficult."

And I tend to find that I'm pretty foolish about what I attempt.

I'm told that all the time.

But foolishness in this respect is actually a good thing.

And when you're trying new things It's okay to be scared.

If you're not trying something ambitious then you're not going to be afraid.

Then you don't need courage.

Courage only comes when you're actually scared of doing something.

Like jumping out of a plane.

Like going skydiving.

Unless you're trying stretch yourself there is no coverage required.

And you get into a mediocre boring life.

When you live at the edge of failure life is a lot more exciting and fun.

In fact I believe the only fun thing in life Is when you're almost always ready to fail.

About to fail and you fight to succeed because then life is challenging.

What's the challenge in being comfortable doing the same thing for 30 years?

The other thing is try and fail but don't fail to try.

Most people don't fail in their minds because they don't try these risky things.

But in fact in my view they failed before they started.

Because they never even attempted it.

So please try and fail but don't fail to try.

And President Robert F Kennedy said only those who dare fail greatly can achieve greatly.

If you don't try and do great things, things everybody else thinks are unreasonable.

Because if they were reasonable things to try, everybody would do them.

By definition great things are unreasonable things to try and do.

So unless you dare fail greatly you cant achieve greatly.

So this from Maya Angelou, is the other personal side of it.

It doesn't matter if you fail, you may face defeat but don't get defeated.

This is about a state of mind.

This is my favorite quote from Michael Jordan.

For those of you who are basketball fans.

He's failed at many of critical shot.

But there's many that pass the ball to him because they're afraid to try.

Afraid that they'll get blamed for losing the game because they didn't take the shot or missed the shot.

So I'll pass the ball to him.

Let him take that risk.

And so it's a shame.

Einstein was defined as mentally slow By his teachers

So don't accept what others tell you.

My favorite was Edison who said because he made so many an attempt to invent the light bulb.

He didn't say he failed, he said he found 10,000 things that don't work.

Eventually he did find the one thing that did work.

Then the Wright brothers did the same thing.

Remember what I told you about experts ignore them.

The President of the Royal Society.

Probably the most learnered man on the planet in those days. Late 1800.

A few years before the Wright brother he proclaim that heavier than air flying machines were impossible.

Experts are wrong all the time.

In fact they're wrong most of the time.

Cynicism, saying why things can't be done, why things are not going to work.

It's very easy, it's very comfortable, It's what most people do.

Cynicism never leads to anything interesting other than convincing other people they shouldn't try things.

Hope is in fact the only path to extraordinary success.

If 200 of you and the senior class at Harker try things and one of you succeeds the world will be a much better place for it.

Because of some things improbable it doesn't mean it's not important.

Because almost certainly and I don't have enough time today to go through it.

Improbable is what happens to the world all the time.

Larry and Sergey try to create Google when everybody said search wasn't an interesting business.

They change the world.

Most of you young people probably don't know what it's like without search, without Google and Facebook.

But in fact until very recently It was the way the world was.

And Mark Zuckerberg did the same thing.

So let me talk about mindset a little bit.

You have to dream the dreams.

And you have to be a little bit foolish.

To try and make them come true.

Because if you weren't foolish you wouldn't attempt unreasonable things.

I've always dreamed of things bigger than I could imagine doing and somehow I probably can honestly say of all the audience today I've probably failed at more things than anybody here.

I have feel that more things than anybody in this room in this hall because I've tried many more things, and because of that there were a few things that were successful.

But I don't get embarrassed by failure.

I'm foolish enough to try all sorts of things.

In January I was skiing over Christmas and I tore my ACL and so I couldn't ski anymore so I started writing.

I wrote a blog called do we need doctors?

and I wrote a second blog since I still couldn't ski or do any teaching.

I am convinced In 10 or 15 years we won't need most of either one.

You won't need most teachers and you won't need most doctors.

It sounds foolish today but i for one am going to try to make sure it happens.

I know it sounds funny but I am absolutely convinced and any of you who are interested, go read my blog. It was in TechCrunch in January.

And that's what I mean by unreasonable. It sounds totally unreasonable.

You have to try unreasonable things to do extraordinary things.

You can't try ordinary things and expect to do extraordinary things.

You have to be unreasonable.

Shoot for the moon.

Question everything.

Every single thing you can think of.

Includes parents, teachers, experts, friends.

If you're not failing try more things, try riskier things.

If you not failing often you're not living on the edge, you're not living an interesting life, you're not taking enough risk.

With persistence when you try hard things, you don't give up easily.

I want to tell you a story.

I was 16.

Remember when I told you to dream the dreams?

I was16 in India.

I never had anybody in my family be in any kind of business.

My grandfather was a professor of sand script.

My father was in the Indian Army since he was 16.

And I read the article on Andy Grove Weather a Hungarian immigrant coming to the valley and starting Intel.

And sitting there, and not ever being out of the country. In fact had never been on a plane in my life, I decided I was going to come to Silicon Valley and start a company.

And that was my unreasonable dream.

I didn't know anybody in business, so I had to come to the valley.

And to understand business I had to get an NBA and I had no money so and nobody would pay for it.

So I came anyway.

I had to go to Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon to do my masters in biomedical engineering.

I was an electrical engineer.

And I apply to Stanford because I wanted to come to Silicon Valley.

I went to Carnegie Mellon because they paid for it.

It was the only reason I think the school.

They were willing to pay for everything.

When I applied to Stanford they turn me down and I said you can't turn me down, so I had this huge argument with admissions director and to put me out he said I should get some work experience and come apply again, I said fine.

How much work experience do you want from me? And he said two years.

I said great I'll apply next year or two years worth of experience.

So I got two full time jobs.

