I'm going to tell you just one thing today. I'm going to tell
you what it takes to change the world.
When I got out of graduate school and started working at IBM Research,
I thought the world worked like this. Clever people had good ideas and
turned them into scientific papers, or paintings, or concertos. Other people
recognized this goodness and picked them up, and ... well, stuff happened.
That was it. That's how good ideas changed the world.
That turns out to be completely wrong. Completely wrong. Do you
know how it really works? The way it really works is that clever people
have good ideas and turn them into scientific papers, or paintings, or
concertos. Then everyone else tells them that what they're doing is impossible,
or impractical, or irrelevant, or wrong.
And at that point, most clever people stop. They decide they're done.
They've published their paper, they've finished their painting, they've
completed their concerto. And almost always, nothing happens after that.
This is the path to cloistered obscurity. And if that's what you want,
it's a pretty easy path.
You've all experienced that lucid moment of creation. You're writing
a narrative and, suddenly, it starts to write itself, and it's all you
can do to type fast enough to keep up. Or you're struggling with a theorem
and, all of a sudden, you can see the whole thing laid out, from beginning
to end, like a detailed map of a beautiful, unexplored land. And you know
how to get all the way from one end to the other. How fortunate you are!
Most people never get to experience that, never get to see the face of
god. You do.
But that incredible feeling of insight, that amazing experience of creation
- is not enough. It's not enough if you want your ideas to change the world.
So what does it take? You have to be right, of course, in your intuition
about what will work and what will be important. And you have to be visionary.
That means you have to be really good, and really insightful, and extremely
knowledgeable. But, since you're sitting here today, I assume you're really
good, and at least on your way to being really insightful and knowledgeable.
(Don't kid yourselves. You're not there yet! But you will be.) But even
if you're all that, it's not enough.
What it takes to change the world - and the thing that will distinguish
you in your career - is not intelligence. There are lots of smart
people in the world. It's not talent. Plenty of people are more talented
that you. What it takes - and what will distinguish you - is stubbornness,
your refusal to give up on your vision - on your dream - when everyone
tells you it's impossible, or impractical, or irrelevant, or wrong. You
will have to work with people who can't possibly do what you do. You will
have to do their jobs for them. You will have to be willing for them to
forget that it was your idea. You will have to make them think it was their
idea in the first place. You will have to win their hearts as well as their
minds. You will have to do whatever it takes to champion your idea.
What will distinguish you is your passion - and your ability - to find
ways around the thousands of roadblocks that people will put in your way.
And if not around them, then over them. And if not over them, then straight
through them.
You know the little red button on IBM ThinkPad keyboards? That TrackPoint
thingie that replaces a mouse? Ted Selker, a friend of mine who's now at
the MIT Media Lab, invented that. He had a prototype that he showed everybody
around the lab, and it worked great. But it wasn't going anywhere. So Ted
flew to Japan - where they made the keyboards - with a prototype and a
sleeping bag. And he told them he wasn't leaving until they built all their
keyboards with his little red button in them. "No one wants this," they
said, so Ted did user studies showing that they did. "It's not as good
as a mouse," they said, so Ted did ergonomic studies proving it was better.
"It'll cost too much," they said, so Ted worked with the manufacturing
engineers to come up with a low cost design. "All right," they said, "we'll
put it in." Then. Then Ted rolled up his sleeping bag and came home.
Was it Ted's job to do user studies, or ergonomic studies, or manufacturing
redesigns? It didn't matter. Ted's a brilliant guy. But that's not why
his ideas changed the world. His ideas changed the world because he was
stubborn. And passionate, and dedicated, and everything else. But stubborn.
Stubborn.
Eleven years ago, my group at IBM Research was worried about the problem
of computer viruses. We looked into the future and saw that the whole world
would move onto the Internet and that viruses, which were not really a
big deal at the time, would become a global plague as a result. We created
the idea of an Immune System that could automatically protect the world
from viruses. It would find completely new viruses on your PC, send them
to an analysis center where they would be analyzed. A cure would then be
distributed to millions of computers around the world. And this would all
happen automatically, without error, and faster than the virus itself could
spread - in just a few minutes from beginning to end. No one believed we
could do it, including some of the people in our group! After we showed
that it was possible, people said the problem would never get bad enough
to need our solution. After viruses became the huge problem we predicted,
people said customers wouldn't buy our solution. After we brought them
customers who were clamoring for it, they said they didn't have the resources
to implement it. So we implemented it ourselves.
There were innumerable opportunities to quit, to say "This is too much
trouble," to say "Fine, we'll go work on something else." Criminey - it
took eleven years! But we were stubborn. We wouldn't give up. We
knew it could work, and we knew it had to work if we were going
to solve the awful problem of Internet viruses. And, right now, a dozen
patents later, a dozen papers later, and hundreds of thousands of lines
of code later, it's protecting millions of people 24 hours a day. It works.
Just like we said it would.
Before I close, I'd like to tell you about a project we're just starting.
It's really very exciting. It's called Autonomic Computing, and the idea
is really simple. Computers are too complicated. You shouldn't have to
set them up, and configure them, and tune them, and upgrade them, and fiddle
around with them when something goes wrong. They should just plain work,
like your refrigerator does. And I'm not just talking about your laptop.
I mean the millions of systems on which the world depends every day. It's
like computing on Star Trek, where you've never seen a systems administrator
or a help desk. Computing that just plain works. It's really different
from the way computing is today. And you know what? People are telling
me that what we're proposing is impossible, or impractical, or irrelevant,
or wrong. And you know what else? I love it when they do that. I'm
stubborn. And that's how you change the world.
Thank you very much.
