Drew Houston's Commencement address
Below is the prepared text of the Commencement address by Drew Houston '05, the CEO of Dropbox, for MIT's 147th Commencement held June 7, 2013.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/commencement-day-0607.html
Thank you Chairman Reed, and congratulations to all of you in the class of 2013.
I'm so happy to be back at MIT, and it's an honor to be here with you today. I still wear my Brass Rat, and turning this ring around on graduation day is still one of the proudest moments of my life.
There are a lot of reasons why this is a special day, but the reason I'm so excited for all of you is that today is the first day of your life where you no longer need to check boxes.
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.
It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice.
Let's go back to the summer after my graduation, the summer you're about to have. One of my fraternity brothers, Adam Smith, and his friend Matt Brezina were starting a company and we decided it would be fun for all of us to work together out of one apartment.
It was the perfect summer — well, almost perfect. The air conditioner was broken so we were all coding in our boxers. Adam and Matt were working around the clock, but as time went on they kept getting pulled away by potential investors who would share their secrets and take them on helicopter rides. I was a little jealous — I had been working on my company for a couple years and Adam had only been at it for a couple months. Where were my helicopter rides?
Things only got worse. August rolled around and Adam gave me the bad news: they were moving out. Not only was my supply of Hot Pockets cut off, but they were off to Silicon Valley, where the real action was happening, and I wasn't.
Every now and then I'd give Adam a call and hear how things were going. Things were always pretty good. "We met with Vinod this afternoon," he would tell me. Vinod Khosla is the billionaire investor and cofounder of Sun Microsystems. Then Adam dropped the bomb. "He's going to give us five million dollars."
I was thrilled for him, but it was a shock for me. Here was my faithful beer pong partner and my little brother in the fraternity, two years younger than me. I was out of excuses. He was off to the Super Bowl and I wasn't even getting drafted. He had no idea at the time, but Adam had given me just the kick I needed. It was time for a change.
They say that you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Think about that for a minute: who would be in your circle of 5? I have some good news: MIT is one of the best places in the world to start building that circle. If I hadn't come here, I wouldn't have met Adam, I wouldn't have met my amazing cofounder, Arash, and there would be no Dropbox.
One thing I've learned is surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard. Can you imagine if Michael Jordan hadn’t been in the NBA, if his circle of 5 had been a bunch of guys in Italy? Your circle pushes you to be better, just as Adam pushed me.
And now your circle will grow to include your coworkers and everyone around you. Where you live matters: there’s only one MIT. And there's only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn't a coincidence: for whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too — follow them. If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.
The last trap you might fall into after school is "getting ready." Don't get me wrong: learning is your top priority, but now the fastest way to learn is by doing. If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying and planning and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been "ready." I remember the day our first investors said yes and asked us where to send the money. For a 24 year old, this is Christmas — and opening your present is hitting refresh over and over on bankofamerica.com and watching your company's checking account go from 60 dollars to 1.2 million dollars. At first I was ecstatic — that number has two commas in it! I took a screenshot — but then I was sick to my stomach. Someday these guys are going to want this back. What the hell have I gotten myself into?
You already know this feeling: at MIT we call it "drinking from the firehose." It’s about as fun as it sounds, and all of us have the internal bleeding to prove it. But we’ve also learned it's good for you. Today, one valve shuts off. Now you need to go out and find another firehose.
Dropbox has been mine. As you might expect, building this company has been the most exciting, interesting and fulfilling experience of my life. What I haven't really shared is that it's also been the most humiliating, frustrating and painful experience too, and I can't even count the number of things that have gone wrong.
Fortunately, it doesn't matter. No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
Bill Gates's first company made software for traffic lights. Steve Jobs's first company made plastic whistles that let you make free phone calls. Both failed, but it's hard to imagine they were too upset about it. That's my favorite thing that changes today. You no longer carry around a number indicating the sum of all your mistakes. From now on, failure doesn't matter: you only have to be right once.
I used to worry about all kinds of things, but I can remember the moment when I calmed down. I had just moved to San Francisco, and one night I couldn't sleep so I was on my laptop. I read something online that said "There are 30,000 days in your life." At first I didn't think much of it, but on a whim I tabbed over to the calculator. I type in 24 times 365 and — oh my God, I'm almost 9,000 days down. What the hell have I been doing?
(By the way: you guys are 8,000 days down.)
So that’s how 30,000 ended up on the cheat sheet. That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story. And when you die, it's not like "here lies Drew, he came in 174th place." So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting. I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that's made all the difference.
