It's now my honor to introduce our Commencement Day speaker,
the founder of the online education phenomenon
known as the Khan Academy, Sal Khan.
Sal earned three degrees from MIT,
a Bachelor's in mathematics, as well as
a Bachelor's and a Master's degree
in electrical engineering and computer science
rounding out his education with a MBA from Harvard.
Sal began his career as a hedge fund analyst.
Within a few years, however, he discovered
quite by accident what has become his calling.
Through preparing video tutorials
to help his young cousin learn math,
he came to understand his own gifts as a teacher
and a great gift that he can give to the world
by creating an online library of 1000s of
free bite-size videos that would shed light
on any topic he chose from geometry to the GDP.
Today, the Khan Academy channel on YouTube
has more than 330,000 subscribers
and has delivered more than 156,000,000 lessons
and has for millions of students,
replaced bafflement with understanding.
For launching this revolutionary experiment
in online learning, in the year 2012
Time Magazine named Sal Khan as
one of the 100 most influential people on the planet.
This is not the first time that Sal has spoken
from the commencement stage here in Killian Court
because he also served as president of his class.
In 1998, addressing his fellow graduates, Sal said,
"It is no exaggeration to say that we will change the world."
Having checked this assignment off his to-do list,
he joins us here today.
Ladies and gentleman, Sal Khan.
[Applause]
Now this is a surreal, a deep honor to be here.
For a whole set of reasons and as was introduced
obviously MIT has played quite a big role in my own life.
But I think a much deeper role than
many of you all might appreciate.
Some of you might remember the late nineties,
kind of when the first internet boom was happening,
there was a lot of talk about online education and
most of the conversation back then about online education
not too different than now, was around how to profit off it,
how to make money off it.
Or some institutions were thinking about how to defend against it,
or at least sit on the sidelines and see how things played out
Then all of a sudden MIT jumped into the mix in 2001,
and announced MIT OpenCourseWare.
That it was going to take knowledge and resources
that used to be behind the walls of elite institutions and
not charge for them but give them away for free to the world
And instead of saying how can we profit off of this, MIT said
"Well there are some things that are higher than that."
That if we could empower an unlimited number of people
for all of time maybe, that is something
we would be willing to spend resources on.
When that happened I was just a couple years out of college
working at a tech company in San Francisco
I had no idea that my own career adventure
would lead to what I am doing now.
But when I read that press release
I had never been so inspired.
I had never felt so proud to come from this community.
And frankly a couple of years later,
when the videos that I had made for my cousins
and it became clear that
people who were not my cousins started watching.
There was talk of, oh well this could be a business.
I was in Silicon Valley, this is what it was all about.
I worked for a hedge fund, a very for profit organization.
But it was the memory of how I felt the first time
I read that press release about OpenCourseWare
and what it had become, that really gave me the clarity
to understand what Khan Academy could be.
That it could be this institution that could reach everyone
and should transcend ideas of profits and businesses.
And I say this not just to show
the connection this had for Khan Academy,
but there is a meta level idea here
that these days you hear a lot of universities and institutions
talk about teaching ethics, teching morality
and instilling that in classes and
they tell you to read about it, but MIT actually did it.
MIT actually lived by its actions.
It actually put principle over profit
and it is continuing to do it.
Now with MITx now with EdX in concert with Harvard
it is continuing to push the envelope.
And I am just in awe, it feels like
we are living in a science fiction book of
what might happen in education in the next few years.
But my connections to MIT go even deeper.
Obviously I went here, but my wife also graduated
from MIT class of 2001.
The president of Khan Academy and chief operating officer,
he was my roommate freshman year at Next House.
Room 343 for the two or three of you
who might have shared that room at some point.
One of our board members went to MIT
and his wife went to MIT.
I am just starting. That is just a small sample
of all of the people we know at MIT.
But maybe even more surprisingly
the fact that of the people we know from MIT now
90% of them are married to each other
and any time you have this type of love
come from one place
I think one should introspect
as romantic as the infinite corridor may be
I have seen such extreme coupling here that
I have often suspected that this whole place might just be
a front for some type of DARPA funded breeding project.
Someone knows what is going on up here.
There are simpler explanations,
and I think the most obvious one
or at least the most clear to me
is that the admissions office here
at both the undergraduate and graduate level
seems to have a somewhat unhealthy bias
for only admitting extremely attractive people.
