Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai today gave the commencement speech to Stanford University’s Class of 2026.
The Stanford alum starts by noting how this is just his second commencement speech, with the first being a filmed address during COVID in 2020 as part of a virtual YouTube series.
Right off the bat, Pichai addresses how graduates during other addresses in recent weeks booed any mention of AI.
…people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.
With some humor, he continues about how the “most timeless advice, I’ve learned, is technology agnostic.”
The main premise of Pichai’s advice is how “very few moments in life are make or break.” Sundar shared a rather poetic story about “how [he] started to learn this”:
One Wednesday morning in January, my first winter quarter, we were on our way to class. [A classmate] was like, “Do you want to go to Vegas instead?” I had never skipped a class. I had definitely never taken a road trip before. (In fact, this is the first time my parents are hearing of it.) And yet, I said, “sure.” So we went back to our dorm rooms, grabbed some things, and set off.
You have to cut through the mountains to get there. As we drove through them, it started to snow. I had never seen snow before. I stuck my hand out to grab it, and I couldn’t believe the softness of the flurries. Pat stopped the car so I could get out; It was really beautiful, a moment I’ll never forget.
Nine hours from when we set out, we arrived in Vegas with the night lights on the horizon. I didn’t know what to think. Pat taught me how to play blackjack. I started with five dollars and did manage to win about fifteen more, and was like, “I’m out!” We didn’t have enough money to stay long so the next day we started the drive back.
No one seemed to notice that we had missed class. For the first time, I realized the world won’t end if I relaxed a little.
You are going to face a lot of moments in your life. Only a few of them are really important and you need to get them right: Picking a partner, choosing whether to start a family, a bigger career pivot. Those decisions require time and intention.
However you will face many more moments in your life that only seem really big… Thousands of them, in fact. And very few of them are make or break: Your first job out of college? The city you move to next? Whether to take that road trip? While those moments add texture to your journey, they rarely determine the course of your life.
But if you are able to filter the signal through the noise you can nudge your life in these moments into having the impact you want.
Pichai proceeds to share “three simple filters” that have “helped [him] get more moments right than wrong and took some of the pressure off” with examples from his life and Google career.
“Choose optimism”
If you’re not from here, California is advertised as being really lush and green. But when I looked out the window, it was more…brown. I guess I said this out loud, I’m not sure why. My host, Mrs. Jane Earl, gently corrected me. “We prefer to call it golden,” she said.
And that’s exactly what I mean by choosing optimism. It’s about reframing for the positive: Where I saw brown, she saw golden. This slight change of perspective had a huge ripple effect on how I thought about the world around me…
Despite the brown hills and cold ocean, it seemed like almost everyone I encountered had a generally positive outlook on life. Maybe it’s because you can wear shorts all year, I don’t know.
I found myself adopting this California optimism. And it helped me navigate one of my bigger pivots during my time at Stanford: I came here fully intending to get my PhD, and to move into academics. Life had other plans, and I needed to get a job sooner.
“gravitate towards working on hard things”
I’d love to tell you I was an immediate success after leaving Stanford… I wasn’t. Even a decade later, I felt like I wasn’t on the right path, and it took me a while to find my footing.
Until I applied to Google.
The first “impossible problem” he worked on was building Chrome.
And in 2008, we launched what we thought was a great browser. We had eight million users in the first twenty-four hours, and the reviews were really positive. And then user growth stagnated.
After a year, we had around two percent share. I remember Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, made fun of Chrome in an interview and called it a rounding error.
It could have been demoralizing. But with that California optimism, I told the team that the fact he went out of his way to dismiss us meant we were doing something right.
We kept going, setting highly aggressive stretch goals to keep the team pushing. We rapidly iterated, shipping the browser every six weeks while others shipped one maybe every six months to a year. Success began to follow.
Working on hard things has taught me a lot: It typically attracts other great and optimistic people. And even if you miss meeting the high goals you set, you’ll still achieve something great.
So when you have the choice to work on something hard — say yes.
“when all else is equal, do the thing that excites you”
I didn’t have much access to a computer until I came to Stanford. So you can imagine my surprise when I walked into Sweet Hall and saw rows and rows of computers that I could use anytime I wanted.
It was 1993 and the internet was being built literally all around me. I saw it as a fundamental enabler of human progress. The idea that I could be a part of bringing it to as many people as possible was exciting. It’s why I took the offer at Google. And why I jumped at the chance to work on projects like Chromebooks and Android later on.
The full transcript of the speech is available here, with video not yet available.
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