Transcriber: Vũ Thị Mỹ Hạnh Reviewer: DAHOU Mohamed
On a hot summer day in 2005,
in front of 23,000 students of Stanford University
who in just a few hours will become graduates,
the legendary late Steve Jobs
gave a commencement speech that was so incredible,
the video of the speech got 40 million views on YouTube.
All the news channel was talking about it.
There’s this article written by Forbes titled:
“Why Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Still Inspires Ten Years Later.”
In this article and many other articles on this event,
there’s one point in particular by Steve Jobs
that was mentioned over and over.
It got people excited.
And that was when Steve said,
“You’ve got to find what you love.”
“If you haven’t found it yet,”
“keep looking,”
“don’t settle.”
Continue with this idea,
14 years later,
on the stage of Oscar 2019,
receiving an award
for the movie “A Star is Born”,
Lady Gaga,
with teary eyes, she said:
“It’s about not giving up.”
“If you have a dream, fight for it.”
If you’ve noticed, in these 2 speeches,
there is one concept that appeared.
That concept is:
“Following your dream.”
I think you would agree with me that this is an extremely popular concept,
based on the notion that you should always follow what you’re passionate about,
do what you love, and in that you find a sense of purpose.
This idea of finding out what your dream is and then pursue it
has been around for a long time.
In fact, you can see it everywhere nowadays.
When you go on social media,
when you read self-help books,
when you watch Hollywood movies,
even in TV commercials,
the idea is marketed to us.
And so, many people seem to look up to it
to consider it the ultimate way of living.
But what if I'm here today to tell you the opposite?
My name is Vivian,
and I will talk about
how following your dream
is a cool concept,
but a terrible career advice.
I’ll talk about what this concept is doing to us,
why is problematic
and the road to success without following your dream.
So at 15 years old,
I was kind of into photography.
I asked my parents for a camera,
learn photography tricks online,
had photoshoots with my models
- my high school friends.
At some point, I thought to myself:
“I think this is my dream”
“- to be a great photographer.”
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t my dream.
Turns out, I just enjoy taking photos.
I wasn’t passionate about it enough
to pursue it for life.
So I kind of stopped and went on with another thing
that I like to do at the time:
Writing.
And I was doing pretty okay.
I founded a club that writes
and publishes magazines in our high school.
I wrote sad poems and short stories that my grandmother seemed to enjoyed.
That’s a success.
But is it my dream?
I can’t imagine myself writing for a living.
So I stop,
again.
To comfort myself, I said:
“It’s okay, Vivian. Keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Like Steve said.
When I turned 20, the search became more aggressive.
I got into graphic design, animation, videography,
all the things I thought I like for a while and then realized
none of them were what I dreamed to do.
I did not become passionate about it.
So I stop, again and again.
And as you can imagine,
I kind of kept struggling with finding my dream.
You know that feeling when you see successful people on social media
who follow their dreams,
and can’t help but feeling a little bit jealous about it?
That’s what I felt a lot of times.
And there is this voice in my head
coming from those self-help books that I read
and the motivational videos that I watched on YouTube
telling me
to keep looking for it.
That dream.
And being the overthinker that I am,
I’ve had those 2-a.m. moments in my college years
just lying in bed,
trying to get myself to sleep
but couldn’t
because I could not stop
thinking about it.
In those moments, I could not help but wonder:
“What’s wrong with me?”
Why haven't I found my passion yet?
I look around and see my friends, the people I’ve known and talked to,
they seem to be bothered by this thing too.
A survey by Linkedin on thousands of people
in their twenties to thirties
found that 75% of us suffer from a quarter-life crisis
and over 60% struggle to find a job that they are passionate about.
And that's when it hit me.
I wasn’t the problem.
Do you know what the problem was?
I think it was this very concept:
Following your dream.
As I’ve mentioned, the idea of following your dream
is to find what you passionate about,
pursue it,
and in that you find a sense of purpose.
There are two problems with this idea.
Problem 1:
[“Following your dream” creates assumptions.]
This concept makes you assume
that you’re born with this one passion
or one dream inside of you.
It’s right there, you know.
And all you have to do is reach deep down inside to discover it.
But this is problematic
because it makes you keep trying to figure everything out
right at the beginning.
It makes you keep looking for it,
that one dream that will fulfill your life
and make everything easier.
But the thing is,
not every individual on this planet
is born with a passion or a dream.
Steve Jobs wasn’t born passionate about technology or business.
In fact, can you guess what he chose to study in college?
If we trace back to the time
when he was a university student himself
in 1972,
You’ll see that he didn’t study business or technology
to start his company,
He studied Western history.
And he wasn’t very decisive about that either.
In the same year that he got in, he dropped out of college.
A little while later, he dropped back in.
And this time, he studied calligraphy, dance and Shakespeare.
Two years after that, Jobs went on a journey to India,
seeking enlightenment and Zen Buddhism.
So you see,
Steve Jobs was figuring himself out,
just like a lot of us.
It wasn’t until two years after that
that Jobs and his friend - Wozniak
started selling circuit board,
which is this thing, to make some money on the side.
Then they realized:
“There’s a lot of potential to this.”
So they made it into the Apple One,
the first product ever of the Apple company,
and the rest is history.
The point that I want to make here is that
not even the legendary Steve Jobs
figured out what it was that he dreamed to do.
He did not have a vision about a technology company
that’s going to change the world.
What he did was,
he followed an opportunity, committed to it,
and then the dream followed him.
The second problem with following your dream:
[It’s based on a feeling.]
It’s based on a feeling.
