For me, this snippet, reminiscent of Nassim Taleb, was the surprising highlight of what was already a great article:
When people get rich it always ends up sounding like destiny. And the actual narratives sound too small, too fragile—and impossible to reproduce. Which makes for a bad story. Good stories are ones you can learn from. Imagine standing in front of the graduating class of Stanford and saying,
Man, I just don’t know. Wozniak wanted to show off for his nerd friends. I was ready to sell to Commodore. Xerox was so focused on the 1990s they forgot about the 1980s. NeXT, we just got further and further into the quagmire. Pixar, before Toy Story, it was the only hardware company less successful than NeXT. The iPhone launched without an App Store. But people were drawn to me, and I told them what they needed to hear in order to make each other rich. So do that: Go out there and tell people what they need to hear in order to make each other rich. When something works say that was the plan all along.
That would be a terrible commencement speech.
Cheers,
Sean
Locked