You're welcome.
I thought that would go over well.
I think it goes even deeper than that.
As long as I can remember,
to any one who would listen to me,
I have told people that MIT is
the closest thing on this planet Earth to Hogwarts,
to Harry Potter's wizarding school.
That the ideas and the research and the science that
percolates behind these walls,
that's the closest thing to magic in the real world,
and frankly to people outside of this campus
looks like magic. The faculty we have here,
these are the leading wizards of out time!
The Dumbledore's and Mcgonagall's
and I guess president Hawkfield
you would be a Mcgonagall.
The halls here they have secret passages and tunnels
and around every corner there are strange and bizzare
magical objects and creatures,
some of whom may finish their thesis this decade.
Maybe a few in the audience.
When we're in Killian Court, it is almost a shrine.
When you look at the names around us, you see
Newton and Darwin and Galileo and Archimedes
and these are the great wizards of history.
And they remind us that
we have inherited an ancient tradition, an ancient art,
one that for much of history and even today to some degree
has always been sometimes vilified or suppressed
by forces of ignorance, but despite that,
has always shone through and has been
at least in my mind the prime cause of human advancement.
The people who come here, the students who come here
you!
There are these young people from all over the world
who are all off the charts in some special way
for this kind of magic that goes on here.
Some come from affluent rich educated families.
Some of you come from poor families
where you are the first to get a college degree.
Some come from environments
where their gifts were really celebrated.
Some come from environments where most of their lives
they have had to hide their passions, their gifts
for fear of looking different.
But they come here suspecting that this might be a place
where they can spread their wings,
where they can explore the world.
They can finally look with clarity at
the mysteries of the universe,
the magic of everything that surrounds us
and MIT delivers on that.
It opens our minds to what is possible
and even more uniquely it pushes us,
and I do believe that MIT pushes us harder than
probably any other institution in the world.
But when you do that you take them to another level
you take them to truly recognize what they are capable of
and I think there is another side affect going to why
there is so much love here.
When you have people regardless of
what they look like superficially,
or where they come from,
or what type of background they come from,
but they all have that same core desire
to understand the universe.
They all have that same core desire
to push humanity forward.
And you bring them all together into a community like this
and then you push them
in a frankly very intense environment
you cry together, you laugh together,
you procrastinate together,
you have sleepless nights together,
you wander the halls together.
It creates the deepest possible bond.
It is like people who have fought in wars together.
They have a shared experience that
other people might not understand or even comprehend,
and because of that, the rest of your life
you will feel connected to other MIT people.
You will want to be around them,
and you will seek them out
and if you are in kind of a mixed group of people
and you hear someone who is not from MIT
start talking about how impossible something is,
how hard something is, or how difficult something is,
you will seek out the other MIT person in the room
and catch a glance and you will both share a little smirk.
And while you are doing that smirk,
if they are your preferred gender,
you might see a certain twinkle in their eye
and realize that you are irresistibly attracted to them.
So coming here it really does feel like I have come to a family,
a family that I am deeply connected to and,
a family that I truly love.
I hope to just give you some appreciation for the potential
that you guys are about to leave with.
And when I said that 14 years ago at my commencement
it was kind of an idea on paper. But now I have seen what
my peers in my class and above/below me have done.
And it has really been nothing short of amazing.
And with that I want to give you a sense of
internal strength and happiness
and not just because I care about you
and I want you to be a happy person,
but because I really do believe that
for you to really reach your potential,
you have to be centered and have a place to go.
When things get a little bit tough
and you should take all of this with a grain of salt.
I am not a lot older than most of you.
View me as your older brother or cousin or whatever
and what I am about to say.
These are things that I still try to live by,
but I don't do.
I am at least as imperfect as any of you guys.
But there are things that when I am able to do
I have found work quite well.
The first is to just be as incredibly and
maybe delusionally positive as possible.
It is a very cynical place out there sometimes.
And that cynicism will eat at your energy
and will eat at your potential. To fight it,
you should smile with every atom in your body.
You should smile first thing in the morning.
You should even force yourself.
This is something I acutally do:
If I am in a bad mood, I actually force a smile.
It releases things in your brain.
You should smile with your mouth,
your eyes, your face, your body and
evey living and non living thing that you see.
You should recognize that
the grass is greener on your side of the fence
and even in the 1% chance that it is not.
Just convincing yourself that it is greener
will be a self fulfilling prophecy.
