According to Fortune, Roblox CEO David Baszucki, who now runs a $60 billion gaming platform, says the best career advice he ever got was to ignore advice from others. This comes from his own experience after graduating from Stanford University in 1985, when his career prospects were unclear and his resume was thin. He recalls creating a detailed spreadsheet with nine potential career paths, a method he now calls “a really weird way” to figure things out. After years in what he describes as the “absolute worst jobs,” he learned to trust his gut, which led him to co-found Knowledge Revolution, a company he sold for $20 million in 1998. He later applied that same self-reliance to build Roblox, which now boasts over 150 million daily active users. Baszucki’s core message is that you have to “participate in making your own reality” rather than following a prescribed path.
Gut Check vs. Spreadsheet
Here’s the thing: Baszucki’s story hits different in 2025. We’re drowning in data. Every career move, from which skills to learn to which company to apply to, is supposedly optimized by algorithms and metrics. Creating a pro/con list for your life feels rational, even smart. But Baszucki is arguing that it’s a trap. It externalizes the decision-making process. You’re basically outsourcing your intuition to a grid of cells, hoping the math will spit out the “right” answer for you. It can’t. His post-grad slump, filled with “massive disappointment,” was the direct result of not listening to that internal voice. And look, I get it. When you’re staring at a blank future, a spreadsheet feels like a life raft. It’s actionable. It gives you the illusion of control. But according to him, it’s often a detour.
The CEO Intuition Club
Now, you might think this is just one rich guy’s quirky hindsight. But he’s not alone. Fortune notes that LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky talks about balancing opinions but needing your own “deep down” conviction. Skims cofounder Jens Grede calls intuition your “collective memory,” fed by every experience and conversation. There’s even a Harvard Business Review article from 2025 on how CEOs hone their gut instincts. So what’s really going on here? I think it’s about synthesis. At a high level, you’re not making decisions in a vacuum—you’re processing a lifetime of subtle signals your conscious brain can’t fully articulate. The spreadsheet captures the obvious variables. Your gut captures everything else: your passions, your tolerances, your unspoken desires. The trick is learning to hear it over the noise of everyone else’s “shoulds.”
Building Your Own Reality
Baszucki’s phrase—”participate in making your own reality”—is key. It’s active. It’s not about waiting for a dream job to materialize or for a mentor to hand you a map. It’s about prototyping, failing, and iterating on your own life. His path from window-washing to a $20 million exit to the early days of what became Roblox wasn’t linear. It was a series of resets guided by internal compass checks. After selling his first company, he expected a CEO offer to land in his lap. When it didn’t, he was adrift again. That’s the real test, isn’t it? The gut instinct isn’t just for the big, shiny decisions. It’s for the quiet, confusing moments in between, when there’s no obvious next step and no one’s advice fits your peculiar situation.
So, Should You Ignore All Advice?
Obviously not. That’s too simplistic. Baszucki’s point, and Grede echoes it, is that you have to feed your intuition. You do that by being curious, by reading, by having conversations, by making both wrong and right decisions. It’s a muscle. You can see this in how Roblox itself has evolved, like their work on new discovery features. The input matters. But then you have to filter it through your own lens. The danger for today’s grads isn’t seeking advice—it’s letting that advice become a script. Your career isn’t a formula to solve. It’s a thing to build, brick by messy brick, and the blueprint often comes from a feeling you can’t fully explain. And sometimes, the most powerful move is to close the spreadsheet, tune out the static, and ask yourself the one question no one else can answer: what do I actually want to try next?
