Mark Rober is one of my favourite content creators. His engineering skills, creativity and sense of humour led him to gain over 24 million subscribers on Youtube. He recently gave a commencement speech at the MIT . During the speech, he addressed hundreds of newly graduated students. While it might have been targeted toward 20-something-year-olds, this speech holds a lot of value for everyone, regardless of their age.
Who's Mark Rober?
Mark Rober has many hats. Most people probably know him for his YouTube channel that he started over 11 years ago. As of June 2023, that channel has gathered over 24 million followers and more than 3.5 BILLION views! Mark studied mechanical engineering and worked as such long before being known for his YouTube channel. He spent 5 years working for NASA, most of which were spent working on the Curiosity Rover that landed on Mars in August 2012. He made a pretty cool video about it. After NASA, he worked as an engineer at Apple for a few years before pursuing a full-time career as a content creator. In 2022, he also founded CrunchLabs , a subscription box delivering monthly toys to help create the next generation of engineers.
All of this to say that he is more than qualified to address new graduates from one of the most prestigious schools in the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (commonly known as MIT).
Mark Rober's 3 tips for life
Number 1: naive optimism
It's easier to be optimistic about the future when you don't know what lies ahead. Not knowing what you don't know is the key to starting something. If you knew what was coming, would you risk starting that thing anyways?
Humatendncy to want to know the outcome of everything before it happens. It turns out, most of the things are simply "unknowable". The best you can do is to make a decision, stick with it and move forward knowing there is more than 1 path that leads to the top of the mountain.
The harsh truth is that no one knows where they will be and what they will be doing in 20 years. Anyone that tells you otherwise is purely speculating.
Mark then makes a great analogy between life and trying to cross a river where the bank is made of big rocks. Naturally, we would love to be able to see every single rock that can lead us to the other side. In reality, we can only see the first few rocks.
So how do we cross a river if we only see the first rocks? First, we can use our feet to wiggle the closest rocks. Eventually, we're forced to pick one and just step on it.
Picking our first rock is like figuring out what to do with our lives. We need to let curiosity and passion dictate which way we should go first. If on top of that, we can find something that we are good at and something that the world needs, then we know we're going in the right direction. There is a Japanese word for this, Ikigai. There is a Japanese word for this, Ikigai. You can read more about Ikigai here.
After taking that first step, we then need to repeat this process over and over. The thing is, for most of us, the river is foggy and we can't even see the other side so we don't know in which direction to go. On top of that, the tide is rolling in so staying stagnant is not a viable option. The good news is that by moving forward, we slowly uncover new rocks we can step on. Steve Jobs often talked about this concept. He said that the best thing we can do in life is to keep creating dots, each dot represents something we have achieved. Initially,y they might just look like an unordered cloud of random dots but we must trust that someday, all those dots will connect. We don't know when, we don't know how and we can't connect them by looking forward, only looking backwards.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
— Steve Jobs
Number 2: focus on failures
Our focus and obsession should always be about winning, beating the game, not how stupid we might look when we fail. On a recent Lex Fridman podcast , Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Meta) said:
Your ability to keep doing interesting things is your willingness to be embarrassed.
— Mark Zuckerberg
It doesn't take just a positive attitude to achieve this, it requires fighting relentlessly over our true desire to quit.
Mark ran an experiment with his subscribers where he asked 50,000 of them to play a video game. They all with 200 points and were split into 2 groups:
- In the first group, players wouldn't lose any points every time they failed.
- In the second group, players would lose 5 points every time they failed.
On top of that, both groups were prompted to immediately try again after they failed.
The results were pretty clear: the group that wouldn't lose any points would attempt the game 2.5 times more than those who lost points, and saw success 16% more of the time.
How can we interpret those results? When players didn't frame failing in a negative light, they were much more likely to try again regardless of the precedent outcome.
This is common among video game players. Players ask each other how far they made it into a game and, how many levels they were able to pass. They never ask how they died or in what way they failed to pass a new level.
As stated before, the key to beating the game is focus and obsession. No one ever picked up a controller for the first time and made it to the end of a game without failing multiple times. Why would we want to go through life without ever failing when we've never played "this game"?
Framing failure as positive incites people to keep trying and learning.
And by the way, wishing that all our problems were gone doesn't work. Our lives wouldn't become instantly easier if our top 5 challenges just disappeared. Such means so much to us because of the setback and challenges we endured.
Number 3: foster relationships
Mark's 3rd piece of advice might be the most important one of the 3.
As we get older, life gets busier and it becomes harder to make close friends. Worse than that, we might even lose touch with some of our close connections: people move cities, spend more time with their growing families or have more professional responsibilities giving them less time for other activities.
Humans are social cooperative creatures. Cooperating increases our chances of success in so many aspects of our lives. Some of the most successful companies were started by multiple co-founders, not just one individual. Have you ever heard a tennis player give a speech after a tough victory? Almost all of them will mention their team, coaches, physios, trainers, and teammates. Even an individual sport like tennis requires an entire group of people to come together to succeed.
In today's world, it's become easier and easier to remain anonymous Mark said. You can bank from your couch, shop from the toilet and even find a new apartment without leaving your apartment!
How do we foster good relationships then? According to Mark, confirmation bias can play a big role in this. in simple terms, confirmation bias is when our brain ignores evidence that doesn't support our beliefs. We tend to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas.
What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.
— Warren Buffett
How can we use confirmation bias to foster better relationships? One of the keys is always to assume the best in people. If we tell our brain that our friends and family are inherently good and have positive intentions, our brain will naturally support and believe it and will try to find evidence that reinforces this belief.
Number 4: playful anarchy
Mark's last tip revolves around playful anarchy. For this one, I'd recommend watching the videos to better understand it. It is linked at the top of this article.
To describe it with words, Mark finished his speech by doing what he does best, which is sticking is sticking a graduate hat to a drone, and sending it flying above the crowd and over tIT's buildings.
What can we take away from this?
If you didn't want to read the entire article, here is a short version of Mark's 3 tips for new grads:
- Don't try to figure everything out before you even get started. Use passion and curiosity to guide you. Go one step at a time, don't trip yourself but don't stay stagnating. Take that first step and likely the next step will appear a little clearer.
- Turn your fear of failure into a desire to learn and build a true desire to never quit. The only way to do interesting things in life is to be willing to look stupid and be embarrassed as we fail and learn.
- Foster your relationships, don't try to stay anonymous. Humans are meant to be cooperative. We might be faster by ourselves, but we can go much further with others.