Don’t Follow Your Passion | Ben Horowitz’s Advice for New Graduates

**Ben Horowitz** (0:00)
Thinking for yourself sounds both simple and trivial, but in reality, it's extremely difficult and it's profound. And here's why. As human beings, we want to be liked. It's anthropological. If people didn't like you in caveman days, they would just eat you.
So you really have a natural built-in instinct to want to be liked. And the easiest way to be liked is to tell people what they want to hear. And you know what everybody wants to hear? What they already believe to be true.
And so the last thing they want to hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system. So it's very hard to even bring that kind of stuff up. But those are the things, those are the only things, things that you believe, that everybody around you doesn't believe, when you're right, that create real value in the world.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
Follow your passion may be the most common piece of career advice graduates receive.
Ben Horowitz disagrees. In this commencement address to Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Ben argues that passion is often a byproduct of mastery, contribution, and achievement, not necessarily the starting point. Drawing on his own experiences as a student, entrepreneur, investor, and technologist, he shares lessons on independent thinking, conviction, innovation, and why some of the most valuable opportunities come from pursuing ideas that other people don't yet believe.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:34)
Thank you, thank you so much. That was a beautiful speech. Very nice work. I'm gonna take my hat off if that's okay with you guys, because I'm gonna get too excited to have it spill, even though it is an awesome hat. So first of all, thank you, Class of 2015, for inviting me to speak. It's such a great honor. And when I got the invitation, I started thinking back to when I was in Columbia. And I remember getting to Columbia, and I was immediately super stressed out because I realized that I now had to figure out at some point what I was going to do with my life. And that was like super scary. Some of you might be going through that now a little bit. But not to bring that up or anything.
And I remember when I kind of first got the first clue of what I might do, I was taking a class over in the mud building, which somebody was telling me today.
Somebody was telling me today mud is great if you like prisons and Catholic school.
And I was in this class, and they were talking about this guy, Alan Turing. And they were talking about how he had proven that if you built a machine that was what he called a Turing machine, that it was theoretically impossible to build a machine that was computationally more powerful. And I was like, it just like melted my mind when I heard it, because I couldn't even imagine like what he was talking about, because it was 1984 And you have to remember, in 1984, computers weren't even really a thing. And so the idea of like a machine that could do anything was just like so far fetched, because all of our machines were like these special purpose machines. Like we had a special purpose machine for doing math. And your parents will remember it was called a calculator. And then we had one for word processing called a typewriter, and we even had one for video called a television set.
And so the idea of like, okay, now you're going to have a machine that can do absolutely anything. And this guy had figured that out 40 years ago, and I didn't even know about it. Like I had no idea. It was like the secret to the universe, which they were just saying, oh, here, oh, by the way, there's a machine that's like limitless, and you can do anything on it. And I was just like, no way. Translate, Espanol, no way, Jose.
For the parents, that's a Kanye West reference.
But it was kind of at that point in my life where it was like, for those of you who are Phineas and Ferb fans, it was like that time when, when Phineas goes, I know what I'm going to do today. I'm going to major in computer science. And so I ran over to Carmen, and I was just so excited to tell my friends. I was like, man, they're going to be just like so fired up for me. I figured it out. I'm not going to be stressed anymore. And I'm like, guys, I'm going to major in computer science. And one of my friends said, wow, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.