My grandmother is here today, and next week we'll be celebrating her 95th birthday. We talk more on the phone now that I’ve moved out to California. But one thing that's stuck with me is she always ends our phone calls with one word: "Excelsior," which means "ever upward."
And today on your commencement, your first day of life in the real world, that's what I wish for you. Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward. Thank you.
中文版：
http://techorange.com/2013/12/29/dropbox-ceo-drew-houston/
人生只有三萬天，活到現在你都做了哪些事？
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston 為美國麻省理工學院 MIT 2005 畢業的校友，本文為他在 MIT 第 147 屆畢業典禮上演講的主要內容。
再次回到 MIT，我感到無比榮幸。今天是個特殊的日子，我還戴著我的 Brass Rat 戒指（MIT 的畢業紀念戒指），我為你們感到興奮。
在你們人生過去的幾十年裡，成功意味著一步步往上爬。但從此刻開始，成功不再意味著考試考高分、上好大學，拿學位證書。
你們不知道未來將奔向何方，所以對未來生活的計劃也無從談起。但你又迫不及待地想迎接未來：也許是成立公司，治療癌症，或者是寫一部偉大的小說。誰知道未來會怎樣呢？
而像今天這樣，身披長袍對著你們演講並不在我七年前（畢業時）的計劃之內。事實上，我從未有過宏大的計劃——如今我領悟到，也許人的一生都不會有什麼宏大的計劃，更別說畢業之際了。
從今天起，你們將迎接新的生活。我思索許久，它會有何不同呢？如果讓我重新再來一遍，我將如何抉擇？
聰明和努力讓你們能夠站在這裡，但沒有人告訴你，從今往後的成功秘方變了。所以，我想給你們一張小紙條。我多希望當初畢業時有人能給我這樣一張。
如果你仔細看看我給你的小抄，那上面不會有很多東西：一個網球，一個圓圈和一個數字 30000，僅此而已。 我知道你們可能覺得有些莫名其妙，但請耐心聽。
21 歲，我成立了我的第一家公司。我和共同創辦人 Andrew Crick 都完全沒有經驗。我們決定創造一個全新的 SAT 網路課程，因為那時候我們大多數用的都是笨重、過時的 800 頁課本，網路課程的質量也很差。我們為它起名 Accolade，這是一個 SAT 詞彙，「榮譽稱號」的意思，而公司全名是 The Accolade Group, LLC，因為我們覺得這樣很酷。
自己設計名片，在上面寫上「創辦人」字樣的感覺非常棒。
但最棒的是，我可以學習各種各樣全新的東西。每個夏天，我都在家裡屋頂上讀一大堆書，包括市場行銷、業務、管理和其他我過去一無所知的東西。
我並沒打算在屋頂上讀我的 MBA，但它確實發生了。
幾年之後，我遇到了瓶頸，諸事不順讓我效率低下。創立公司一直是我的夢想，但我開始懷疑自己的能力。
所以我給自己放了個假。我開始寫一個撲克機器人的程式。這是很有趣的挑戰，我完全入迷了，像個機器一樣一天到晚在思考。
喜歡你所做的事情，但這不是全部。讓自己相信你喜歡正在做的事情太簡單了 —— 誰願意承認自己不喜歡呢？我所認識的最成功、最樂在其中的人不僅熱愛他們所做的事情，他們還沉迷於解決關鍵的問題，這就他們來說很重要。這讓我想起了小狗追網球的畫面：你能在他們的眼睛裡看到一點點瘋狂，甚至會把拴著他們的皮帶都拉斷。我還有一些朋友工作努力，報酬豐厚，但還是時常抱怨工作。
問題在於，他們沒有馬上找到自己的網球。讓我感到害怕的是，撲克機器人和 Dropbox 最開始都讓我感到分心。我的腦袋裡似乎有一個聲音一直在指揮我去哪裡，但我卻不斷地叫它閉嘴。但有時候那些聲音是最真實的。
我花了很久才領悟到這個道理。最努力的那群人並不是因為他們都嚴於律己。他們努力工作，是因為他們在解決一個令人興奮的問題時收獲了快樂。
