Strange Loop Canon Commencement Address

Congratulations!

You made it!

And thank you for being here. I skipped my first two to do what seemed at the time like more interesting things, which were not that memorable either in retrospect. But the one that I did attend had the philosopher Gray discuss advice, on how to live the good life.

He spoke of the dilemma faced by philosophers from Aristotle on, and on the importance of thinking about one’s life, the examined life, and I think that was a worthwhile speech. He wanted to tell us, who were about to go forth into the world with every intention of conquering it, to think about what drove that urge to conquer. An apt topic.

It is also traditional in commencement speeches to talk about commencement speeches, making it perhaps the first example of the meta literary cultural outputs. And both with speeches and with all the well wishes you’ve gotten on the road to getting here, I’m sure you’ve got a lot of advice. That’s what we dispense, to those like you. Well wishes, congratulations, hopes, and, inevitably, advice.

Advice, characteristically, can be complicated. Through the travails of age and wisdom I get to occasionally sit in circles where people wonder about what they might even be able to teach their kids, since the world is changing fast. And it goes around in circles.

You must have gotten all sorts in getting here. From professors, other students, career services, online forums, social media, prospective employers, maybe your girlfriends or boyfriends or their well meaning brothers and sisters and uncles and aunties.

And what you should do, as many have said, is to choose the right advice. And then, success!

Jeff Bezos, perhaps the best manager of the century, said a key to his success was “Disagree and commit”. You must have had teams you worked in to do projects during your time here. And if they were anything like mine, there would have been a lot of arguments.

Bezos says that at some point, when arguing back and forth is no longer useful, you should just say “I disagree with you, but I commit to doing it your way”. And then the chips fall where they may. No recriminations, no “I told you so”.

It's great advice, right? Jeff Bezos created one of the most impressive companies of all time, presumably by following through on his advice. It’s about as valuable as advice gets. It’s constantly referenced in speeches, in books, in articles. A true piece of management history.

Now, Steve Jobs, also no slouch when it comes to building iconic companies, was asked this question too; how does he manage conflicts?

He said something different. Which is that his job, and the job of senior management, is to make the absolute best decisions they can for the company. And, he said, being humans we naturally are less willing to fight to get to the truth, or do our best work if we don't think what's being done is right. And knowing what we’re doing is right is crucial. In other words, he thinks “disagree and commit” is both intellectually dishonest and impossible to make work.

So which one do we believe? Which one do you follow?

We could just go industry by industry. If you're building an e-commerce empire then choose Jeff. If you're building the most beautiful consumer hardware in the world then Steve.

But doesn't that feel rather … capricious? You're well educated. You know not to just blindly believe. You would want to look at the available evidence. Ask for more. Even though it's somewhat less influential in these skeptical times, you know about Kahneman and Tverskys work on biases. This feels like that old chestnut about the planes in world war two coming back with bullet holes. Selection bias. Can't just choose a theory based on one data point.

So what do we do? And more importantly, why are these pieces of advice so contradictory?

Maybe it’s just the business world. But life, as you’ll all discover when you step out of this beautiful campus, is more complicated. And things will be different across a whole array of human endeavours. So let’s look at Arnold. He's back. (That's a joke for your parents.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger talked earnestly and openly about his life in an excellent documentary series. In between excellent lessons about being the Governor or California, real estate mogul, worlds greatest bodybuilder, and the worlds top action star, he mentioned the maxim that drove him - a piece of advice that his father gave him when younger. “Be useful.”

It's a great piece of advice. We should all aspire to be useful. I tell my kids that too. Sometimes they even listen, and those days life is wonderful.

But another viewpoint comes from Jim Carrey, also exceptional in the “be exceptional in creative industries” department, and that was about curiosity and following his passion. He dominated his chosen industry by doing what he felt most excited about, the idea of usefulness be damned. He’s not alone either.

So what advice should we follow?

Or, let’s take comedians. Obsessed with the craft. Jerry Seinfeld says you should try and try and try a joke a thousand times till it blooms. Cut all the fat, let it be it's purest form.

