{"id":4422,"date":"2009-05-03T09:30:31","date_gmt":"2009-05-03T13:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/blog\/larry-pages-university-of-michigan-commencement-address\/"},"modified":"2009-05-03T09:30:31","modified_gmt":"2009-05-03T13:30:31","slug":"larry-pages-university-of-michigan-commencement-address","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/blog\/larry-pages-university-of-michigan-commencement-address\/","title":{"rendered":"Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took a moment to read Larry’s commencement speech<\/a> primarily because I am interested in what he has to say, but also because I find these kinds of speeches to be very inspiring.<\/p>\n

Larry’s speech is no exception. It may not be a power house of motivational tips but it was very personal and covers his one experiences.<\/p>\n

Of particular interest to me was his description of how he came up with the idea which later became Google:<\/p>\n

You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?<\/p>\n

Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve had my own share of dreams which were either new business opportunities or solutions to problems I’m facing. I guess it’s the lack of other stimulus that lets my mind think clearly, focusing on just the one issue which allows me to come to a solution.<\/p>\n

I think you should take a moment and read Larry’s speech. You just might find something inspiring i there for yourself!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I took a moment to read Larry’s commencement speech primarily because I am interested in what he has to say, but also because I find these kinds of speeches to…","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[891],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}