Long

Don't be afraid to shoot the long ball. Take the risk. Life is too short to spend your time avoiding failure. If I had worried about failure or listened to those who do, I would never have started my company and never run for mayor.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them. The world will not do your work for you, but it will meet you more than halfway if you go after what you want with energy and passion.

The great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you're not special. Because everyone is.

In the days ahead, a lot of people will tell you to trust your instincts and don't be afraid to take chances, and I am definitely one of those people. But I would also say this: don't rush into the next phase of your life.

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever, but to be part of an ongoing historical movement.

We show off and have a vision of success as a ladder to climb. But there is no ladder, and it has no top, and eventually we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to be, what we want to stand for.

Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world. There are things you can do to lift the human spirit — things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character.

I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try to find the most interesting-looking person in the room, the ## person most unlike you, and talk to them.

The gap is the thing that will drive you. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

Don't be afraid to be a late bloomer. Repeatedly. Remember, you have time to figure out what you want to do, who you need to be, and where you want to go. You have time to fail. You have time to try again.

We do not think of our lives in a linear way. We remember series of moments — memorable moments — and together these moments make up the meshwork of our lives. Make each moment count.

I knew what intellectual passion felt like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling.