Rober's first piece of advice is to embrace naive optimism. He compares life to crossing a big flowing river full of rocks — you can wiggle them with your toe and scan a few boulders ahead, but at some point you've just gotta pick one and jump because the river is dynamic and always changing. He used this approach himself going from college to NASA to YouTube to giving the MIT commencement speech — never a master plan, just one rock at a time. He argues that not knowing the full difficulty ahead is actually a strength: "Sometimes it's an advantage not to be the expert with all the experience. There's no reputational risk, so it's easier to try new things."