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Robert Downey, Jr. – Don’t Chase That Thing | A Speech All Of Us Should Hear Once!

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Robert Downey Jr. built his second act on one blunt piece of advice: stop chasing the wrong thing.

On January 19, 2020, the motivational channel MulliganBrothers released a video titled “Robert Downey, Jr. – Don’t Chase That Thing | A Speech All Of Us Should Hear Once!” The compilation strings together Downey’s own reflections on addiction, fame, and self-worth into a single narrative, built around a commencement address he delivered at a graduation ceremony in the Hamptons, East Hampton, New York, in 2016. It’s less a single unedited speech than a curated distillation of what Downey has said, in various rooms, about the years he nearly lost.

• MulliganBrothers published the edited compilation on January 19, 2020, weaving Downey’s 2016 Hamptons graduation remarks with his broader public reflections on recovery.
• Downey’s career arc runs from his 1992 Academy Award nomination for “Chaplin” through highly publicized substance abuse and legal trouble in the late 1990s, to his 2008 resurgence as Tony Stark in “Iron Man.”
• The speech’s core message — “don’t chase that thing” — warns against pursuing money, status, or vanity instead of what actually makes a person unique.

From Chaplin to Rock Bottom

Downey’s rise looked inevitable at first. He broke through in the 1980s and earned an Oscar nomination for playing the title role in 1992’s “Chaplin,” a performance that marked him as one of his generation’s most gifted actors. What followed instead was a decade of arrests, rehab stints, and industry blacklisting so severe that insurers reportedly wouldn’t cover productions that hired him. By the time he clawed his way back into leading-man territory with “Iron Man” in 2008, Downey wasn’t just headlining a Marvel franchise — he was proof that a career written off as finished could be rebuilt from the ground up.

The Hamptons Speech

The 2016 graduation address that anchors the MulliganBrothers video wasn’t a typical commencement speech, and Downey didn’t try to make it one. He told the graduates plainly: “I urge you to embrace that thing that makes you unique. Sometimes your insecurities and your inexperience may lead you, too, to embrace other people’s expectations, standards or values, but you can harness that inexperience to carve out your own path, one that is free of the burden of knowing how things are supposed to be.” He framed addiction and public failure not as a footnote to his story but as the material of it, telling the crowd, “everyone has a singular story, and in that story, you are the protagonist, the hero, or the anti-hero… and still, you stand here, ready to continue on with that story.”

The Lesson Behind “Don’t Chase That Thing”

Downey’s throughline is simple and repeated in nearly every interview he’s given about getting sober: chasing success or money as an end in itself doesn’t work. “I think you need to, no matter what your dream is or what your goal is, love what you do in order to accomplish everything you’re capable of,” he told the graduates. It’s the same instinct that runs through a lot of the recovery and self-work content that circulates alongside speeches like this one — the idea that breaking old patterns of self-doubt matters more than any external marker of having “made it.”

“I want to see you all here in 25 years with a habit or a tattoo that was worth the risk. Don’t settle for something that feels like a prison, or is just okay, or that’s what’s in right now. Because you’re worth more than that.”

Downey closed his remarks on that note, and it’s the line MulliganBrothers builds the entire video around — not a call to avoid risk, but a demand that whatever risk you take actually be yours. It’s a message that pairs naturally with the kind of hard-won perspective found in advice aimed at young adults about choosing their sacrifices deliberately rather than by accident.

MulliganBrothers has built its channel on exactly this format — pulling archival interview and speech footage from public figures and cutting it into short, cinematic-score-backed motivational reels — and the Downey video landed squarely in that lane, racking up millions of views from people who know the “Iron Man” version of him but not necessarily the decade he spent trying to get back there.