Video-sharing platform YouTube recently organised a virtual graduation ceremony for students who won’t receive their in-person farewell due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
And in attendance was a stellar crowd comprising former US President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, BTS, Lady Gaga, Malala Yousafzai, among others.
Google CEO certainly inspired everyone with his speech. He began with asking the students to work on things that makes them impatient.
“There are probably things about technology that frustrate you and make you impatient”, said Sundar Pichai in his speech.
Adding more, he said, that impatience will help create the next technology revolution and enable people to build things his generation could never dream of.
He also urged the students to not get frustrated by his generation’s approach to climate change or education, but continue being impatient as it will help in creating the progress the world needs.
“You will make the world better in your own ways. Even if you don’t know exactly how. The important thing is to be open-minded so you can find what you love,” he reiterated.
Adding to the nostalgia, he said that his father spent the equivalent of a year’s salary on his first plane ticket to the U.S. so he could attend Stanford. When he landed in California, reality hit him hard. “America was expensive. A phone call back home was more than $2 a minute, and a backpack cost the same as my dad’s monthly salary in India,” he mentioned.
He mentioned two moments that profoundly shaped the rest of his life, but he didn’t realise it at that time.
“The internet was literally being built all around me. The year I arrived at Stanford was the same year the browser Mosaic was released, which would popularise the world wide web and the internet.
“The summer I left was the same summer that a graduate student named Sergey Brin met a prospective engineering student named Larry Page,” he addressed in his announcement.
He said that his life got better when his family had more access to technology.
He concluded by asking students to be impatient and hopeful.
“The only thing that got me from here to there—other than luck—was a deep passion for technology, and an open mind.
So take the time to find the thing that excites you more than anything else in the world. Not the thing your parents want you to do. Or the thing that all your friends are doing. Or that society expects of you.
I know you’re getting a lot of advice today. So let me leave you with mine:
Be open … be impatient … be hopeful.”