Unlike this methodical approach, Robin Williams thrived on spontaneity and veered off script, using his wit and impersonations all the time. Directors often had to shoot 50% more because they didn’t know what would be useful, so it was easier to let Robin run, because what they got was gold.

So which one would we learn from? Which piece of advice should we emulate? Should we become endless perfectionists honing our craft, or let the utter insanity of our every creative expression bear fruit and know it will pay off?

Or, to take the most vilified professions of all, politics. The most famous dictum perhaps is Lyndon Johnson, who said to win you must “if you do everything, you will win”. That was his secret, do literally everything to win. He would work until he was physically exhausted, with intense focus and determination. Even at 28, running is first campaign, Caro, whom you should all read, writes:

In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry, and whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly.

He was, as you would imagine, incredibly successful.

On the other hand, Ike. Eisenhower preferred a more measured, strategic approach, focusing on key issues and often delegating extensively. He even created the famous matrix, which you probably have seen somewhere in a textbook or a whiteboard. Do that which is urgent and important first, then don't forget the important for the urgent. Must have seemed banal, it sure did to me, but it is a different beast to what Mr. Johnson would have had you do.

And he too was inordinately successful.

So, which one would you emulate?

I can see a few of you eager beavers trying to do the numbers and choose amongst these options, a few others trying to come up with ways in which I am logically incorrect, and almost everyone else dreaming now throwing your caps in the air and grabbing and drink afterwards. So let me get to the punch line.

Receiving advice has its own version of Newton's third law.

For every piece of advice there's an equal and opposite piece of advice that's equally valid.

The conventional wisdom by the way goes something like this. When you step out into the wider world you will encounter plenty of times when it feels like you're in the dark. What to do is unclear. Whom to believe is unclear. And the solution is to ask someone, learn from others. You must have read it too.

The problem though, as we saw, there are hundreds of pieces of advice from all manner of extremely smart and accomplished people, that all contradict each other.

The world of human achievement is pre-paradigmatic. There are no easy rules, and no useful advice. It’s something to do with the fact that the world isn’t simple or linear and there are multiple strategies to succeed.

It’s not just the more pragmatic worldly pursuits that we see this phenomenon. It’s the moral teachings as well, from ancient Greece to India to Israel.

Saint Augustine says "Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe." While Martin Luther says “Reason is the enemy of faith.” All the while Zen Buddhism uses paradoxical koans to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to break through that barrier.

Seems there are no rules there either.

Or, going straight to the source of many of your anxieties, the old worry about the ceiling that you all have set for yourself in your minds. The one made of stories about innate genius, your own version of Gladwell’s capitalisation rate. You might think that it is that precocious twelve year old who read Moliere or did college level physics is destined to be successful in such and such ways, while the rest of us have a prosaic path to tread.

But it doesn’t work that way. Just read Henry.

Or that it’s the exceptionally smart sophomore whom you had a crush on who just somehow knew the topic inside out. She’s what the paradigm of success looks like.

But again, not always.

Or, let’s go all the way to the top of the bell curve. Let’s look at the Nobel prize winners. Are they all child prodigies like von Neumann, immediately able to understand fields from computation to quantum physics to biology, launching entirely new fields with about the same effort we use to figure out where to have dinner?

But turns out, no. They exist, of course, but the ability to do something extraordinary doesn’t only exist within A students, even if you took the existence of A students for granted. Sometimes it’s those that took a while to get to the top and managed to think of new ways.

Dmitri Mendeleev, whom some of you might remember from high school, the father of the periodic table, was incredibly systematic. Well, that shouldn’t be a surprise I suppose, if you have seen the periodic table*.* He believed intensely in the power of patterns and predictability of the elements.

Linus Pauling though, also pretty good at chemistry, a Nobel laureate twice over, felt "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas”.

While we’re on a roll let’s take the drive to find beauty, or use it as the core means of distinguishing a “good idea” from bad.

