Don’t Follow Your Passion | Ben Horowitz’s Advice for New Graduates

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 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 wanna 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. 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 believe. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a beautiful speech. Very nice work. I'm gonna take my hat off if that's okay with you guys because I wanna get too excited to have it spill. Even though it is an awesome hat. So first of all, thank you class of 2,015 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 gonna do with my life. And that was like super scary. Some of you might be going through that now a little bit. But not not 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 Mudd Building, which somebody was telling me today. Somebody was telling me today, mud is great if you like prisons and 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. Computationally more powerful. And I was like, it it it just like melted my mind when I heard it because I I couldn't even imagine, like, …