This post originally appeared on Quora in response to the question "What are the most profound life lessons from Stanford Professor John Ousterhout?"
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John Ousterhout
Every Friday in his class at Stanford, Professor Ousterhout would spend 15 minutes of the class to give a life lesson for the week. He called it "Thought for the weekend." Eric Conner, a computer science major who graduated in 2012, provided this transcription of a particularly great lesson from one of these Friday lectures. It has been lightly edited.
Here's today's thought: A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y-intercept.  
At a mathematical level this is an obvious truism. You know if you have two lines — the red line and the blue line — and the red line has a lower Y-intercept but a greater slope, then eventually, the red line will cross the blue line.
This is a pretty good guideline for life, too. If the Y-axis is something good, depending on your definition of something good, then most people would pick the red trajectory over the blue trajectory, even though the blue trajectory is at a higher starting point. Unless you think you're going to die before you get to the point where the two lines cross.
In general, people emphasize how much they know and not how fast they're learning. But how fast you learn is a lot more important than how much you know to begin with.
You shouldn't be afraid to try new things even if you're completely clueless about the area you're going into. No need to be afraid about that. As long as you learn fast, you'll catch up and you'll be fine.
Here’s an example. I often hear conversations the first week of class where somebody will be bemoaning, "Oh so-and-so knows blah-blah-blah, how am I ever going to catch up to them?"
Well, if you're one of the people who knows blah-blah-blah, it's bad news for you, because honestly, everyone is going to catch up really quickly. Before you know it, that advantage is going to be gone, and if you aren't learning, too, you're going to be behind.
Another example is that a lot of people get stuck in ruts in their lives. They realize they're in the wrong job for them. And they're afraid to go off and try something new. Often they think, "I'm going to really look bad if I go."
Seriously, people will be afraid to try some new thing because they're worried they'll look bad or will make a lot of rookie mistakes. But, I say, just go do it and focus on learning.
It also applies to hiring. Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago, I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire, they almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over.
That's basically hiring based on Y-intercept. That's not a very good way to hire.
The people who are doing the same thing over and over again often burn out. They've maxed out. They can't do anything more than that. Typically when you level off, you level off slightly below your level of competence. So, in fact, you're not actually doing the current job all that well.
I would always hire based on aptitude, not experience. Is this person ready to do the job? They may never have done it before and have no experience in this area, but are they a smart person who can figure things out? Are they a quick learner? And I've found that's a much better way to get really effective people.
The key thing here is that slow and steady is great. You don't have to do anything heroic. You know the difference in slopes doesn't have to be that great if you just think about learning a little bit more and getting a little bit better every day.
If you take lots of small steps, it's amazing how quickly you can catch up and become a real expert in the field.
I often ask myself: have I learned one new thing today? Now, you guys are younger and, you know, your slope is a little bit higher than mine, so you can learn two or three or four new things a day.
But if you just think about your slope and don't worry about where you start out, you'll end up some place nice.

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