You're going to have these moments that are going to feel like insurmountable rejection. You are going to have moments where you know, the girl that you already imagined could be your wife, doesn't want to be. Deal with it, persevere, it's going to make you stronger. You're going to have moments where the job you wanted or the jobs you wanted, where you got rejected 20 or 30 times, it's all going to work out at the end and it's all for a good purpose. And I would tell that young self it's just like yeah, focus in those early stages of your career, on building your skills, finding great mentors, optimizing for learning and optimizing for setting the foundation for what really is an adventure of life. Always keep space for your passions. I think that is what 20-year-old Sal did do reasonably well, is that no matter what the career was, and I tell this to anyone who wants to listen to me, is you got to always leave a little carveout for your passions or your interests. If I didn't do that, there'd be no Khan Academy.
I see a lot of my friends, you know when we were in college, we'd sit in the dorm rooms and we'd all day dream. We'd say well, next year when I get a good job, I got to pay off my student loans, but boy if I ever make $1 million, I'm going to do this. If I ever make $5 million, I'm going to do this. You know some of my friends, they are now making way more than that, and they've kind of forgotten. They've kind of forgotten what they were telling themselves in the dorm room. They had all these passions. And now they might make X million and if you really ask them, they are just trying to go for 2X million or 4X million or 8X million, and that's okay if they're getting real energy from it and some of them are. I mean some of them, I don't think it's about the money, it's about the hey I'm helping entrepreneurs or I'm starting a new thing that's going to create value for the world, and if the money happens, that happens. That's pretty healthy. But I think sometimes it is a, you know because money is so quantifiable, people view it as the scorecard of life. Hey, this is you know, I'm at X and so-and-so is at 1.5X, oh they've succeeded more, and that's the furthest thing from the truth.
