Graduation

Everyone gets knocked down. What matters is whether you get back up and keep going.

Healing our country is going to take what I call radical empathy. This is a moment to reach across divides of race, class, and politics, to try to see the world through the eyes of people very different from ourselves.

This is a battle-hardened hope, tempered by loss and clear-eyed about the stakes.

No just cause is futile, even if it's lost. What matters is to keep going, no matter what. Keep going.

The real version of this was that I was heartbroken, and I was scared, and I had no idea if I was doing the right thing.

In the moment, you don't know how important a story is going to be. In the moment, you don't know if you're fighting because you're right, or if you're fighting because your ego, and your desire to win, and your notion of yourself as the hero in your own story are clouding your judgment.

Trust that inner voice. Because more than ever we need people to be guided by their own senses of principle — and not the whims of a culture that prizes ambition, and sensationalism, and celebrity, and vulgarity, and doing whatever it takes to win.

The most traditionally successful people I know were divorced and they told me sacrificing their families wasn't worth it. Hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are.

Not everything in Silicon Valley or any industry or life for that matter need be portrayed as home runs or strike-outs — success or failure — it's just what you hear about so often because it's what sells newspapers.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.

I wish someone had told me at my own commencement that the one and only requirement for graduation was that I had to emerge out of the closed, cordoned-off space of my own head. I had to learn to listen.

We are the only species that can learn to think like another of our own species; the only one that records and remembers its history; the only one that tries to decipher the laws of the universe.