Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, great. If you want to be successful, do something you’re really passionate about rather than some kind of cold calculation of what can make you the most money. Because if you go and try to do something and you’re like, “I’m not that interested, but I’m going to make a lot of money doing it,” you’re probably not going to be that good at it. And so, that is a big piece of it. For startups, I give this advice. And this is a career startup, any kind of young person just starting out is be persistent. There will be moments when it’s not working out and you can’t just give up too easily. You’ve got to persist through some hard times. Maybe two servers crash on a Sunday, and you’ve got to scramble to figure it out, but persist through that, and then also be prepared to pivot. That’s a newer word, new for me. But when I pivoted from Nupedia to Wikipedia it’s like, “This isn’t working. I’ve got to completely change.” So, be willing to completely change direction when something is not working. Now, the problem with these two wonderful pieces of advice is, which situation am I in today? Is this a moment when I need to just power through and persist because I’m going to find a way to make this work? Or is this a moment where I need to go, “Actually, this is totally not working and I need to change direction?” But also, I think for me, that always gives me a framework of like, “Okay, here’s the problem. Do we need to change direction, or do we need to power through it?” And just knowing those are the choices. Not always the only choices, but those choices. I think it can be helpful to say, “Okay, am I chickening out because I’m having a little bump, and I’m feeling unemotional, and I’m just going to give up too soon?” Ask yourself that question. And also, it’s like, “Am I being pigheaded and trying to do something that actually doesn’t make sense?” Okay. Ask yourself that question too. Even though they’re contradictory questions, sometimes it will be one, sometimes it will be the other, and you got to really think it through. I think persisting with the business model behind Wikipedia is such an inspiring story, because we live in a capitalist world. We live in a scary world, I think, for an internet business. And so, to do things differently than a lot of websites are doing, what Wikipedia has lived through this excessive explosion of many websites that are basically ad driven. Google is ad driven. Facebook, Twitter, all of these websites are ad driven. And to see them succeed, become these incredibly rich, powerful companies that if I could just have that money, you would think as somebody running Wikipedia, “I could do so much positive stuff.” And so, to persist through that is … I think from my perspective now, Monday night quarterback or whatever was the right decision, but boy is that a tough decision. It seemed easy at the time.…

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