A feeling of you loving something so much,
you want to give up other things to pursue it.
And I kept waiting
for that feeling,
that one passion that will stay with me for life
to the point that I turned away great opportunities
and didn’t make any commitment
because I was scared
that it wasn’t my dream.
But feelings change, you know.
It may come, it may not come.
And when it comes, it can go.
And when it goes,
you are left with frustration,
wondering what's wrong with you.
If that has ever happened to you,
Or if you’ve ever felt a little bit lost in your life,
feeling anxious,
pressured
because you haven’t found your dream yet,
Don’t worry.
Don’t blame yourself.
Not having a dream at the moment
doesn’t make you less ambitious, courageous, exciting
or in any way less worthy of success and happiness.
It’s just that
following your dream is a terrible career advice.
And now that we know that,
the next question is: what do we do next?
You know, the thing with following your dream
is that,
it’s such a catchy concept, isn’t it?
So even though many people know
what’s wrong with it,
it’s still going to stay, let’s face it.
So to deal with this,
let’s come up with a new term to replace it,
a term that,
first of all, still sounds cool.
Very important.
Second of all, is less problematic.
And third of all, actually leads us to a fulfilling career.
So here’s my proposal.
Instead of a dream follower,
Be a dream creator.
Hear me out.
A dream creator doesn’t try to find his or her passion
and then follow it.
Instead, he or she focuses on
building skills and knowledge through opportunities.
And from those experiences,
passion is created.
Steve Jobs is a wonderful example of a dream creator.
You see, he followed his opportunity to sell circuit board,
committed to it,
learn from it,
and then his dream was born after.
So how do we be a dream creator?
I’ve narrowed it down to three things that we can follow
instead of a dream,
And here they are.
At number one is Follow Your Success.
I want you to think about what you’re good at,
What’s the job that you have done well?
You may find a clue from there.
I don’t mean if you have second place in a math competition,
You should go ahead and be a math scientist.
But it may show that you have a thing for problem solving
and attention to detail.
Use these hints as your guide to learn the skills
that are practical and in need by others.
Steve Ferrante said:
Success is like a snowball.
You’ve got to get it moving
and the more you roll, the greater it gets.
With greater success comes confidence and competence,
the two great things that create passions that last.
So follow your success.
The second point that I want to mention is:
Follow A Growth Mindset,
which I think is even more important than the first one.
Quick question: How do you view failure?
Do you like it? Do you hate it?
Do you avoid it?
A growth mindset is the opposite of a fixed mindset.
This is how a person with a fixed mindset views failure.
Failure equals to not good enough
or a decrease in self worth.
And this is how a person with a growth mindset views failure.
Failure equals to:
Opportunities to learn and grow.
Following a growth mindset is about believing
that talents and abilities can be developed.
Research has shown that students with a growth mindset
were three times more likely to score in the top 20% of the class,
while students with a fixed mindset,
they were four times more likely to score in the bottom 20%.
Believe that a lack of knowledge,
it’s not an indicator of stupidity,
that challenges are opportunities.
That will be the most powerful mindset that will take you to success.
After these two things, you might say something like this:
Okay, assume I’m going to go ahead and follow a growth mindset,
follow my success.
How do I actually start, though?
To response to this, I would like to present to you my final point.
Follow Your Goals.
There’s this short, famous story
written by Charlie Mackesy about a boy and a horse.
The boy and the horse got lost in the wood.
“I can’t see a way through.”
The boy said.
The horse responsed:
“Can you see your next step?”
“Yes”
- the boy answered.
“Just take that.”
- the horse said.
A step in any direction is better than staying still.
So move forward by setting specific goals for yourself.
If you have something in mind to set goals to at the moment,
good for you.
If you have a growth mindset and want to learn
but don’t know where to start yet,
here’s a strategy from me that has helped me
to leave my 2 a.m. moments behind.
It’s actually really simple.
Step 1:
Choose something. Anything.
Be it dancing, baking, coding, bottle making,...
anything that you’re interested in.
Step 2:
Give yourself a 30-day challenge
to learn it.
At the end of that 30 days,
you can decide whether you want to continue with it or not.
If you don't, that's fine.
What you have now is a new skill and a new healthy habit.
If you do like it, that’s great.
Continue with it.
The best part of this strategy is
you have now opened yourself to new opportunities
that you didn’t have before you learned that skill.
So here’s a story of mine using this strategy.
In high school, whenever I hear of the word
“public speaking”,
this is me.
The thought of speaking to people who can be judging me
is terrifying to me.
There’s this one time I had the chance to promote my magazine club
in front of the entire high school.
I walked on stage,
I panicked so hard
that I just stare down at my notes the whole time
and read it like this.
After that traumatizing experience,
There’s some part of me that still wants to do it
that I will regret it if I don’t.
So last year I set to myself
a 30-day challenge to make YouTube videos
sharing what I’ve learned and felt.
Even only in front of a camera,
there was a lot of struggling, believe me.
But I managed to post some of my first few videos.
They were terrible, by the way.
But I felt great.
And after 30 days, I stopped.
But I was left with this wonderful thing.
The belief that I can do it.
And today I’m standing here,
on the stage of the biggest idea-sharing platform in the world,
sharing my ideas to you.
Was it the dream that I followed?
No.
But it is now the dream that I have created for myself.
So I guess my key takeaway here is
I may or may not know you.
But I’m sure you are a cool person with so much potential
and life,
is waiting for you
to just take a step.
So stay ambitious. Stay brave.
Don’t be a dream follower.
Be a dream creator.
Thank you.