When Sundar Pichai first arrived in California for studies, he looked out at the hills and saw them burnt brown, a landscape that seemed tired, drained, and waiting for rain. His host looked at the same hills and called them golden. Same hills, same light; two different perspectives, and thus two different worlds. In his commencement / graduation address to the graduating class of 2026, Pichai returned to that moment and drew from it the first of three things worth carrying: learn to see the gold.
Optimism Is a Way Of Seeing
Optimism is not the belief that everything will go well. It is closer to what Proust meant when he wrote that the real voyage of discovery lies in having new eyes. The facts of your life will often be brown and unpromising. Whether they are also golden depends on the quality of your attention.
There is an old story from the Franciscan tradition about Brother Juniper, who was so incapable of seeing malice in anyone that he was routinely swindled; and yet who was, by every account, the happiest man in the order. Francis is said to have wished for a whole forest of such Junipers. The world mistook his optimism for foolishness. It was actually a discipline: a refusal to let the worst reading of a thing become the only reading.
You will meet people who consider cynicism a form of intelligence. It isn't. It is only a way of being disappointed in advance.
Work on the Harder Things
The easy things will not carry you far, Pichai said. They rarely do. Pichai gave examples from the kind of problems he chose to solve when he began working for Google. In 1898, Marie Curie began stirring cauldrons of pitchblende in a leaking shed in Paris, a shed so cold that she recorded the indoor temperature in her notebooks. It took her four years of that labour to isolate a single decigram of radium. She could have chosen a hundred easier problems. She chose the one that resisted her.
Kennedy said it plainly at Rice University in 1962: we go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The hardness was the point. Difficulty is not an obstacle placed between you and the work; very often, difficulty is the work. It is the only reliable instrument we have for finding out what we are made of. Choose the problem that is slightly too big for you. You will grow to its size.
Do What Genuinely Excites You
Rilke, writing to a young poet who had asked whether his verses were any good, refused to answer the question. Instead he told him to go inward, to find out whether he would have to write even if he were forbidden to. Ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night, he said, must I do this?
That is a better question than "will this succeed?" Because excitement is not frivolous. It is data. It tells you where your attention naturally goes when no one is rewarding you for it, and attention, sustained over decades, is what a life is made of. The world is very good at telling young people what they ought to want. It is much worse at noticing what they actually love.
Three things, then, and they fit together more neatly than they first appear. Optimism lets you see a hard thing as worth attempting rather than as a wall. Hard things are the only ones that reshape you. And excitement is the fuel that keeps you at a hard thing long enough for it to change you.
In education, in life, in relationship, etc. the hills outside your window are probably brown this morning. Look again.
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