ASTRO TELLER: When I was six I wanted
to be Pippi Longstocking, the strongest,
silliest, most carefree, most underestimated girl
in the world.
The heroes of comics, books, and film,
characters like d'Artagnan from the "3 Musketeers,"
the fourth doctor from "Doctor Who," Hawkeye from "M*A*S*H,"
and X-Men's Professor Xavier all helped me see who I could hope
to become.
I also fell in love with the real life
heroes of 20th century science and engineering.
The more than 400,000 audacious men and women
that put a person on the moon.
Alan Turing and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park
who helped to win the Second World War,
and laid the foundations for modern computer science.
The Manhattan Project, which my grandfather was a part of,
which gave rise, not just to the atomic bomb,
but also to the first electronic general purpose computer.
All of these people imagined things
that didn't seem possible and made it happen.
They helped me to realize the world is full to overflowing
with latent superheroes.
Superheroes are everywhere, not some rare species.
That includes you, class of 2020.
Now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it.
I look at everyone I meet, and I see
a bonfire of possibility inside of them I know most of them
can't yet see in themselves.
We go through our days with the most powerful parts
of what we can do and what we can imagine tucked away,
or unconsciously suppressed, waiting for the right challenge
and the right moment to let the magic out and move mountains.
Now is that moment.
This rapidly changing world calls on all of us
to find and let out our superpowers.
All of our passion, all of our talents,
not the workaday versions of ourselves.
That part of you you can feel is in there,
even if it scares you to imagine letting it out into the light.
2020 has thrown us all into a situation, which there
are no easy or obvious answers.
The fear and the discomfort can be intense.
And it's easier to see disrupted dreams in front of us
than it is to see opportunities.
But believing the Pause button has been hit on your future
will only make it true.
This is not a global game of musical chairs
this graduating class just lost.
Counterintuitively, the especially disrupted time
we've just entered, crossed with your being early
in your careers, have created just the right set
of conditions for your superpowers
to be unleashed and help us all get through the next few years
and beyond.
In the past, it was often the presence or prospect
of a war that generated the conditions for breakthrough
innovation.
That's both tragic and absurd.
That's why I've spent my life and career
obsessed with finding the cultural conditions that
can be an impetus for radical creativity
without the destruction of international conflict.
For as long as I can remember, I've
wanted to create an invention machine.
Not an actual physical machine, but a place
where groups of passionate, talented people
can throw themselves unleashed and unfiltered
at the problems they care about most, and emerge
with radical solutions that are 10 times better than anything
that's been possible before.
I've always imagined such a place
as the love child of 1960s NASA and Willy Wonka's chocolate
factory.
I've been trying various iterations of this
since I was in my 20s, and I'm now
10 years into building a moonshot factory, a place where
we bring the audacity and optimism embodied by the space
race to inventing and launching technologies
that could help solve the world's most pressing problems.
Problems like food scarcity, internet connectivity,
and clean energy.
Born Google X, now just X, we've created
things like self-driving cars, delivery drones,
and verily, the health care arm of Alphabet.
What bothers me is that X shouldn't be the only moonshot
factory.
We need more, many more, not just big
formal moonshot factories.
We need millions more people waking up
every day more creative, more brave, more urgent
to find 10x solutions to the world's biggest problems.
I know there's lots of intelligence,
desire, and resources being invested already.
No one gets up Monday morning saying, this week,
I'm going to make incremental progress.
And yet, that is almost exclusively what happens.
And it doesn't need to be that way.
We are all superheroes.
The ability and aspiration is there,
even if it's buried deep in some of us.
What's holding us back as individuals and organizations
is the strong gravitational pull towards conventional ways
of thinking and behaving.
Most of us have been conditioned by the environment
around us not to fail, not to take risks,
not to make anyone uncomfortable,
especially if that person is your boss.
So most of us end up being too cautious, too
afraid to rock the status quo, or mess something up.
And the irony is it works the other way around.
The most powerful and painful epiphany of my life
was to stop hiding my inner weirdo.
You don't get joy, power, money, a sense of purpose,
whatever you crave by protecting yourself.
You get those things and you protect yourself best
by unleashing yourself.
Everyone thinks it's someone else's job
to come up with the weird new ideas and take the big risks.
Big companies think radical thinking is for startups.
Startups say it's the big guys who have all the resources.
Universities do great research, but aren't set up
to build real world solutions.
Governments get mired in short-term problems.
And there you have it.
Suddenly, it's no one's job, even when
it should be everyone's job to help
solve the problems of our time.
