Why Does Ankur Moitra Say to Pretend You Already Won?

Ankur Moitra says the best way to live a rich and fulfilling life is to pretend you have already won, then figure out what you would do.

After a sabbatical in the Bay Area, living in Palo Alto while college stress sat in the cafes, he came back to MIT and was asked to give the convocation speech. The auditorium held freshmen and their families, 17-year-old kids who had already won the game of looking good on paper. He remembered starting college excited just to learn, filling little notebooks with a four-year plan so the classes would line up and he could take photonics as a sophomore. He had no idea what photonics was. It sounded fun and fancy. He sees the later path as endless optimizing: APs and extracurriculars to reach an elite school, then classes that might be skipped to prepare for interviews at a frontier lab, then restricted stock units. A person can win at every stage and still be left with so what.

When he started as faculty at MIT, Sanjeev Arora told him the easiest way to get tenure is to pretend you already have it and do what you would have wanted to do all along. He would give graduate students and high schoolers the same advice. Pretend you already have tenure, then decide what you would do. Finding something you really believe in is the only way he knows to be fulfilled. A fulfilling career is a problem that is important, that you find interesting, and that you are good at. Two of the three means you are pretty lucky. All three means you are happy for the rest of your life.