If you find yourself in your life in an argument
with someone whom you respect,
whom you care deeply about,
that is a time, and it is not an easy thing to do,
but try to surrender your ego to the shared identity of
the relationship that you have with that person.
If possible, do the exact opposite of
what your pride and ego tell you in the heat of a battle.
If you have the strength to do it,
right when you are about to try to get the last word
and you are about to say that kind of vindictive
or below the belt thing, just pause, don't do anything
and try to just give them a super-mega-hug.
Recognize that material loss or gain, we'll all have it.
But when it happens, be upset a little bit
or be happy a little bit but keep it all in perspective.
They are all silly relative to the things that matter,
your health, and your relationships.
As much as possible try to make people feel that
you are listening to them. And I have a secret here.
The best way to make people feel that
you are listening to them, is to listen to them.
When you are stressed and
there will be times of stress in your life,
just look up at the night sky and imagine
the scale of the universe, the age of the universe,
the distance to the next star,
the other sentient creatures on other M-class planets,
who are also looking at the night sky,
and think about that shared experience
the civilizations that have come by,
it will put your problems into a little bit of perspective.
If you can take a walk through the woods,
forget your name, your identity, your ambitions,
and just for a little bit, for a moment
realize what you are.
Just another animal walking through the wood,
just another mammal.
Recognize that you are not quite sure why you are here,
but you enjoy the ride and you love the mystery of everything
that surrounds you, and you want to explore it more.
As much as possible
and this is something that is difficult and
not something that I do anywhere near perfectly
but I try, is try to build true empathy for everyone.
And a thought experiment that I often do
to get me into that frame of mind,
and it is just a though experiment
regardless of your actual spiritual beliefs.
Imagine that time isn't a one way street.
That you can go back and etc. etc.
In your next life you could be reincarnated
you could go back in time and be reincarnated as anyone.
You literally, because of that, could be everybody in this room.
And with that mental framework in place,
imagine that in your next life you could be that person
you could go back in time and be that person that
you are having the conversation with right now.
Maybe that you are arguing with right now or maybe
the person that you are passing judgement on right now.
And if that is the case, then in your next life
you will have to put up with
the current self righteous version of yourself.
So I want to just bring it all together
with another thought experiment that I like to do,
that helps me focus where I want to put my energies.
Imagine yourself in 50 years. You are in your early 70's.
You are near the end of your career.
Hey! Oh! Oh! Very good! [Laughter]
We have a few models here
if you have trouble visualizing that.
But imagine at that stage you are on your couch in 2062
and you have just finished watching
the state of the union holograph by president Kardashian
and you start to reflect on your life.
You start to think of all the success you have had
all the career sucesses, family sucesses,
the great memories that you have had.
But then you also start to think about the things
you wish you did just a little bit different.
Your regrets, and I can imagine what they might be.
You'll wish you spent more time with your children.
You'll wish you had told your spouse
that you loved them more frequently.
You'll wish that you had spend more time and
told your parents how much you appreciated them,
before they passed away.
And just while that is happening, a genie appears.
And the genie says,
"Well I have been listening in to your regrets."
"You seem like a good person."
"I am willing to give you a 2nd chance, If you are open to it."
And so you say "sure".
And the genie snaps his fingers and you blink your eyes
and when you open your eyes you find yourself right there
right where you are right now June 8th 2012, in Killian Court.
Some crazy guy is giving a commencement speech.
And you say, Oh my God,
I am in my 20-something fit and pain free body again,
I am around my peers again.
The genie was serious. I have a second chance.
I can have all the successes,
all of the adventures I had the first time around,
but now I can optimize things.
Now when I see my classmates and
I give them that hug at commencement,
I can hug them a little bit harder.
I can show them how much I care about them.
Now that my parents are back,
I can finally tell them how much I appreciate them.
I can finally give them more hugs, more time.
I can do everything that
I can laugh more, I can sing more, I can dance more.
I can be more of a source of positivity
for people around me and empower more people.
And so here I am
truly honored to be your commencement speaker.
Just in awe of the potential that is here,
the potential in this time that we are in,
a time when the revolutions, the positive revolutions,
are not going to be caused by generals and politicians.
They are going to be caused by innovators like you
and in this time to see you the wizards of tomorrow.
I am just excited by what
you are going to do with your second pass.
Thank You.
[Applause]