Senior Speech

A couple days ago, I was sitting in class when a teacher started counting to 10.

Four. Five. Six.

And before she even got to the next number, people were already looking at each other.

Seven.

I’m assuming a decent amount of you know exactly why that is funny, which, when you actually think about it, makes absolutely no sense.

It is literally two numbers.

There is nothing inherently funny about six or seven. There isn’t really even a joke there. But somehow, at some point, enough of us saw the same videos, heard the same sound, watched enough other people laugh at it, so eventually those two numbers started producing a reaction in our heads.

And I was bothered by the fact that I had never made the conscious decision that those two numbers were funny.

I just found them funny.

Then I got to thinking, and I realized that the class’s collective laughter was bigger than those numbers. And it made me think about how many reactions I have every day that feel completely mine, even though something else may have helped train them into me.

For years, we have talked about algorithms as tools that learn from us. They learn what music we like, what videos we watch, what we buy, what makes us stop scrolling, and what keeps us on an app for another thirty seconds.

But there is another side to that relationship that I think about a lot.

While the algorithm is learning us, we are also learning from the algorithm.

It shows us something, we react, it measures the reaction, and then it gives us more of whatever worked. We train it, it changes what we see, and what we see slowly changes us.

Henry David Thoreau wrote almost two hundred years ago that, “Men have become the tools of their tools.”

He obviously was not talking about scrolling.

But I think he understood something that matters even more now. A tool is supposed to help a person accomplish something they already wanted to accomplish. Somewhere along the way, we started building tools sophisticated enough to influence what we want in the first place.

And I don’t say any of this because I am anti-technology. It is basically the opposite. My friends know that I am the number one proponent of AI.

But I also don’t think this is only about technology.

Because algorithms are not the only things that condition us.

High school does it too.

Other people do it. Expectations do it. Embarrassment does it.

Think about how many times you have had an idea and immediately imagined how everyone else would react before you even considered whether you actually wanted to do it. Or how quickly we decide that someone is the smart kid, the athletic kid, the artistic kid, the weird kid, the person who could start something, or the person who probably couldn’t.

Eventually, if you hear the same story about yourself enough times, you can start repeating it in your own head.

And that is the part I think matters.

Because there are people sitting in this room right now who could build things that do not exist yet, write something that changes the way somebody thinks, start a company, become a scientist, make art, teach, or end up doing something none of us even has a word for right now.

I can’t tell you that believing you can do something means you will succeed. That obviously isn’t true. You can believe in something completely and still fail, which is fine.

But if you decide before you start that you are not the type of person who could ever do it, then somebody else has already made the decision for you.

Steve Jobs has a famous quote that says: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people use.”

So what I have started trying to do, whether it is with technology or just with my own life, is notice the difference between the things I have actually chosen and the things I have simply learned to choose.

Because more and more things are going to compete for the right to tell us what to watch, what to want, what to care about, and even what kind of person we are.

Maybe we should start paying more attention to how much we let those things shape us without even realizing it.

And maybe we should pay attention to the beliefs we have about ourselves, too.

Because if we can be conditioned into believing things about ourselves that are not necessarily true, then we can also question those beliefs. We can decide that being embarrassed is not a good enough reason not to try something, that failing once is not enough evidence that we are bad at it, and that the version of ourselves we have gotten used to does not have to be the version we stay.

Henry Ford once said: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are probably right.”

Believing you can do something obviously does not mean you will succeed. But believing you cannot do it guarantees that you will never give yourself the chance.

So whatever it is that you want to build, change, try, or become, pay attention to the story you are telling yourself about whether you are capable of doing it.

Because if a computer can teach an entire room of us to laugh at two numbers, imagine what we might be capable of if we became just as deliberate about what we teach ourselves to believe.