A Pretty Good Graduation Speech
Posted on June 7th, 2012 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
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.
Smart, funny, self-deprecating. Nice.
4 Responses
6/7/2024 11:48 am
http://www.harvard.edu/president/2012-baccalaureate-service-updraft-inexplicable-luck
6/7/2024 12:48 pm
Not bad! Certainly more relaxed and human than many of her speeches. Who wrote it?
6/8/2024 10:30 pm
Seems being Harvard’s Commencement speaker, on the stage that George Marshall used to announce the Marshall Plan, was not sufficient for Fareed Zakaria to write a fresh address - the Boston Globe reports that his speech at Duke, two weeks earlier, was essentially identical to his Harvard speech. According to the Globe, both recent speeches contained parts used by Zakaria in earlier graduations, over the past five years, at Johns Hopkins, Brown, and Yale!
In my opinion, it was a rather ordinary speech, not nearly as memorable as recent Commencement addresses by Bill Gates or J. K. Rowling. But has Zakaria so few ideas that he cannot write something new?
6/9/2024 7:40 am
What’s surprising to me about that is that you’d think you’d get away with it…Doesn’t anyone remember the Tim Russert experience?
http://www.universities-weblog.com/50226711/tim_russert_delivers_canned_harvard_commencement_address.php