You, as the class of 2020, have a huge opportunity.
You can decide right now that it's
going to be your job to use your superpowers to help solve
the problems you care about.
Whether that's something to help us adapt to our new reality,
or one of the many other issues humanity is facing.
And I promise you, if you throw yourself
into the deep end with passion, you
will get more of the very things you worry you'll be risking.
The problem I've made my cause is pretty meta--
to create environments where other people can
unleash their full selves on the problems they care about.
After more than 20 years encouraging this
at X and other places, I can tell you
these people end up winning at life in all sorts of ways
that really matter.
And it's been extremely fulfilling to watch.
There's probably a little voice in your head saying, "Yeah, I
might have a superpower in here somewhere, but."
What holds back humanity's potential is that but.
The human tendency to slide toward the conventional,
the way things are supposed to be done.
But you, class of 2020, don't yet know what's conventional.
Society hasn't quite finished programming you
on what you're supposed to do.
What society has been teaching you you're supposed to do,
how you're supposed to think and behave has its uses.
But when it comes to solving hard problems,
it is also a mental straitjacket.
Naiveté and inexperience is freedom.
Freedom from mental ruts and emotional attachments.
Freedom from crusty habits that keep you
stuck in the status quo instead of flying
towards future possibilities.
Think about the people who started
building self-driving cars.
They weren't car experts.
Most experts would ask, what safety features
can we add to cars because human drivers can be idiots?
That's the conventional question,
and the answers do save lives.
But various academic groups in the 1990s used
their non-expertness--
you might even say their naiveté--
as their superpower.
They came from a different perspective.
What if the car just drove itself?
And now self-driving cars are well on their way to
becoming a reality.
I'm 49.
I've had to create a special brand for myself
as a useful crazy person, because I'm
supposed to know better.
And so I need air cover for saying
things that aren't normal.
Your ideas are unfettered.
Your perspectives are fresh.
And your being young gives you air cover
for throwing out crazy ideas.
So go for it.
Let them rip.
You have another big advantage.
You don't already know the answers.
And unlike the experts, you know you don't know the answers.
There are still lots of jobs in which experience
saves a ton of time and hassle.
But when the answers to current problems
are far over the horizon and all the rules
have suddenly changed, like we've just seen,
the experts' belief they know the solution
and just have to implement it is why they will fail.
Experimenting, iterating, and learning
is the only way forward.
And doing that is a lot easier with your advantage.
You can admit ahead of time you don't
have the solution upfront.
For extremely complex problems like the world is facing today,
there are no answers.
There is no playbook.
That's why some of the most exciting innovations
come from newcomers or from people who combine inspiration
from many disparate fields.
You see this in music, fashion, and food all the time.
At X, we have puppeteers who became roboticists.
And we mixed machine learning with marine biology.
When you move to a new field, you become a novice again,
which means the expectations of you are zero.
So you can try a lot of new things and mess
up without embarrassment.
And you can transplant ideas across fields, which can
spark faster or novel progress.
The superpower isn't to pretend you're
more experienced than you are, but to force yourself
to be fresh again and again to get the benefits over and over
that being fresh brings.
Finally, I want to remind you that you're
playing a long game.
It can feel like you're already behind in life,
and the pandemic is going to slow you down even more.
That doesn't have to be true.
I believe that after the wreckage of all
this sudden change, we'll see a period of intense innovation
and openness to trying new things,
unlike anything we've seen in decades.
Having 40 or 50 years of your career in front of you
is a massive advantage.
People who are late in their careers
need to harvest what they can with the time they have left.
They tend to be more interested in lower return, sure things,
rather than winding journeys that
lead to unexpected discovery and adventure.
They're the ones who in the coming months
will be trying to claw society back
towards an old normal that wasn't
working that well anyway.
You, however, have the time to explore interesting paths.
Let your learning moments and growth opportunities
build on each other.
You can head out purposefully to work on huge problems,
thinking long term about your work
and its impact on the world, ready to take
a winding journey that can't be predicted,
and is anything but normal.
And I suspect you'll find that you'll end up having more fun,
feeling less fear, doing more good for the world,
and making more money.
That's because you leaned into the best
superpower you could have been given in this pivotal moment
in history.
Your ideas, your energy, your spirit is fresh.
Different is what we need.
Hold onto that.
Amplify it.
Lean into it.
Celebrate your inner weirdo.
Find your superpowers.
The world needs you and that fresh perspective
now in a way it hasn't for many generations.