While talking about life, decisions and success, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has narrated an untold story from his student days. While addressing the graduating students at Stanford University, he recalled how as a young student at Stanford, he skipped class for the first time and went on an impromptu road trip to Las Vegas. From this experience he learned that the outcome of every decision is not life changing.
According to a Business Today report, Sundar Pichai told that during his first winter quarter at Stanford, a classmate named Pat suddenly made a suggestion. One Wednesday morning in January, when I was in my first winter quarter, we were walking to class. She asked, would you like to go to Vegas instead?
The offer was completely out of Pichai's comfort zone; he had never missed a class or gone on a road trip before. Still, he agreed. Both the students packed their things and left for Las Vegas through the mountains. On the way, he saw snowfall for the first time. Recalling those moments, Sundar Pichai said that when we were passing by, snow started falling. I had never seen snow before. I put out my hand to catch it, after touching those soft pieces of ice I could not believe that they were so soft.
After a nine-hour drive, the two finally reached Las Vegas. After Pat taught him how to play blackjack, Pichai started with $5 and decided to stop playing after winning some more money. If I just get some rest, the world won't end.
He said that this trip left a deep impression on him, not just because of Las Vegas, but because of what it taught him about life. For the first time, I realized that if I just got some rest, the world wouldn't end. Pichai told the graduates that people who are very successful often feel a lot of pressure to get every decision right, from studies and internships to careers and important life milestones. Referring to the Vegas story, Pichai talked about the three filters that have guided his life and career.
Choose Optimism: He said that the first filter is optimism. Recalling his upbringing in Chennai, Pichai said he grew up amid concerns of drought and limited access to technology. He remembers arriving in California and finding the landscape to be brown instead of green. His host mother, Mrs. Jane Earl, responded, "We like to call it golden." Pichai said that where I saw brownness, he saw golden color. He described the conversation as a lesson in looking at challenges from a new perspective and finding possibilities where others see limitations. He said that this same attitude gave him courage even when he gave up his intention of doing PhD and changed the direction of his career.
Work on the hard things: The second filter is to detect difficult challenges. Pichai in 2004 Google and later becoming part of the small team that developed the Chrome browser. At the time, many people inside the company believed that creating a browser would require hundreds of engineers. There were only about 10 people in the Chrome team. Development slowed after launch and then Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed Chrome as a rounding error. Instead of retreating, the team kept improving the product. Pichai said, working on difficult things has taught me a lot and even if you fall short of meeting the high goals you set, you will still achieve something great.
Do what excites you: He said that the third filter is to do work that really excites you. Pichai described how access to technology changed his life, from growing up with little access to computers in India to arriving at Stanford in 1993 and witnessing the rapid development of the Internet firsthand. That excitement eventually led him to Google and later to projects like Android and Chromebooks.
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