Class of 2013: Future Perfect

Good morning.

The first thing I want to get out of the way is that you look as dorky, skinny, awkward and frightened as I did when my graduation day arrived. I know many of you now, in the year 2043, and you can't believe you wore those things either. For those select few wearing Google Glass, I can only say life will get better.

I just spent thirty years in the future you created and I was asked to come back and say a few words at your graduation. I’ve given this speech 17 times before, on this very morning. We’ve had some close calls with the occasional turn of a phrase or misplaced comma. But I think we've got it right this time. The team at the Seldon Foundation assure me that if you listen carefully, and take my advice to heart, there is a 99.8% probability that you’ll live a wonderful life and help us all through the particularly sticky part of the future that lies ahead.

Before I begin my talk, I’d like to clarify a few things for some of you in the audience today.

Jules, you really must dream a little smaller. I feel bad saying that, as dreaming bigger is one of the things we need most. In a world where anyone can make anything and make it right, it turns out making the right thing is harder than it looks. Most people from your generation had a hard time dreaming big enough. A bit too shackled to the small thinking of the first information age. But, nobody enjoyed your little experiment in restructuring all life forms based on the novels of …. Oh. I’m sorry they’ve now told me I can’t even come close to giving you any ideas at all. It might be best if you “multitask” during this speech. I think that’s what your generation called it when you completely ignoring something hard while you distracted yourself with easy but essentially useless activities.

There you go, I can already see your eyes glazing over and drifting towards your phone.

Kayla, hang tough, it’s actually going to turn out better than you think. Sometimes a thousand unconnected things come together. You may feel adrift today, unsure where or if you should focus, unclear how you’re going to make it through to see tomorrow. Your self-awareness is a gift. Most people take much longer to realize they have blind spots and that we are all fundamentally broken along some dimension or another. They take much longer than you will to realize that the most interesting things happen when we find others that are broken in different ways, when we take on someone else’s agenda rather than our own, when we fit together and do something bigger than any one of us could ever have accomplished alone.

That class you took as a lark last year? It’s the one that gives you the insight to try something different. We are all really glad you did. My grandchildren thank you (or will when you catch up to them.)

Jon — you know who you are — you took a few of my comments a bit too literally and nearly caused the great mass extinction event of 2026. Note: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Please go back and study the manufacturer's non-deterministic design rules before trying out your Makerbot 2025.

Antoine I only have one word for you, grit. Write it down for when all seems lost. Remember that a failure isn’t someone who gets knocked down. It’s someone who doesn’t get back up. Some cliché’s are cliché’s for a reason. Grit is one of those things we didn’t quite know how to teach back in 2013. Get more practice at failing in little ways and somehow trying again.

I can’t tell you the number of times I screwed up, fumbled, fell, stumbled. Made a fool of myself. Turned red. Wished I could bury my head in my pillow and shut out the world.

As you get older the only difference, if you’re doing things right, is that the stumbles are a bit more epic, you learn to laugh at yourself just a little bit more, and a few more friends are around to help you get back up. Don’t lose your sense of humor. Don’t forget to be humble. Don’t forget to reach further than you can grasp. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself. You’ll turn out to be one of our best leaders. Your ability to shine will come from your comfort in the uncomfortable, from your ability to hold a few ideas in opposition and NOT act decisively. People will follow you because you’re willing to admit you don’t know but also willing to try something enough to fall a few times. Your brilliance will be in giving yourself and your team enough time to think, and to try.

Jacob, don’t be a dilettante. If we hear about one more person wanting to learn how to code “because everyone should” we’ll all probably have another world-wide reboot party and reset this entire generation back to their birth parameters. You can’t be a physicist either. Get over it. It’s wonderful that you want to try, heck we all now teach kindergarten students algorithmic thinking, but people who dream in code are rare and when you don’t respect them you make everything cheap.

If you’re going to do something, learn it deeply. You’ll have far more respect for someone who learned a different skill than you. We need interdisciplinary collaboration in the future. All the hard problems are at the edges not in the center of a discipline. But you aren’t any use to us if you don’t understand the value of a discipline and don’t respect others who think differently.

Many times in the coming years you’ll wish you could understand why "they" are so passionate about a particular belief. Learn to trust them. If you’ve learned something deeply enough they’ll trust you when you dig your heels in about some odd decision. Hint: spend more time learning to draw. It’s not as sexy, but by 2021 there will be no successful leaders who don’t spend half of their time sketching on a whiteboard with their team. Drawing is oddly enough, the lingua franca between disciplines. And, it turns out you become pretty fluent.

Hannah, keep at it. While others focused on learning tools you spent time bending them. You found gaps between tools--you made them do things nobody had ever dreamed about--you made them sing. We now understand that tool bending is far more important than tool use. Tools define what we can think and in the future we need people who can think much bigger.

Um, can someone make sure Jules is still checking in on Facebook before I continue?

Hannah your focus on building something, regardless of the capabilities of a particular tool, started a movement in toolbending; in virtuousity; that blossomed in the next decade. You became the Jimmy Hendrix of a generation, but instead of bending a guitar to speak, you made the Internet of Manufacturing sing. By 2015 you had already made your mark. As atoms and bits blended and flowed and the line between designing a product and using it, between marketing and manufacturing blurred, you bent the world in a new direction. You helped us see what would happen when all manufacturing upcycled, recycled, overcycled, and shifted into a Hyper-local ecology.

Zach, tomorrow you will step out into a world that will be characterized by future generations as a new epoch in human culture. Three words will echo through the next century. Unbounded. Malignant. Complexity. It turns out you are the first generation of humans who will live “in” the information. You will live in a world where computation and connectivity flow like liquid throughout your lives.

You and all your friends will be superheroes, arch villains, malcontents, saints, and sinners. Basically just like your parents. The only difference from past generations will be that when you dream, or fail, you hold the power to crash civilization in the palm of your hand. “Ooops!” will not cover your stumbles and you in particular have a few in the next few years that are legendary. We won't speak about the great unraveling of 2016 or the time you confused Watson so much that he made us all pets.

So take care, and care for your fellow graduates in the days, months, and years ahead. We need every one of your fellow classmate's brains on deck, but we also need you to take it easy and be patient with the future. It'll come in its own sweet time. Enjoy the ride.

OK, now that I've gotten the few comments out of the way that seem to always cause the most problems in future timelines I'm ready to give my formal remarks...

Good luck.