And I work two full time jobs for the year then I apply it again.

And he turn me down again.

So I argued with him again.

And I argued with him and argued with him because I had work two full years of jobs, even if I did it in one year.

And to get rid of me he said fine after about 2 months of arguing, he turned me down, he said I'll put you on the waitlist.

So he put me on the waitlist, that was progress and of course he wasn't serious.

And I got to know all the people in the admissions office.

All the secretaries all the all admissions assistance and I talk to them everyday.

This is honest to god truth story.

And they turned me down in March by June I knew everybody.

The wait list was clearing but they wouldn't clear me.

I started calling him every week.

June went we talk every week.

July went we talked every week.

August went we talked every week.

I was at Carnegie Mellon University, I also applied to the business school there.

Labor Day classes started, I started in the business school at Carnegie Mellon.

But I didn't give up.

I kept talking to him and talking to him and Stanford starts pretty late. It starts around the 3rd or 4th week.

I was three weeks into the semester at Carnegie Mellon Business School and I called him and said hey classes start next week and you won't let me in yet.

And we kept literally we were talking everyday by now.

Then we kept arguing and I knew one person dropped out and I was going to get that spot.

So the Wednesday before classes started I called him and I said look classes start next week.

Orientations coming up and I'm going to come and he said I'm going to call you back.

He calls me back Thursday and said you can com and Thursday, Friday morning I was here.

I didn't know how to pay my fees because I had already paid my fees at Carnegie Mellon and I didn't have enough money to pay fees, to pay my rent.

One of the people in the admissions office put me up in her living room.

I live there for a while because I didn't have enough, I'd already paid the deposit In Pittsburgh.

My point is persistence Matters when you have a dream.

The other thing I always say is push yourself.

Nothing should ever be good enough.

My son he's a freshman at Stanford, hates it because I tell him that good isn't good enough and great is barely acceptable.

I have to say that good and great should be in your mind and not your parents mind.

You set your standards.

But I have to say when he got a 97% on his SAT He didn't tell me for 2 weeks.

Because he knew I'd be unhappy, that he could do better.

But don't forget to have fun, don't forget to be reverent, have an attitude that disregards all authority, all rules, all lines, you can color outside.

Weather is about you can or can't have dogs in your apartment.

Forever you should or shouldn't beam my teacher

Attitude is very important and it goes with this idea of exploration.

Exploration and learning, exploration and experimenting, exploration and living on the edge.

Which cuts in premature confidence.

Hopefully you get that sense from me and paranoia.

So that's a conflicting statement.

To be successful I think you have to be schizophrenic.

Have to try things that people tell you are unreasonable and too much of a stretch for you.

Things you don't think you can do and then you have to get scared, and exercise courage, and like I said earlier there's no courage unless you're scared, and both are important.

Otherwise either you don't try the really exciting stretch things, or you're not afraid enough, paranoid enough, experimental enough.

Because when you have paranoia you have to learn when you failed and try again and again and again.

And I'll Come back to this one more time.

It ok to jump without a parachute.

Getting evicted from this place, I didn't know what I was going to do if they evicted me for having a dog.

But I figured it out.

I didn't know how I was going to live the first year when I came to Stanford.

I didn't have enough money.

But I said I'd figure it out.

Jumping without a parachute is just fine often.

I do it all the time personally.

It will annoy your parents.

The more necessity you create the more inventive you will be when finding solutions.

Necessity is in fact the mother of invention

When you jump out of a plane and you have to build a parachute on the way down You do find a way to do it.

I recommend everybody went thinking about this watch Apollo 13 the movie.

When there was astronaut up there.

What NASA did was take everything up there. They were all going to die, there was no contingency plans to build carbon dioxide scrubbers because they were breathing carbon dioxide in the air.

So they put a bunch of engineers together in the room.

The other components that were in the Space Shuttle together and said find a way.

Watch the movie it's really interesting.

Any of those engineers, any of the experts, any of those cynic.

If you had given them the same problem in a different context they would have said it can't be done.

In Apollo 13 at NASA the engineers figured out how to do it and save the lives Of those astronaut.

Creating necessity is absolutely key.

Getting into trouble with no easy way is a great thing.

Because you get inventive, you get creative, you learn how to do things.

You learn things when there's no other way to learn, and I do it all the time.

I always say holy shit what did I get myself into?

So Failure is great.

So I said giving up, realizing when you fail.

There's two types of failure.

Don't fail easily about your goals.

They are usually about your tactics.

The optimist about your goals, what you're trying to achieve.

But if how you're doing it is not working change it quickly.

Admit it's wrong.

Admitting you're wrong it's absolutely key.

Be fail fast on tactics, admit fast on tactics.

On your vision, your goals, your dreams, don't fail easily , and again be schizophrenic.

I won't repeat itt all again.

And when you fail, if you ask enough questions, you will learn more then out of any success you ever have.

There is no teacher as good as failure, and the broader you want to be, the more things you should try, and the more things you should fail at.

I talked about this in the interest of time and I'm running out of time.

So the fact is most of the things you're told are true, will be wrong in 10 years.

Many will be wrong and 10 years, most will be wrong and 20.

So when your mother says be a doctor, tell her we won't need doctors, software will do the job.

I'm very serious.

Will we need doctors, will we need teachers? Probably not.

So let me finish by saying, the best way to predict what will happen, the best way to predict the future, Is you invent it.

And the best way to make the future that you want to happen is to invent the future that you want.

And each and everyone of you can do it and try and do it every single day.

It's a lot more fun than anything else I do.

I'm much rather work for 3 more hours then to go see a movie.

Because I so enjoy trying to do what others say is difficult, or impossible, or to challenging.

Thank you