Melinda French Gates’s top career advice: Embrace uncertainty

Melinda French Gates told Stanford graduates in 2024 that they should enter moments of transition with a "radical openheartedness."

Transcript

00:00The first piece of advice is to enter these moments with radical open-heartedness.

00:06Most of the time we walk around through life in the thicket of our everyday routine,

00:12but during the transition we step out of our familiar surroundings into a big wide open space

00:20where everything is new. And there are two ways to encounter these spaces. You can keep your head

00:27down and focus on finding the shortest distance possible from one familiar thing to the next,

00:34or you can find the courage to linger in that liminal space and see what it has to tell you.

00:44That to me is practicing open-heartedness. I have to admit as a young person I managed

00:53transitions in the first way. I had a list of goals I wanted to accomplish and as soon as I

00:57checked one off the list I raced across the clearing to the next one. Because frankly it was

01:02a lot less scary that way. But as I've gotten older I've learned the value of embracing uncertainty.