James Joyce’s "[writers] are the medium through which inspiration flows. Sometimes producing as few as one sentence after a whole day's work,” stands in stark contrast with Stephen King’s “amateurs sit and wait for inspiration.”

Back even in the more prosaic world of business, seeing what he did at OpenAI and thinking about what he used to do before, we recently had Sam Altman say:

I feel so bad about the advice I gave while running YC, I’ve been thinking of deleting my entire blog

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, what's left. This is depressing. We shouldn’t be talking about this today. Especially today. Levelling up confusion isn’t the right idea.

What's more, it's wrong. You’re all smart, intellectual, statistically savvy. You'd think that surely some of these paths are better than others even if they're seemingly opposite to each other. You just look at the number of people who succeeded one way, look at the number who succeeded the other way, and voilà! Statistics will save us.

It's true. Sometimes there are right answers you can find this way. What's the best Chinese restaurant near the uni is a great question to answer this way. Or how do you choose which nightclub to go to in Tokyo. Or, if you’re able to create and run a randomised controlled trial, some of the harder questions too.

But who do you want to be in life, or what you should do, are not questions like this. Those are not questions where you can do an A/B test. Not easily anyway. Most of the sociological literature doesn’t even replicate.

And its also a dangerous way to think. One all too easy to lose yourself in.

You, the individual, with your particular strengths and interests and weaknesses. You get subsumed under the weight of the statistics. Some of it rightfully so, because that's what statistics is for. But a lot of it not so.

The reason is simple, there are more variables along which you vary than gets measured in those statistics. And perhaps more importantly, when you judge the things that you should do by looking at what others have done you might end up narrowly restricting yourself. You bind yourself into a small frame. That’s bad.

Now, I’m sure you’d like me to quote Einstein at this point, since that’s what’s expected of commencement speakers. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. So here goes.

Einstein said “God does not play dice with the universe,”. A famous quote, an important quote. And one which prompted Bohr to respond, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

In the same spirit, I can’t tell you what to do. But the good news is, nobody really can. There are many ways to reduce your downside in life, but very few of those actively can help make your life exceptional.

There are, however, an extraordinarily large number of people who will tell you there are such rules. You start a company and there are hundreds of threads and articles on how to build and how to grow and how to get your customer and how to get to product-market-fit and how to hire and how to fire. You start at a research lab and you have hundreds of articles about how to write papers and how to submit them and how to choose research areas and how to find collaborators and how to act at conferences and dozens more.

For any job or path you choose there is no shortage of advice.

And your job is to remember that paths aren’t fixed, and this isn’t true. If there are no easy paths to take nor are there easy pieces of advice, you’re back where you started. Slightly blind and full of soaring ambition.

To find the path that works for you and the path that you would like to walk is not something that someone else can usually tell you much about. The best you can get are vague impressions of what worked for them, and maybe some stories of how life can evolve.

There are always vague answers that you can handwave to, like the necessity of being interested in more things or the importance of exploring before exploiting or being open to opportunities. Sadly, they're all true but none of them will help you figure out what you should do tomorrow.

While we’re here I'll also try give you one answer that I’m partial to. Here it is. You should be obsessed about something.

Not because this means you will be immensely successful, though it won’t hurt, but because it is a better way to live. To know something, to understand something.

It’s still not a sufficient answer, though it will make your life more interesting. But it’s not a guarantee either.

This kind of goes against everything you’ve learnt, I realise that. That there is an answer, a good answer, a path that you can follow.

Unfortunately nobody will give you permission to be good. Or even when they do it only comes after you give yourself that permission.

Some of you will be sure that this doesn't apply to you. You will have knowledge, and you will have passion, and surety. You know you will be a doctor/ lawyer/ engineer/ banker, that that's your future, the life you chose after seeing it's fruits.

You're ready for the job to start, for your life to start, and you're about what you want to do. You’re great at it. Why wouldn’t you be? You’re graduates from here! You’re smart, clearly well educated, well networked, and ready to take the world by the horns and stamp your mark on it.

Which means there's another way to see all this … that all advice is useful.

