Find a BIG Cause

Sal Khan

08.17.19

There are a lot of things that inspire Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. The vision and commitment of the founders of the United States... Leaders who want to explore space... Visionaries who want to re-think healthcare, or transportation, or education. For Sal, what’s inspiring are people who authentically commit to causes that are bigger than themselves.

Summary:

There are a lot of things that inspire Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. The vision and commitment of the founders of the United States… Leaders who want to explore space… Visionaries who want to re-think healthcare, or transportation, or education. For Sal, what’s inspiring are people who authentically commit to causes that are bigger than themselves.

Think big. Think REALLY big. Now BIGGER. That’s what inspires Sal. He talks with Thuy about some of his heroes.

Thuy

When you need inspiration, where do you find it?
Sal_Khan

Sal Khan

So I get inspiration from any effort, whenever I see something that I think people have, kind of surrendered themselves to something bigger than themselves. And it's done authentically. And so you know I teach world history on Khan Academy. And so there's multiple events in world history where you see just like these incredibly, in some ways selfish acts, or acts that are much bigger than themselves.

This will sound almost cheesy, but if you even look at if you even look at what happened in the 13 colonies, around the time of the American Revolution, There was something very unique, a unique group of people who got together, and actually thought about things that were even better than themselves.

I think if you look at things in the present, I am inspired by, there are folks trying to explore space now. And talking about going to Mars. That's the type of thing that I think everyone gets. It's not just about what are shareholders earning this quarter, and how do we prop up the stock price. It's about hey how do we do things for our civilization?

Yuri Milner, he's a venture capitalist here in Silicon Valley. He's exploring an effort to take these chip-sized satellites and accelerate them to a fifth of the speed of light, to be able to explore Alpha Proxima. The closest star cluster to our system. You know stuff like that I find incredibly inspiring. There's efforts to rethink the healthcare system. There's efforts to rethink transportation. Obviously we are very invested in helping to rethink education. So all these things I think they get me very excited.