# The Game of Life

*Fail early, fail often. And when in doubt, fail in the direction of kindness*

I recently was invited to give a speech at my high school's "Cum Laude" ceremony, comprising the top 20% of the graduating class.

I was instructed to give some advice to the students, who are around ten years younger than me. In the process of writing this speech, I realized that there were a few mental models that I have been using consistently since I graduated from college. In my speech, I tried to summarize them:

* You can become proficient at anything
* The difficult aspect of the above statement is figuring out what you want to become proficient in
* To figure that out, try a lot of different things and don't be afraid of being bad at those things at the outset
* Once you decide what you want to proficient in, practice it consistently and do not give up

## The Speech
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## The Unedited Transcript

Thanks Mr valentine for the kind intro. Mr valentine was my freshman year English teacher in 2009. In addition to teaching us how to write, he also encouraged us to associate learning with fun. I’ll never forget him challenging my friend Jon to a push-up contest in the middle of class.

Let it be known that Mr Valentine won.

Good evening everyone,

I am honored to be here amongst so many familiar faces.

Thank you to MKA for inviting me to speak to some of this generation’s best and brightest.

MKA has always been a special place. The close friendships that I forged at MKA have stayed strong to this day.

There are many lessons that I learned from my teachers and coaches at MKA that have deeply affected me, some of which I’d like to touch upon tonight.

But first, congratulations to the parents of the honorees. You must feel very proud of your kids. The fact that they are here today is as much of a credit to you as it is to them.

You must be excited that the teenage years are almost over.

In high school I was a menace to my parents.

However, I became a lot closer with them once I moved out of their house and got a job. Keeping a household clean and in order is difficult, something I did not internalize until I lived on my own.

Now I’m the one asking people to take their shoes off when they enter my house.

Parents, before you know it, your kids will have become full grown adults.

Congratulations to all of the students and soon-to-be graduates. You’re so close to the finish line. You’re finally about to begin your life and there is so much to look forward to.

I speak from my heart when I say that MKA has prepared you very well for your college experience. Academically, college will be difficult but not as difficult as for those who didn’t have the privilege of getting an MKA education.

So before I go on, I think you all should pat yourselves on the back for having gotten to where you are today.

Savor the rest of this spring and summer, spend a lot of time with each other, and be excited for what’s to come.

### YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT TO BE

I don’t think there’s anything I can say to better prepare you academically.

But, I want to offer my advice for life outside of the classroom.

Up until now, many of your choices were made up for you, whether you knew it or not. College is likely the first time that you’ll have so many choices and no one will tell you what to do:

What to study
Which of the student clubs to join
What to eat and when to eat. How many meals to eat a day.
When to go to sleep and when to wake up.
What to wear. This is always difficult for MKA graduates.
How often to exercise
And of course, Who to date. The dating pool is much larger in college. The odds are good, but the goods can be odd.

Think about those choices. Do you even think about them as choices you can make? You’re about to enter a stage in your life where you can form your own answers to all of them out of an abundance of options.

But Fear not, there are no wrong decisions to be made in the Game of Life.

At some point in my junior year at college, I realized that Life is kind of a video game. Specifically, life is like one those open-world role-playing games where you can customize your own character, take on any side quest you want and develop any skill that you want.

College isn’t quite the totally unconstrained game that I’m promising you. That will come after college. You’re still going to be a college student with class and homework commitments. But you’re going to have a lot more free time, and you will have a choice about how to spend that free time.

Want to learn to code? Want to learn to throw an axe? Want to learn to ferment Kimchi? You’re going to have the time to find the YouTube video teaching you how to do that.

If there is one thing I’d like you to take from this speech, then it is this: You can be whoever you want to be in life, and that can start tomorrow. Tonight even. And Certainly in college.

Want to be a fashion designer? A chef? Pursue it in your free time. In college, there won’t be anyone stopping you. It’s actually really simple to get started. You just need to start doing what that person does:

The only difference between a professional weightlifter and you is that they lift weights consistently. A poet writes poetry. An actor acts. A film director makes videos.

And they were all really bad when they first started. Their secret was that they never stopped. A good poet is a bad poet who never stopped writing. A viral influencer is a bad one who never stopped producing content and then deleted their older videos.

I’m not an experienced public speaker, but I knew that if I spoke tonight and made mistakes, then I’d be better the next time I had to give a speech. I want to be an excellent speech maker one day, and this is an important learning step for me to get there.

Expect to be very bad whenever you try a new thing, and then you can only surprise yourself to the upside.

(I should add a caveat now, before I go on, and remind you that there are some things you need to do. Parents, you’ll like this line.

You need to eat, drink water, get sleep, moisturize and wear sunscreen. You also should go outside and touch grass once a day. This is so that your health bar doesn’t run out in the video game.)

With a full health bar and a lot of time, you can literally do anything, and you just need to figure out what you find worth doing.

### TO FIND OUT WHO YOU WANT TO BE, TRY ON MANY HATS

Once you decide who you want to be, the best way to get there is to start doing the thing and not giving up.

Now, you might be wondering. How do I know what I want to be?

How do I know what I like?

This is a great question. It’s arguably THE question. Religions, philosophies, and advertisements have all been created to answer this question for you. It’s a hard one and one you should answer for yourself.

