[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
MARK ROBER: All right.
Good afternoon, esteemed faculty, distinguished guests,
relieved parents, bored siblings, confused pets,
and, of course, the 2023 graduating class of MIT.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
It is indeed a warm welcome.
It's hot.
And you know what I love to do on a beautiful, sunny,
95-degree summer day?
Where a big black blanket.
[LAUGHTER]
At least I'm up here in the shade.
You'd think the best engineering school on the planet
could design a bigger awning for everyone.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
It's for next year.
[LAUGHTER]
Standing here before you is weird.
I feel this pressure to give some timeless
advice that will endure, despite our world changing
at an unprecedented pace.
The world is so different, even from four years ago.
For example, for the undergrads, you
are the first graduating class to have persevered
through a global pandemic, just as this
is the first commencement speech written entirely by ChatGPT.
[LAUGHTER]
The tech is still very new.
So if I make any grammatical errors
or threaten to end all human life, that did not come for me.
That's the robot.
[LAUGHTER]
At this point, I should probably tell your parents who I am.
I'm Mark Rober, a former Apple and NASA mechanical
engineer who became a YouTuber.
And, yes, I know, to some of you,
it sounds like I just said I quit
the NBA to work at Foot Locker.
[LAUGHTER]
Or I traded a Picasso for an NFT of a stoned monkey.
[LAUGHTER]
But I wouldn't have it any other way.
I sort of feel at home here, because Buzz Aldrin
went to MIT.
And just like me, Buzz was a NASA engineer.
Only Buzz stuck with it and became one of the first humans
to set foot on the moon.
Whereas I quit to become the first human to
sprinkle porch pirates with glitter and fart spray.
[LAUGHTER]
It's on YouTube.
Your kids will explain it at dinner.
[LAUGHTER]
But whether it's seeking karmic justice for package thieves,
or building an obstacle course for squirrels in my backyard,
I plan my monthly YouTube videos really far out in advance.
In fact, I've already decided what my June 2053
video will be.
And it's going to be a collab with all of you.
It's going to be a retrospective look at all the amazing things
this MIT graduating class of 2023 has accomplished.
In fact, this right now is the video intro.
So if you've ever wanted to be in one of my videos,
this is your chance.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
Now, will YouTube still be around in 30 years?
Hopefully, unless Elon buys it.
[LAUGHTER]
But here's the thing.
The degree to which you positively impact the world
is the degree to which you'll be featured in the video.
So in order to increase your chances of making the cut,
I want to give you three pieces of advice based off
my life experience.
The first bit of advice--
is to moisturize when giving a commencement speech--
is to embrace naive optimism.
What do I mean by naive optimism?
Actually, before I go any further,
usually in my YouTube videos, when I get to the juicy part,
I'm not really used to this public speaking thing,
so the music kicks in.
So if you'll just give me a moment and hit this button.
Trust me, this is going to be better for both of us.
Here we go.
Right here.
Let's see.
There we go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
All right.
That's better.
What do I mean by naive optimism?
[LAUGHTER]
Naive optimism means it's easier to be
optimistic about your future when you're
sort of naive about what lies ahead,
when you don't know what you don't know.
As an example, think back on the first week at MIT,
how naive you were about the number of all-nighters and cans
of Red Bull that would be required to be sitting where
you are right now.
In fact, you guys drank so much caffeine I'm surprised
you're even sitting at all.
[LAUGHTER]
If you truly understood what would be required,
that discouragement might have prevented you
from even starting.
Sometimes it's an advantage not to be the expert with all
the experience.
There's no reputational risk.
So it's easier to try new things and approach them
from a fresh first principles approach.
Naive optimism can also help when
faced with a big life decision, when you feel like you want
to know the results before you decide,
but the true outcome is simply unknowable.
Naive optimism means you have irrational-- naive optimism
means you have the irrational confidence of a child learning
to walk or a mom learning to TikTok.
[LAUGHTER]
And you pick what you think is the best path and just move
forward, knowing there's more than one trail that
leads to the top of Mount Fuji.
It's OK that you don't know exactly what you
want to be doing 20 years from now
or what you want to have accomplished.
And by the way, even if you do know,
it doesn't matter, because you're wrong.
Anyone who tells you they knew where they'd be,
where they're at, 20 years ago is
either lying, or delusional, or a time-traveler, or Pat Sajak.
[LAUGHTER]
Life is like trying to cross a big flowing
river with lots of rocks and boulders strewn about.
If you want to cross the river, you have to start on the bank
and look at the first several rocks in front of you.
You can wiggle them with your toe
and scan a few boulders out.
But at some point, you've just got to pick one and jump,
because the river is dynamic and always changing.
If the first rock in this metaphor is a hobby,
let curiosity and passion guide your initial step.
If the first rock represents your professional career,
take curiosity and passion into account,
but you should also weigh what you're good at
and what the world needs, even if the world might not
know they need it yet.
Whichever one you'd pick, the real secret is to dominate it.
Obsessively study it from every angle.
Master it.
