I am not one to have the personal conflict of whether it’s a
right or a privilege to be an American. I am more of the mindset that it’s a privilege
to be alive. Luck, happenstance, and a universal will is the determinate of
what puts us here and the path we take. For those to argue that point just ask
what YOUR life would be had you were the spawn of George and Barbara Bush or
the child of Donald Trump? My point is made.
I can’t say that everything is how you start out in life,
but it damn sure makes a difference.
While there is the Bill Gates of the world…he is the anomaly…not
the rule. The question I must ask is what is the rule of accepting the
privilege of life? What accountability do we have as enjoying life? Is the
universal golden rule the policy we all should adhere to?
I ask these things not to say let’s implement and run with
the “do unto others” quote, but to start a conversation about what we could do
as an alternative to what we have comprehensively done…screwed over those less
privileged than ourselves.
At this point I would continue making points of what should
be done and what could be done after pointing out all the examples of what we
have done as a culture, as a society, and a human race…
I will leave it to someone else…he said it better…because he
lived it.
To some it may be a long read…but it’s worth the time.
Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents
of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give
yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see
everyone dressed in black it'll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment.
Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened
to some older person share his life experience. But I don't remember a word of
it. I can't even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is
graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and
maybe all of you are. I wasn't. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given
them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it.
By kicking me out.
At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no
possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a
start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost
certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I
have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly,
how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be,
before you go out and have one yourself.
I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a
word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else.
But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary
ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly
gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to
explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture —
which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell
someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped
me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I
knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or,
to put it differently: to write books.
Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards
from here, in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to say
how well written my thesis was. He didn't. And so after about 45 minutes I
finally said, "So. What did you think of the writing?"
"Put it this way" he said. "Never try to make
a living at it."
And I didn't — not really. I did what everyone does who has
no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at
nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I
should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to
the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon
Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to
nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall
Street was being reinvented—into the place we have all come to know and love.
When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in
which to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house expert on
derivatives. A year and a half later Salomon Brothers was handing me a check
for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to
professional investors.
Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall
Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who
knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money.
I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis.
I called up my father. I told him I was going to quit this
job that now promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of
40 grand. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "You might
just want to think about that," he said.
"Why?"
"Stay at Salomon Brothers 10 years, make your fortune,
and then write your books," he said.
I didn't need to think about it. I knew what intellectual
passion felt like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to
feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never
have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling.
The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker." It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old.
I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of
a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd.
Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme.
What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers
lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story
of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having
parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you
must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor
of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first
place?
This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a
point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really
don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful
people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow
inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their
lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it
either.
I wrote a book about this, called "Moneyball." It
was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else. There are
poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically
different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team
in professional baseball, the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120
million on its 25 players. The poorest team, the Oakland A's, was spending
about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning as many games as the
Yankees — and more than all the other richer teams.
This isn't supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams
should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had
figured something out: the rich teams didn't really understand who the best
baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single
reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient
attention to the role of luck in baseball success. Players got given credit for
things they did that depended on the performance of others: pitchers got paid
for winning games, hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base. Players
got blamed and credited for events beyond their control. Where balls that got
hit happened to land on the field, for example.
Forget baseball, forget sports. Here you had these corporate
employees, paid millions of dollars a year. They were doing exactly the same
job that people in their business had been doing forever. In front of millions of people, who evaluate
their every move. They had statistics attached to everything they did. And yet
they were misvalued — because the wider world was blind to their luck.
This had been going on for a century. Right under all of our
noses. And no one noticed — until it paid a poor team so well to notice that
they could not afford not to notice. And you have to ask: if a professional
athlete paid millions of dollars can be misvalued who can't be? If the
supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can't distinguish between
lucky and good, who can?
The "Moneyball" story has practical implications.
If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market
inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical
message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not
entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all,
recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and
not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
I make this point because — along with this speech — it is
something that will be easy for you to forget.
I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a
few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department
staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they
broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women,
per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily
assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some
complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating,
or how to regulate drinking on campus.
Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers
interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four
cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies.
Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just
sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn't. With incredible
consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the
fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips
smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that
was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader's shirt.
This leader had performed no special task. He had no special
virtue. He'd been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing
but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be
his.
This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO
pay, and I'm sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new
graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been
appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely
arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few.
Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton
exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and
increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the
richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects
you to sacrifice your interests to anything.
All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you
will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume
that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be
happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you
don't.
Never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all
nations.
Thank you.
And good luck.
"Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie"
Michael Lewis
June 3, 2012
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/
