Why Big Goals Are the Secret to Massive Success | Larry Page's Advice in 13 Minutes

He's a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He's ranked 19th on Forbes billionaires list with an estimated net worth of $33.4 billion. He leads a company with over 57,000 employees in over 40 countries. He's Google co-founder Larry Page, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

A lot of times my issue is people are not setting Goals that will be something that somebody who becomes rich or could do anything, you got to be excited about working on that for 10 years. So you got to have a big enough goal that, you know, you attract the best people and you retain them and you keep them focused. And then my experience, you don't go wrong, you know, maybe you don't hit it next year or maybe you fail entirely and you discover something more exciting to work on. With the same set of people.

One of the things that I'd been through as a student was some leadership training, and one of the things they taught us was to have— to not be afraid of failure, and instead to have the goal to fail a lot quickly, and then eventually you'll succeed. And I sort of took this to heart, and they also had a slogan called "healthy disregard for the impossible." And they actually made you write down sort of the things you would do that were kind of impossible, but you thought you might really accomplish. And that's really stuck with me in everything that I've tried to do. And I think, you know, it was very, very close that we wouldn't have started the company. And I think there are many of you out there in sort of similar situations. You know, do you wanna take a little bit more risk? Do you wanna try something out? And, you know, even if you don't succeed, we actually tried many things that didn't work. You know, Google happened to work pretty well. But there are many things that we did that didn't, but we don't worry about those, right? Because we, we tried many things. So I just encourage you to take a little more risk in life, and I think if you do it often enough, it will really pay off. This is how we keep our innovation running. I think usually as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small innovative projects, and we had this problem too for a while, and we said, oh, we really need a new concept, you know, the Google X. That's a small project that we're not quite sure if it's going to work or not, but we hope it will. And if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out such as News. But then we had a— we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them, and these are kind of made up, don't really pay attention to them. For example, the "buy Iceland" was from a media article. We would never do such a crazy thing. But in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago. And I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well organized.

Yeah, I talked a little bit about focusing the company. And I think that I want to talk a little bit about making some big bets. And we always try to concentrate on the long term. What we're doing for the long term. And, you know, I think that, you know, many of the things we started up that are really big now, like Chrome, were seen as kind of crazy when we launched them. And so how do we decide what to do? You know, how do we decide what's really important to work on? Well, I like to call it the toothbrush test. So the toothbrush test is do you use it as often as you use your toothbrush? And for most people, I guess it's twice a day.

Raise your hand.

Twice a day?

Yeah.

Okay, most people. So I think, you know, we really want things like that. And I think things like Gmail, obviously, I use much more than twice a day. And YouTube, you know, I think that those things are amazing. And I think that, you know, we look at things like YouTube, people thought, "Oh, you guys are never going to make money with that. You bought it for $1.4 billion." You know, you're totally crazy. And we were reasonably crazy, but it was a good bet. And we've actually been doubling revenue every year on YouTube for 4 years. And actually, if you're doubling things, it starts to add up pretty quickly, even no matter where you start from. So I think that's a good example of the— how sort of our philosophy is that We see things that people use a lot, that they're gonna, that are gonna be really important to them. And we think that usually you can make money from those things over time. You know, a well-run technology business can be monetized over time.

I think a lot of companies, not so much these days, but still get started because some space is hot. And honestly, I don't think that's a very good reason to start a company. And in fact, we see, you know, hundreds or thousands of people come to us who want to commercialize something or want us to collaborate with their business. And we actually look at these and I look at quite a few of them. And my guess is like one a year we are interested in. So, you know, the trick is to have the one that somebody is going to be interested because it's a good idea and not to, you know, be one of the thousands that come through all the time. And I think if you're the one good deal or you have a good idea, you really understand the area you're in, the funding environment doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether it's a hot area. I guarantee you'll be able to get people interested in helping you out.

And I think for all of you, there are many areas where there's leverage available in the world where one or two people, a good idea, a lot of hard work can really make a difference. There's many, many things like that. And it's good not to forget that, but it's good to look for those things. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And one of the things that surprised me, that's a very broad mission. It's a lot of work. We're not gonna achieve it anytime soon, right? It's almost an impossible task. But it's an exciting task and one that you can get other people excited about and they can help you. And one of the things that also surprised me is it's sometimes easier to do something that's harder because other people get excited about it and you can get much more resource. You can get tremendous resources to solve a hard problem, whereas you might only get minor resources to solve a small problem.

