Larry Page on how to change the world

"Even when we started Google, we thought, "Oh, we might fail," and we almost didn't do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, "You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don't succeed.""<p>So true. Society has formed a horrible notion of stressing the importance of earning your degree(s) right after high school and in consecutive order.

I like the fact that he stays optimistic and talks about the opportunities we have to make a difference, rather than complain about all the problems we have.

I went to google's san francisco's open house a few months back where Vincent G. Serf (<a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint</a>) gave a talk and at one point he mentioned a list of engineering "grand challenges" put together by the National Academy of Engineering. It's an interesting list and may provide some good food for thought for anyone with a bit of free time on their hands:<p><a href="http://engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx</a>

The thing that struck me was the point about Moore's Law not being applicable to cars - which seems to go against his point of not believing in limits.<p>If we all expected cars to double their efficiency every 2 years maybe people would be working on that just like they are working hard to double the number of transistors every 2 years.

The sidebar on 'The Best Advice I Ever Got' makes for good reading too.<p>Here's the link:<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bestadvice.fortune/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bes...</a>

Wish cancer was on that list of noble things to fix. But I guess cancer &#60; dirty water &#62; shelter &#60; food

i wish i could work for him on some of the projects