Now, from your position of more secure footing,
you can reevaluate the river.
And you'll find you've got a few more rocks available that you
couldn't even see from where you started,
so you could continue on your journey.
Instead of putting the pressure on myself
to create some master life plan, this attitude of naive optimism
combined with dedication, enthusiasm,
and the willingness to jump from my current safe rock
to the next is what I feel has led me
from college, to NASA, to YouTube, to eventually
landing on this rock of giving the commencement speech at MI
frickin' T.
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
There's no way I could have predicted that path when
I was exactly in your shoes 20 years ago.
So cross your river one rock at a time,
but do it with a naive optimism that it's all
going to work out.
Let that be your North Star.
If you actually knew how cold the river can get,
or how long it takes to recover from a sprained ankle
if you slipped, your knowledge might get in the way.
So have faith in yourself.
You're about to get a degree from MIT.
So you've obviously made some pretty great decisions so far.
Embrace your inexperience, and keep taking leaps forward.
And apologies to all the civil engineering
majors who have been grumbling sitting there saying, if he
wants to cross this river so bad,
why doesn't he just build a suspension bridge?
Because it's my metaphor, all right?
Back off.
[LAUGHTER]
And now, for some real talk.
You're going to take that leap of faith,
land on a rock, and only then realize
it's not as stable as your foot wiggle have predicted,
and you're going to fall into the river sometimes.
That leads to my second of three pieces of advice
to maximize your chance of positively impacting the world
and making the video cut, which is to frame your failures.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ah.
[LAUGHTER]
You can tell, it's the juicy part, because the music's back.
To illustrate what I mean by this,
I asked 50,000 of my YouTube followers
that subscribe to my channel to play a simple computer
programming puzzle that I made.
But what they didn't know is that I
had served up two slightly different versions
of the puzzle.
In one, if you failed the puzzle,
you didn't lose any of your starting 200 points,
and you were prompted to try again.
Whereas in the other, if you didn't succeed,
you were also prompted to try again, but I said
I was taking away five of those starting 200 points.
That was the only difference.
And even though they were no value in the real world,
no one will ever see these completely fake
meaningless internet points, those
who didn't lose those points attempted
to solve the puzzle two and 1/2 times more
and saw success 16% more of the time.
And because 50,000 people took the test,
those results are super statistically significant.
Basically, those who didn't frame
losing in a negative light stuck with it for longer,
saw more success, and learned more.
And I think a great example of this in real life
is video games.
When Super Mario Brothers first came out,
my friends and I became obsessed with making it to the castle
and rescuing Princess Peach from the evil Bowser.
Water break.
We'd get to school and ask each other,
dude, what level did you make it to?
Did you pass the game?
We never asked each other for details
on all the different ways we might have died.
This was before Call of Duty.
When it comes to video games like, this no one ever picks up
the controller for the first time,
falls in the pit right away, and thinks, I'm so ashamed.
That was such a failure.
I'm never doing this again.
How am I going to break it to Luigi?
I murdered his brother.
[LAUGHTER]
What really happens is you think, OK, I got to remember,
there's a pit there.
Next time, I'm going to come at it with a bit more speed.
The focus and obsession is about beating the game, not how dumb
you might look if you get hit by a sliding green shell.
And as a direct result of that attitude,
of learning from but not being focused on the failures,
we got really good and learned a ton
in a very short amount of time.
And in my personal and work life,
I've dealt with my share of sliding green shells.
I still feel like every video we make each month there's
a moment where it seems everything that can go wrong
has gone wrong.
And those failures can be gut-wrenching.
And they can sting real bad.
But they sting like missing that one key Mario long-jump
right at the end of level 8-1.
And then, right after that, really quickly it
turns in, OK, what did we just learn from that?
What should we try differently for next time?
And this concept of life imitation
is more than just have a positive attitude
or never give up.
Because those imply you have to fight against your true desire
to quit.
And I feel like when you frame a challenge or a learning
process in this way, you actually want to do it.
It feels natural to ignore the failure and try again.
In the same way a toddler will want
to keep trying to stand up, or in the same way
you want to keep playing Super Mario Brothers,
or in the same way half the people who
attempted my coding puzzle had a desire to stick with it two
and 1/2 times longer.
The framing of their failures made it
so they wanted to keep trying and learning.
And that's exactly why the most meaningful high-fives
of my adolescence were when I said,
dude, I finally beat Bowser last night.
It probably goes without saying, but girls didn't talk to me
till I was much older.
[LAUGHTER]
And in case you're like, yeah, but my real life
would just be so much better if my top five challenges
disappear.
Would it?
I'd like to point out that if Super Mario Brothers was just
jumping over one pit, and then you rescued Princess Peach,
no one would play it.
Where's the risk and the reward?
Where's the challenge?
There's no ultimate feeling of satisfaction.
The degree you're getting today means so much to you
precisely because of all the struggle and setbacks
that you've had to endure.
If you want to cross the river of life,
you're going to get wet.
You're going to have to backtrack.
And that's not a bug, that's a feature.
Frame those failures and slips like a video game.
