You can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure,
which one of those, when you're 90 years old, are you going to be more proud of?
So a young person starting their career, I think there are probably a lot of things,
some of them are very well known and people have heard them
many times and are still true. One of those is that you should always focus on,
a young person should find something that they're passionate about to do.
And that's not going to surprise anyone, it's a clear thing to do, it's very hard.
If you don't love your work, you're never going to be great at it.
I think the other thing I would suggest to any young person,
even before they start their career, is to really think about their choices.
Because I find young people, I know when I was young I made this mistake too.
You can get very fixed on your gifts,
so everybody has gifts, you have gifts and you have things
that you didn't get gifted and maybe you're extremely beautiful,
maybe you're extremely good at mathematics, there are lot of things that you can be given,
but those things can confuse you because they're not the things that
construct your life, it's your choices, that construct your life, not your gifts.
You can celebrate your gifts, be proud of them, be happy of them,
actually, don't be proud of them, be celebratory of them,
you can't be proud because their gifts, they were given to you, you didn't earn them.
You can only be proud of the things you earn. And so as I got older I started to realize
I wasn't proud of my gifts, I was always good at school,
school was always easy for me, and I was always proud that I was a great student,
got A's in all my classes, I was good at math, all of that,
and I thought that's who I was, but it's not true. Those are the things that are gifts,
what was hard for me is deciding to work hard, deciding to use my gifts in certain ways
to challenge myself to do things that I didn't think I could do,
to put myself in uncomfortable situations. I would say to a young person,
you can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure.
Which one of those, when you're 90 years old, are you going to be more proud of?
I often tell people that I work with if you can get,
because people have very high standards for how they want their work life to be,
and I said, look, if you can get your work life
to be where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Because very few people ever achieve that,
because the truth is everything comes with overhead, that's reality.
Everything comes with pieces that you don't like. You could be a Supreme Court justice
and there's going to be pieces of your job you don't like,
you can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee
meetings and you have to do things, every job comes with pieces you don't like
and we need to say, that's part of it, and not resent those pieces or try not to.
But also try to minimize them, I tell senior executives,
you should have the least stress. There's this weird, I think, false idea
that CEOs, I'm CEO,
there's this false idea that CEOs are under the most stress.
Well, I mean why? You're in charge.
Why don't you delegate the stress? It's your choice.
And so you have to figure out how to set up your life in such a way
that you can minimize the things. And I find people don't dislike hard work,
what people dislike is being out of control, they can't control their life,
they can't control their environment. This happens to me when I get over scheduled.
I hate being over scheduled. I want some time
to be able to think and free myself. We all have the same amount of time in the world,
nobody has more time than anybody else, and when you become a very successful person,
one of the things you start to get is overscheduled.