As some Gen Z graduates find themselves iced out of the job market, millions have slipped into so-called “NEET” status (not in employment, education, or training), unclear as to when their careers will finally be able to take off. For Roblox CEO David Baszucki, that sense of professional drift is familiar.
Although today he helms the $60 billion video game platform—and has a $5 billion net worth to go with it—when he graduated from Stanford University in 1985, he said his career prospects were anything but clear.
Like today’s aspiring professionals, it was tempting for him to lean on the advice of mentors, professors, or friends to figure out how to jumpstart his career. But Baszucki warns that mindset could lead you worse off. In fact, looking back, the best advice he ever received was to actually stop overvaluing what others think.
“A lot of my development has been trying to over time ignore advice I’ve been given,” Baszucki recalled to students at his alma mater. Instead, when you’re having a rough time, listen when people say “‘trust your gut.’”
Baszucki went from lost window cleaner to billionaire tech leader
Even though Stanford has a reputation as a launchpad for billion-dollar companies—from Snapchat to Databricks—Baszucki hit a wall after graduation. His dream job didn’t materialize, and his resume was thin: One of his only concrete experiences was window-cleaning with his brother one summer.
“I can remember in this terrible time right out of college trying to figure out what I was going to do,” Baszucki said to the Stanford business students.
“Rather than trusting my intuition, I can remember having a spreadsheet of nine potential careers and then all these metrics—’it’s really good for this, but it’s not so good for this.’”
“It was like a really weird way to try to figure out your career,” he added.
It was then that Baszucki first learned about the need to trust your own instincts.
After landing a post-grad salaried role, Baszucki spent the next two or three years in what he now calls the “absolute worst jobs in the world” and faced “massive disappointment.”
Eventually, he took a step back to listen to his gut—and the reset paid off. Baszucki went on to carve his own path and create Knowledge Revolution, an education software company that sold for $20 million in 1998. After the sale, he expected to get poached for a CEO job. When he didn’t, he found himself once again adrift and needing to forge his own path.
“Time and time again, you have to participate in making your own reality,” he told Fortune earlier this year.”
A few years later, he began building on what would become Roblox, now a global gaming platform with over 150 million daily active users.
Fortune reached out to Roblox for further comment.
The best career advice: trust your own instincts
During a time when data and data-driven decision making is all the rage in the workplace, leaning on intuition might sound misguided. However, many executives still lean on their instincts to guide even major business decisions.
“Be able to balance a lot of different people’s opinions, but at the end of the day, you have to have your own conviction deep down and make decisions for yourself,” LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky said when asked to give career advice
“You have to know what’s right, you have to care about what’s right, to be passionate about what’s right,” Roslansky added. “And if you’re going to put yourself out there and decide to dive into the crowd, it should be because you want to … not because someone else is telling you to do it.”
Skims cofounder and CEO Jens Grede also recently echoed the importance of trusting your gut—as long as you exercise it.
“You can feed [intuition] by being a curious person,” Grede said on his wife Emma’s Aspire podcast. “Your gut is really your collective memory, your collective experience and learnings … Every book you read, every article, every conversation, every wrong or right decision you’ve made, that becomes your gut.”