My experience is that what you like will change very often in your life as you get more experience. I think what’s most important is that you keep an open mind.

Try not to turn down side quests, especially when you’re young.

To figure out what you like, talk to a lot of people and never discount someone’s opinion. Most importantly, be curious.

You might have heard that curiosity killed the cat, but what people don’t talk enough about is that the cat in question had nine lives. So even if curiosity killed the cat, the cat emerged as a smarter cat with 8 lives left. Sometimes I wish I were a cat.

Curiosity is great. Try to learn about anything you are curious about. If you like what you’re learning so far, go deeper. If not, then at least you figured out one more thing that you are not interested in.

You should periodically remind yourself that you can customize your character whenever you want to. If you’re sick of being an axe thrower then you don’t need to keep being an axe thrower. If you are dreading having to do what you need to do tomorrow, then you should think about why you are doing that thing in the first place.

Perhaps this will lead you to changing your major to one that you are excited about.

Perhaps you’ll quit a club you joined originally just because it was the activity that your parents made you do your whole life.

At any point in life, you can choose to learn a new skill. You’ll just need to be OK with starting at the bottom again and experiencing a lot of failure.

If you don’t have an open mind, then you might miss an opportunity to try something new that you find really fun.

This is why my partner and I have one rule:

Try everything twice.

(Except the things you should only try once)

College is the perfect time to experiment and try new things. Check out that pottery class, that Judo class, take buddhist philosophy, introductory ballet, train for a half marathon. Get your dream haircut. You’ll be shocked at what activities light a spark in you.

Don’t be afraid of embracing change and experiment with the latest tools. I bet you can’t even tell which parts of this speech were written by ChatGpt.

There are a lot of interesting things in this world. Some of them might be so interesting that you might want to go learn more about them. Follow that instinct.

I’ve found that the most frustrating part of life is that there are so many things I would love to become an expert in, but I just don’t have enough time to dive into all of those rabbit holes. And I would rather explore one or two topics deeply than a lot of them briefly.

### ONCE YOU DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO SKILL UP IN, DO IT A LOT AND DON’T GIVE UP

Once you’ve decided who you want to be, don’t get easily discouraged. Some people will find what you are doing to be strange. As long as you are not harming anyone, then you are not wrong.

When I decided to quit my job as a trader and work on a cryptocurrency startup in 2017, everyone thought I was crazy. But I think that’s just because there was no commonly accepted roadmap for where I was going. I was building things with tools that were so new that there wasn’t yet a textbook explaining how to use them. Many people still think I’m crazy, but there are always going to be critics.

It’s a lot easier to point out flaws in an idea than to come up with the idea. History doesn’t remember the critics over the long run. And in the real long run, history won’t remember anyone. So why be a critic when it’s way more fun proving them wrong?

I am not the most experienced person in this room in the game of life, but I have developed an ongoing thesis that I’m pretty confident about.

That is: all adults are making up things as they go. Everyone’s hacking it. I hacked this speech last night and i’m making changes on the fly.

College is the perfect time to fail at something. No one will remember that you took that one astrophysics course and failed the first test miserably, and then switched your major. No one will remember that time you tried out for the swimming team and didn’t make it. Unlike MKA, there are enough people in college for you to blend in and be forgotten.

So go for that crazy idea now and don’t give up until you’ve given it a real effort. Go try to grow a pineapple in your closet. Make a video essay about the geometrical beauty of cauliflower. Ask YouTube: “how do I make my own perfume?” But maybe don’t try to microwave a microwave microwaving a toaster.

(I’ve already tried this for you. It didn’t work for me).

If failure is a requisite step to success, then you’d do best to get all your failure out of the way in college. Fail early, fail often. Only then can you learn about your weaknesses.

In summary:
You can be whoever you want to be,
In order to figure out what you want to be, first figure out what you like and dislike. To do that, try a lot of things and talk to a lot of people
Once you decide who you want to be, you just need to put in the time, make incremental improvement, and not give up.
Fortunately, you have a lot of time ahead of you. You are time rich and experience poor.

### CONCLUSION: IT TAKES A VILLAGE

I appreciate you all for being here tonight. Tonight is a celebration of achievement. There is a lot to look forward to for everyone.

I’ve talked a lot about how you can achieve your dreams, but from my experience, achieving anything requires a community effort. No one has achieved anything on their own. This is a lesson I learned at MKA on the soccer field. In some endeavors you will be a role-player rather than the main character.

Embrace that, for in other situations in which you find yourself playing the main character, you’re going to appreciate having loyal role-players.

Remember, you are playing the video game of life. And so is everyone else. There is no actual main character, we’re all role players. We’re all trying to figure out the answer to questions like “What do I like. And what do I want to do with my life”. One day you’ll think you have answer, and a few years later, you might have a different answer.

Embrace the chaos.

Students, appreciate your parents. Appreciate each other, and appreciate your teachers. Be kind to everyone.

We talked a lot about embracing failure. To that, I’d like to add one final piece of advice.

When in doubt, fail in the direction of kindness.

And good luck in the game of life.

## Press Release about the ceremony

[Link](https://www.mka.org/mkanewspost/~board/news-posts/post/mka-inducts-21-seniors-to-cum-laude-society)