You might not know how it’s useful, but it is. It might depend on the type of person you are, and what you want to do, and who you want to become, maybe even how you feel that particular morning and if you had your coffee, but the usefulness of the advice isn’t tarred by your inability to take it.

It’s a piece of distilled wisdom that, were you able to apply it, would make itself known to you after the fact. That’s what a lot of advice is. Wisdom that you can only really see from the other side.

But the way to see it is to understand that life is something you live, not map out and navigate. As many of you are muttering to each other now, it is incredibly easy to find ways in which advice of all sorts don’t apply. It really is remarkably easy, much easier than what I did before.

You, especially because you’re smarter, will easily find exceptions to every rule, and bend every rule to your individual exception. You will feel, with the incredible brightness of a thousand suns, the absolute righteousness of your convictions. That is what it means to be young.

You will have to work to find that piece of advice that you think will work for you, but frustratingly enough you will probably only really see it looking backwards, or when you’re standing just at the cusp of being about to follow through it anyway.

The best that advice can do is to tip you towards a valley you were already adjacent to. And if you follow too many, well, you’ll likely get tipped left and right enough to make you dizzy.

You live in a web of information and content that flows in every direction all the time. An ocean of hyperconnectivity.

And standing in the middle of this torrent it can be incredibly difficult to figure out which thread is yours, which thread should be yours. Which one should you grab, which one should you pull, which one should you follow. The advice we started with was specific, and it only gets more complicated at this volume.

A while back Neil Postman said:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one

But this paradox, that you are living in a time of post-scarcity with information but have almost no anchors to allow you to hold on to the right ones or even identify them, that is new. That is the water you swim in.

The challenge of finding the right threads is not just finding the right piece of advice to follow, or ones not to follow. It’s not to the difficulty of doing research or the magnitude of the options. It’s not even the fact that doing all of that still won’t give you the right answer.

It’s that it is the journey of a lifetime to actually identify the right thread. We used to have journeys of self discovery, but now we have the search process. And you can only really attempt it unironically, with respect for your likes and dislikes shorn of those you carry with you like so many barnacles. Otherwise you’re doomed to spend much of your life searching, feeling the rainbow is just over the horizon and you might be missing out.

You know that the world isn’t the way it’s portrayed in books or movies or TV shows or, god forbid, the news. You will know that the truth is different, it’s sometimes more sinister, sometimes more byzantine, sometimes just plain weird, and that finding it will give you that thrill, just like you got to the last few pages of a brilliant mystery novel.

But … but if you talked to those who graduated a decade before you, once you find time to grab a drink with them, after you have those drinks, once you’re done talking about their job and how great it is and the state of the world, you should try ask them if they’re happy.

Then you wait for another drink to finish, and after they firmly say yes they are, they love their life, there will be a pregnant pause. And you listen, for the unspoken “well”. They are accomplished, they are successful, they have climbed to the very top of the ladder, but are they happy? It’s not a trick question, even though it seems like one. Ask it.

And listen to their answers. Listen to their stories. Listen to their wins and failures and life. Read about even more people who lived. Collect an array of what a life can look like. Expand your understanding of what the world could be. Advice will come and go, and mostly will remain at best a signpost of what might have worked for someone else.

There are iceberg movers and forensic entomologists and disaster restoration technicians and museum specimen preserver and urban beekeepers.

It still won’t tell you what to do. But it will give you a language to talk about the incredible diversity of the world. It will help you explore the world.

And that exploration that is what you’ve been trained for. It’s easy to forget that as you step into the maelstrom. Don’t.

If you are lucky, the search might even result in finding a passion for something, something that sustains you over the long run, much like food or water or love. You might find that in a year, or a decade, or after half your life. But if the process is true that will sustain you. There are no magic lamps that give answers. Those will remain contingent on the lives you lead. But there are magic patterns of thought, and that’s not half bad.

I wish I could be sitting again where you are. This is what I’d have liked to have heard, and hopefully some of it would have helped forge my path. Maybe it will do that for you. Congratulations!