And not only will you learn more and do it faster,
but it will make all the successful jumps
along the way that much sweeter.
All right, now, I've got some good news,
which is that you're not crossing the river alone.
For my third and final bit of advice
is to foster your relationships.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Nice.
A sad truth about getting older is life gets busier and busier.
And it gets harder and harder to make really close friends
like you did here at school.
And this isn't great, because we evolved
to be social cooperative creatures.
50,000 years ago, conditions were much harsher.
So those who were more inclined to cooperate
with their fellow humans were also
much more likely to succeed and pass
on those cooperation genes.
So we've inherited these brains designed
for social interaction.
And we are hardwired to cooperate with other people.
And, look, I don't blame you if you want to cast aside advice
from a guy who makes a living trying to outwit squirrels.
But I wouldn't recommend doing that
to six million years of evolutionary programming.
Because in today's society, it's really convenient
just to isolate yourself.
You can attend the board meeting from your kitchen table.
You can order food in the shower.
You can bank on the toilet.
You can even look for a new apartment
without leaving your apartment.
It's easier to stay anonymous in our big cities
versus the small tribes of our ancestors
where everyone knew each other.
Which means we've got to actively work at fostering
meaningful relationships.
And because I know this can be harder
for some more than others, here's
a life fact I've found that really helps.
Confirmation bias is when your brain ignores evidence that
doesn't support your beliefs.
And then it cherry-picks the evidence that does.
And, generally, when people hear this term,
they think it's a broken unscientific way for our brains
to approach the world.
And this is true.
But you could judo-flip it to your advantage.
The trick is to positively apply confirmation bias
to your relationships.
If you assume good intentions on the part of your friends
and family, and you tell yourself
you're lucky to have them, your brain
will naturally work to find evidence to support that.
That's just how our brains work.
If you tell yourself that your fellow humans are
inherently good, your brain will find examples of it everywhere.
And that will reinforce your outlook.
The opposite, unfortunately, is also true.
Basically, whether you think the world and everyone in it
is out to hurt you or help you, you're right.
Studies have shown that the best predictor of divorce
is if the couple assumes bad intentions in their partner's
actions, or if you marry Kanye.
[LAUGHTER]
But if you get it in your head that your partner is selfish,
or inconsiderate, or willfully refusing to take out
the garbage, that creates a negative feedback loop
of confirmation bias, seeking to find further evidence
that your spouse is a jerk, even when good faith efforts are
being made.
And this hack works not just for spouses, friends, and family,
but even total strangers who might infuriate you.
And, look, I agree with you, they're wrong.
But don't forget, as George Carlin pointed out,
anyone who's driving slower than you is an idiot,
and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.
Fostering your relationship closes out
my list of three bits of advice, because that may be where
your impact is the greatest.
Due to a challenging upbringing, my mom
barely graduated high school.
But she took being a mom and instilling
values in her children really seriously.
As such, she's the single biggest influence on my life
by far.
She passed away over a decade ago
from ALS, six months before I ever released my first YouTube
video.
But I love the idea that the ripples from her influence
are still being felt as strongly as they ever
have through the work that I try and do today.
If there's anything I've said today has resonated
with you in my mind, it's a direct result of her commitment
to this third piece of advice.
So leverage concrete means to confirmation bias
to enhance your relationships as you
cooperate to cross the river.
Train your brain to assume good intentions.
And try to remember if someone cuts you off on the freeway,
maybe they're not out to get you.
Maybe they just have diarrhea.
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC - RICHARD STRAUSS, "ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA"]
Now, for piece of advice number four,
engage in occasional playful anarchy.
But, Mark, you told us were only going to give us
three pieces of advice.
Boom!
Here's a fourth, because, why not?
I am playing music in a commencement
speech because why not?
Is not ending your speech with pump up music
just objectively better?
Or like how these graduation robes and hats
are just objectively silly?
Why shouldn't I take my own fourth piece of advice
right now and engage in some playful anarchy?
Anybody can toss their hat in the air.
We see it at every graduation.
But few have dared to make it actually fly.
I bet Buzz Aldrin never tried this.
You know what?
Time out.
This is actually a great opportunity
to review everything we just talked about.
[LAUGHTER]
To my first point, I will embrace my naive optimism
that my hat will actually get airborne.
But if not, to my second point, if it goes
haywire, and I accidentally blow up E-53,
I can reframe the failure as an opportunity
to renovate a very old and sketchy building.
[LAUGHTER]
Maybe this time we'll even add a few windows.
[LAUGHTER]
And then, to my third point, when I get sued by the faculty,
I will foster the relationship I have with my defense lawyers.
[LAUGHTER]
Because settling with MIT over damages
will bring us all closer together.
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERING]
And so, now, after turning on my hat--
[MUSIC - RICHARD STRAUSS, "ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA"]
--I've done my part and filmed a banger of an intro
to our upcoming collab 30 years from now.
Which means all that's left to do
is your part, to go out and change
the world for the better.
Congratulations, MIT class of 2023.
You totally got this.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]