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 jump-start his career. But Baszucki warns that mindset could leave you worse off. In fact, looking back, he says the best advice he ever received was to actually stop overvaluing what others think.
“I can remember in this terrible time right out of college trying to figure out what I was going to do,” Baszucki shared with an audience of 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 postgrad salaried role, Baszucki spent the next two or three years in what he now calls the “absolute worst jobs in the world” where he 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 educational 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.
Fortune reached out to Roblox for further comment.
“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.
