Philosophical

Imagine yourself in 50 years. You're in your early 70s, near the end of your career. You start to reflect on your life and think of all the things you wished you had done differently. And just while that's happening, a genie appears and gives you a second chance. You blink your eyes and find yourself right here, right now. The genie was serious.

The person under 25 is less a rough draft than a finely honed instrument, tailor-made for one of life's greatest periods of challenge and change.

A generation is not 'youth.' Youth is just an age bracket. It's like an empty hotel room that different generations move into — with their own baggage — and then soon leave. Sometimes that room swells with sweet music, sometimes it throbs with death metal, sometimes it's utterly silent. But it's never the same.

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.

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.

Even if you know you are right, you may be wrong.

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.

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.

Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

Don't search for defining moments, because they will never come. The moments that define you have already happened, and they will already happen again. And it passes so quickly.