Advice for young people: Learn things deeply | John Carmack and Lex Fridman

Advice for young people: Learn things deeply | John Carmack and Lex Fridman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOv_dWDgIRM

What advice would you give to young people today about life, about career? How they can have a job, how they can have an impact, how they can have a life they can be proud of. So it was kind of fun. I got invited to give the commencement speech back at the. I went to college for two semesters and dropped out and went on to do my tech stuff, but they still wanted me to come back and give a commencement speech. Speech. And I've got that pinned on my Twitter account. I still feel good about everything that I said there. And my biggest point was that the path for me might not be the path for everyone. And in fact, the advice, the path that I took and even the advice that I would give based on my experience and learnings probably isn't the best advice for everyone. Because what I did was all about this knowledge in depth. It was about not just having this surface level ability to make things do what I want, but to really understand them through and through, to let me do the systems engineering work and to sometimes find these inefficiencies that can be bypassed and that the whole world doesn't need, that most programmers or engineers of any kind don't necessarily need to do that. They need to do a little job that's been parceled out to them. Be reliable, let people depend on you. Do quality work with all of that. But people that do have an inclination for wanting to know, know things deeper and learn things deeper, you know, the. There are just layers and layers of things out there. And it. It's amazing. It's. If you're the right person that is excited about that. I. The world's never been like this before. It's better than ever. I mean, everything that was wonderful for me is still there, and there's whole new worlds to explore on the different things that you can do and that, you know, it's hard work. Embrace the grind with it and understand as much as you can, and then be. Be prepared for opportunities to present themselves where you can't just say, this is my goal in life, and just push at that. I mean, you might be able to do that, but you're going to make more total progress. If you say, I am preparing myself with this broad set of tools, and then I'm being aware of all the way things are changing as I move through the world and as the whole world changes around me, and then looking for opportunities to deploy the tools that you've built, and there's going to be more and more of those types of things there where an awareness of what's happening, where the inefficiencies are, what things can be done, what's possible versus what's current practice, and then finding those areas where you can go and make an adjustment and make something that may affect millions or billions of people in the world, make it better, when maybe from your own example, how are you able to recognize this about yourself? That you saw the layers in a particular thing and you were drawn to discovering deeper and deeper truths about it? Is that something that was obvious to you that you couldn't help? Or is there some actions you had to take to actually allow yourself to dig deep? So, in the earliest days of personal computers, I remember the reference manuals and the very early ones, even had schematics of computers in the background in the back of the books, as well as firmware listings and things. And I could look at that. And at that time, when I was a younger teenager, I didn't understand a lot of that stuff, how the different things worked. I was pulling out the information that I could get, but I always wanted to know all of that. There was magical information sitting down there. It's like the elder lore that some greybeard wizard is the keeper of. And so I always felt that pull for wanting to know more, wanting to explore the mysterious areas there. And that followed right in through all the things that got the value, exploring the video cards, leading to the scrolling advantages, exploring some of the academic papers and things, learning about BSP trees and the different things that I could do with those systems, and just the huge larval phases, going through aerospace, just reading bookshelves full of books again, that point where I have enough money, I can buy all the books I want. It was so valuable there where I was terrible with my money when I was a kid, my mom thought I would always be broke because I'd buy my comic books and just be out of money. But it was like all the pizza I want, all the Diet Coke I want, video games, and then books, books. And it didn't take that much. As soon as I was making twenty seven k a year, I felt rich and I was just getting all the things that I wanted. But that sense of books have always been magical to me. And that was one of the things that really made me smile is Andre had said he found, when he came over to my, he said he found my library inspiring, just. And it was great to see, you know, I used to look at him. He's kind of a younger guy. I sometimes wonder if younger people these days have the same relationship with books that I do where they were such a cornerstone for me in so many ways, but that sense that, yeah, I always wanted to know it all. I know I can't. And that was like one of the last things I said. You can't know everything, but you should convince yourself that you can know anything. You know, any one particular thing. It was created and discovered by humans. You can learn it, you can find out what you need on there and you can learn it deeply. Yeah. You can drive a nail down through whatever layer cake problem space you've got and learn a cross section there. And not only can you have an impact doing that, you can attain happiness doing that. There's something so fulfilling about becoming a craftsman of a thing. Yeah. And I don't want to tell people that, look, this is a, a good career move, just you know, grit your teeth and you know, and bear it. I, you know, you want people, you want to. And I do think it is possible sometimes to find the joy in something like it might not immediately appeal to you, but I had told people early on, like in, in software times, that I, you know it, a lot of game developers are in it just because they are so passionate about games. But I was always really more flexible in what appealed to me. Where I had a said, I think I could be quite engaged doing operating system work or even database work. I would find the interest in that because I think most things that are significant in the world have a lot of layers and complexity to them and a lot of opportunities hidden within them. So that would probably be the most important thing to encourage to people is that you can, it's like weaponized curiosity. You can deploy your curiosity to find, to kind of like make things useful and valuable to you even if they don't immediately appear that way.