Are Dreams Practical Today?
Dreams have long been and still are responsible for many
breakthroughs in science and technology. Here is what Larry Page,
the co-founder of Google, said during a commencement address about the
role of a dream in his life:
"I
have a story about following dreams. Or maybe more accurately, it's
a story about finding a path to make those dreams real.
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?
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!"
This was taken from an address given to the University of
Michigan graduating class, May 2, 2009. For more about the speech,
click here.