所以從今往後，不要勉強地推著自己前進。試著找到自己的網球，它會拉著你前進。你也許會彷徨很久，但在找到之前，傾聽你內心的聲音。
讓我們再回到我剛畢業的那個夏天。那是一個完美，或者說接近完美的夏天。我的好兄弟 Adam Smith，他的朋友 Matt Brezina 和我准備成立一家公司，我們當時覺得大家一起在一個屋檐底下辦公會很酷。
Adam 和 Matt 沒日沒夜地寫 Code ，並不斷引起潛在投資者的興趣，邀請他們乘坐直升機出遊。而我呢，為自己的公司花了幾年的心血，而 Adam 才花了幾個月的工夫。我的直升機在哪裡？
到了 8 月，Adam 又給了一個壞消息：他們要搬走了，去矽谷，而我卻去不了。
之後我就會經常和 Adam 通電話，了解那邊的情況。他們一直都很不錯，比如他會提到下午見到了投資人 Vinod Khosla，Sun Microsystems 的共同創辦人，億萬富翁。最後，他丟下一個重磅炸彈：他要給我 500 萬美金。
我徹底震驚。他一直是我的好伙伴，比我小 2 歲。（用橄欖球做個比喻），現實就像是，他進軍超級盃，而我卻連選秀都沒被選上。他在不經意之間給了我一個很好的打擊，是時候改變了。
有人說，與你相處最多的 5 個人的平均水平代表了你的水平。仔細想一分鐘：誰會在你 5 個人的圓圈裡面。好消息是，MIT 是組建這個圓圈最好的地方之一。如果我沒有來到這裡，我就不會認識 Adam，也就不會認識 Dropbox 的另一個創始人 Arash，也就不會有 Dropbox。
我意識到，身邊有一群富有啟發性的人，和你自己的天賦、勤奮一樣重要。你的圓圈推動你變得更好，就像 Adam 推動我一樣。
但是別忘了，MIT 只有一個，好萊塢，矽谷都只有一個，這並不是巧合：無論你做什麼，最頂尖的人才通常只會聚集到一個地方，那就是你該去的地方。你會在那裡遇到你的英雄，他也在你的圓圈裡面，向他們學習。
剛畢業的人還容易掉入一個陷阱：沒做好準備就不去做。不要理解錯了，學習是首要的，但最快的學習方法是動手。如果你有夢想，你當然應該用一生的時間去學習、去計劃、去準備。但現在要做的，只是啟程而已。
我覺得自己從未真正準備好。
我還記得，我們的第一個投資人說「好」的時候，他問我錢應該打到哪裡？
對於一個 24 歲的年輕人來說，這就像過聖誕節一樣開心。我一遍遍重新整理公司的銀行賬戶，看著它從 60 美金變成了 120 萬美金。最初我欣喜若狂，還拍了照片紀念。但一想到有一天，他們要把這些錢都拿回去，我的肚子就一陣難受。
你們也許會覺得，創立 Dropbox 是我一生中最刺激、最有趣、最有成就感的事情。而我卻沒有告訴你們，它也是讓我覺得最丟臉、最沮喪、最痛苦的經歷。
我甚至記不清我犯錯的次數。
幸運的是，這都無所謂，在現實生活中，沒有人的 GPA 是 5.0（《TO》編按：美國大學學業成績評分比）。事實上，當你告別學校，GPA 的概念也將不復存在。你在學校裡犯的每一個錯誤都可能影響你最終的成績，而在現實生活中，你最大的危險並不是失敗，而且太安逸。
Bill Gates 的第一個公司是為交通號誌開發軟體的，Jobs 的第一個公司是製作塑料口哨的。兩人都失敗了，這是我對現實最滿意的一點：過去的錯誤不會累積。
從今往後，失敗都不重要，你只需成功一次。
曾經，我為各種事情憂慮。但我永遠記得，我開始內心平靜下來的時候，是那時我剛搬到舊金山，一天晚上，我實在睡不著，於是我打開我的筆記本電腦，讀到了這樣一句話：人的一生只有 30000 天。
一開始我也沒多想， 但我拿過計算器一算，365 X 24，發現快 9000 天已經過去了！我究竟都做了什麼事情？
所以這就是我把 30000 寫在紙條上的原因。就在當晚，我意識到，人生沒有熱身，沒有練習，沒有回去的按鈕。每一天，我們都在為自己的故事加幾個詞語。所以從那以後，我不再追求生活的完美，而是努力讓生活更加有趣。我希望我的故事成為一場冒險 —— 這改變了一切。
今天我的祖母也在這裡，下周將迎來她的 95 歲生日。我去加州之後和她打了很多次電話，有個細節一直印在我的腦海裡：她每次掛電話時都會對我說一個詞，Excelsior，意思是不斷向上，精益求精。
今天是你們的典禮，你們來到真實世界的第一天。我對你們的期望是，不要追求生活的完美，而給你自己自由，把生活變成一段美麗的冒險。
還有，不斷向上。 謝謝。
