This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube talk titled "John Lilly: The Virtue of Hard Situations" (created 2013-02-14). It features a single speaker—John Lilly—giving a personal, career-focused talk about integrity, resilience, and learning from failure. He shares anecdotes from Stanford (switching out of physics after a low grade), repeatedly applying for roles (CS198 coordinator), early false starts in venture and startups, and feeling like the inexperienced new partner at Greylock. The core message is to be clear about your integrity and deliberately put yourself into hard situations where you will be challenged and learn.
Chapters
Warren Buffett's got this quote I think that it's like what you try to find people to work with is people who have integrity, energy, and intelligence because if they don't have the first one, the other two will kill you, right? And so it's like without integrity, like the intelligence and energy will totally screw you up, right? And so there's some baseline things like you have to— you just have to figure out where your integrity line is and all that stuff and what fundamental values are important to you. Beyond that, I think you got to try hard to put yourself in situations that are hard. And one of the— I haven't ever given this talk, but I've got a title for a talk I want to give some time, which is called 'On the Virtues of Getting Your Ass Kicked.' And what I'll tell you is that I've gotten my ass kicked so many times. And when I got to Stanford, I was going to be a physics major until I got like a C+ in Physics 63, right? And it was so clear that I was not— I I was not able to cope with those guys. CS198, the thing I'd say was the most important decision I ever made, well, they turned me down the first quarter I applied. They turned me down the first quarter and then I applied to be the coordinator, they turned me down the first two quarters and then the third time I applied I got to be coordinator. The first time I looked to be a VC, I didn't really find the right thing. The first time I started a company, I didn't really find the right thing. I've got partners, Reid, who go from thing to thing and success to success. That's never been my experience. And I don't know, I think that if you are really aggressive and try to put yourself into hard situations where the people around you kick your ass all the time. So being at a table in our partnership, it's a murderer's row. So people who invested and created the biggest SaaS companies in the world, the biggest networking companies in the world, Facebook, so billions of dollars in returns and I'm the new guy. With 5 investments and we'll see how it goes. It's an intimidating table to sit at and then it's intimidating to say things. You do the best you can and then people say, well, that's kind of the dumbest thing I've heard all day. And, you know, nobody— to be clear, nobody at Greylock has ever said that to me, although I'm pretty sure they've thought it. But the— but, you know, if it's only the dumbest thing today, that's fine because then you'll learn and you'll get better. So that's what I would say is just Be clear on your integrity, and then put yourself into situations that are hard, hard, hard.
