Chai's Blog

Ben Horow­itz’s speech at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty is a great com­mence­ment speech I enjoyed in a long time.

It is wit­ty, insight­ful, opti­mistic and uncon­ven­tion­al.

I loved his main idea: fol­low your con­tri­bu­tion instead of your pas­sion. The next thing I loved is this quote:

As human beings we want to be liked. It’s anthro­po­log­i­cal. If peo­ple did­n’t like you in cave­man days, they will 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. So the last thing they want to hear is an orig­i­nal idea that con­tra­dicts their belief sys­tem. So it is 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 are right, that cre­ates real val­ue in the world. Every­thing else peo­ple already know. It is just busi­ness usu­al. So it is very impor­tant to think for your­self.

A must watch!