You know, anything you can imagine probably is doable, right? You just have to imagine it and work on it. And things that we thought were almost impossible— so we were interested in machine translation. There are services on the web. We had licensed one that— which could translate between different languages. And obviously, for search, you know, if you can't— if the information's not in your language, we can't find it for you. And most information's not in your language, right? This is sort of by definition. And so we thought, well, it'd be great if we could provide search results from any language for any query. And so we really focused on that problem. And we focused on it, and we developed Google Translate. And we found some machine learning researchers, and we said, do you think you can translate between any languages and do it better than an average human translator? And they laughed at us. They said, no, we can't possibly do that. But they actually were willing to try. And 6 years later, we can translate between 64 languages. [NOISE] And it's amazing, actually. We're better— many languages, we're better than an average human translating. We do it instantly and for free. And between those 64 languages, we can translate between any 2 of the languages, so we have something like 4,000 languages we can translate between. And so I'm just trying to give you— I guess I'm tremendously optimistic that whatever things we try to challenge, whatever challenges we try to take on, we can solve with a little bit of concerted effort and some good technology. And I think that's a really exciting place to be in the world. So I think we want more people working on it. We want to have more ambitious goals. And I think with that, we could easily double kind of human progress and the rate at which we're developing.

So I'm going to switch gears and talk really briefly about entrepreneurship. So I'll try to give you some of the things I think are really important that other people won't tell you or won't stress as much. And one of those is really just don't settle. It's very, very, very important if you're starting a company to have the right people involved. And I can't stress that enough. I've been enormously happy with people we've had involved at Google with my co-founder and with Eric. And we took a long time to find these people actually. I've been working with Sergey for a really long time, but Eric took us over a year to hire Eric. And just generally, having great people involved that you really like and that, you know, are compatible with you and all those things is tremendously important. And you're never gonna question the equity you gave up or any of the other things. So I can't stress that enough. The other thing I think we really benefited from is being real experts. We worked on Google for many years at Stanford before we started the company. And that was a pretty nice position to be in. We understood sort of all aspects of search. We talked to all the search companies for many years.

We really knew a lot about what was going on.

And you can do that pretty cheaply, right? It's just your labor, right? You can invest a year or two or three years and really learn something very, very well before you start having hundreds of people, you know, working on the problem.

Recently, I reorganized a bit to focus on product areas. And I think, you know, in any company as it grows, you know, if the company's not static, which it shouldn't be. As it grows and it changes, you need to reorganize it. And this question is, are you keeping ahead of that?

And looking at our business, it's pretty complicated.

We have all these different products. We have advertising. We have search.

We have Chrome.

We have Android. We have YouTube and so on. And those things are actually relatively different.

Have different things going on.

So I think, you know, I kind of moved that up a level in the company and made sure that we were super focused in each of those areas on what our user experience was. And I think that's helped. Just generally, as you switch to a company, as we got more offices, you know, as we got time zone differences, we had to change how we did our meetings, change how we do our employee communications, and so on. So I just think, you know, in a technology business, it's growing rapidly, you just need to make sure you're changing everything, you know, you're being responsive to that change and changing everything, you know, every year, or else you're just not keeping up with it.

I want to talk about dreams for a second, and in my case, literally a dream. When I was in college, I was sure that I'd been admitted by a clerical error, probably a computer error. And because of that, I had an irrational fear I'd be sent home on the bus. And Sergey here knows this is true. But it turns out, because of that anxiety, I woke up literally with a dream. And it was kind of a strange dream. It went like, "I think I could download the entire web onto some old computers that were lying around." And that probably seemed pretty crazy to most people, but I stayed up a couple hours in the middle of the night doing some math, and it seemed actually pretty plausible. Well, assuming he actually didn't keep any of the web pages, he only kept the links. And then sort of figured out, given all that data, I thought it would take a couple weeks And I told my advisor that, and he just sort of laughed at me. And of course, it took a year or two, but at the end of that, we had a way to rank web pages and no thoughts to search at all. And eventually, search entered the picture, and you know the rest. And that became Google. So I'd like to encourage everyone to follow their dreams. Thanks.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because SickNick95 asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Larry Page's top 10 rules meant the most to you, is going to have the biggest impact on you. Leave it in the comments below and I'm going to join in the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe and I'll see you soon.