The second filter is to gravitate towards working on hard things. I’d love to tell you I was an immediate success after leaving Stanford… I wasn’t. Even a decade later, I felt like I wasn’t on the right path, and it took me a while to find my footing. Until I applied to Google. I had my final interview there in 2004, it was April Fool’s Day and the day Gmail launched. So when my interviewers asked me about it, I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a real product. That’s because at the time, one gigabyte of free storage for everyone felt super ambitious, and almost impossible. A couple years into the job, I got my chance to work on a seemingly impossible problem, too. It was around this time that the internet was moving into a new phase. The web was evolving from simple web pages to rich applications. There was a group of us that felt we could reimagine the browser to be much better and faster, and we had an early prototype that we thought was pretty good. Internally there was a consensus that building a browser would be incredibly difficult, requiring hundreds of engineers; we had a group of about ten. The consensus was right. It was going to be really hard. In some ways we were naive, and it's good to be a bit irrational when you approach new things. And in 2008, we launched what we thought was a great browser. We had eight million users in the first twenty-four hours, and the reviews were really positive. And then user growth stagnated. After a year, we had around two percent share. I remember Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, made fun of Chrome in an interview and called it a rounding error. It could have been demoralizing. But with that California optimism, I told the team that the fact he went out of his way to dismiss us meant we were doing something right. We kept going, setting highly aggressive stretch goals to keep the team pushing. We rapidly iterated, shipping the browser every six weeks while others shipped one maybe every six months to a year. Success began to follow. Working on hard things has taught me a lot: It typically attracts other great and optimistic people. And even if you miss meeting the high goals you set, you’ll still achieve something great. So when you have the choice to work on something hard — say yes. Do what excites you

This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable. “Cockroach” is of course an allusion to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into an insect. The point of the story is as much the responses and incomprehension of his family as it is the account of his own sensations, and it is hard to resist the thought that even the best-meaning and most generously thoughtful friend or relative cannot hope to understand the sense of isolation and imprisonment that this disease imposes upon its victims.

my second failure in my career. But that second failure got me interested in knockout mice, mouse technology. So I think failure is important in my career

The studios are superreluctant to give final cut. They have so much money riding on these things, so they want a committee to go and rule the roost.

Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask … It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning.

There is an even longer shot that I do propose to attempt even though its likely efficacy lies at the outer limits of probability. I am going to try to have my entire DNA “sequenced,” along with the genome of my tumor. ... So perhaps I will be able to contribute a little bit to enlarging the knowledge that will help future generations.

The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.