For your first couple decades, success in life has meant jumping through one hoop after another: get these test scores, get into this college. Take these classes, get this degree. Get into this prestigious institution so you can get into the next prestigious institution. All of that ends today.
The hard thing about planning your life is you have no idea where you're going, but you want to get there as soon as possible. Maybe you'll start a company, or cure cancer, or write the great American novel. Or who knows? Maybe things will go horribly wrong. I had no idea.
Being up here in robes and speaking to all of you today wasn't exactly part of my plan seven years ago. In fact, I've never really had a grand plan — and what I realize now is that it's probably impossible to have one after graduation, if ever.
I've thought a lot about what's different about the life you're beginning today. I've thought about what I would do if I had to start all over again. What got you here was basically being smart and working hard. But nobody tells you that after today, the recipe for success changes. So what I want to do is give you a little cheat sheet, the one I would have loved to have had on my graduation day.
If you were to look at my cheat sheet, there wouldn't be a lot on it. There would be a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. I know this doesn't make any sense right now, but bear with me.
I started my first company in a Chili's when I was 21. My cofounder, Andrew Crick, and I had never done this before. We were wondering if you needed to wear a suit to City Hall, or if you needed to make a company seal for stamping important documents. It turns out you can just go online and fill out a form and be done in about two minutes. It was a little anti-climactic, but we were in business. Over onion strings we decided that our company was going to make a new kind of online course for the SAT. Most kids back then were still using these old-school 800-page books, and the other online prep courses weren't very good. We called it Accolade, an SAT vocab word meaning an award of distinction. Well, actually, we called it "The Accolade Group, LLC" which we thought sounded a lot more impressive.
I stopped at Staples on the way home to pick up some card stock. Clearly, the most important order of business was to Photoshop a logo and print out some business cards that said "Founder" on them. The next order of business was to hand them out at conferences, and tell girls "why yes, I do have a company." It was awesome.
But the best part was learning all kinds of new things. I lived in my fraternity house every summer, and up on the fifth floor there's a ladder that goes up to the roof. I had this green nylon folding chair that I'd drag up there along with armfuls of business books I bought off Amazon and I'd spend every weekend reading about marketing, sales, management and all these other things I knew nothing about. I wasn't planning to get my MBA on the roof of Phi Delta Theta, but that's what happened.
A couple years later, things started going downhill. I felt like I had to paddle harder and harder to make progress, and at some point I just snapped and couldn't deal with any more math questions about parallel lines or the train leaving Memphis at 3:45. I figured something was wrong with me. I felt guilty for being so unproductive. Starting a company had been my dream, and, well, maybe I didn't have what it takes after all.
So I took a little break. Of course, if you're in course 6, sometimes "taking a break" means writing a poker bot. For those of you who don't know what a poker bot is, what happens when you play poker online is first, you sit for hours and click buttons, and then you lose all your money. A poker bot means you can have your computer lose all your money for you.
But it was a fascinating challenge. I was possessed. I would think about it in the shower. I would think about it in the middle of the night. It was like a switch went on — suddenly I was a machine.
In the middle of all this, my mom and dad wanted all of us to come up to New Hampshire to spend a family weekend together. But I really wanted to keep working on my poker bot. So I pull up in my Accord and open the trunk, and next I'm dragging all my computer stuff and all these wires into our little cottage. The dining room table wasn't big enough so I started moving all the pots and pans off the stove to make room for all my monitors. This time it was my mom who thought something was wrong with me. She was convinced I was going to jail.
I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing — who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk.
The problem is a lot of people don’t find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong — I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn’t going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.Click on their website www.smartcardfactory.com for more information.
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