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we're so pleased today welcome Mr. David Brooks, this year's keynote speaker.
David Brooks is the OpEd columnist for the New York Times.
He appears frequently as a commentator on T.V. and radio on shows such as the
The News Hour with Jim Lehrer
and NPR's All Things Considered.
He has written for numerous
national publications including the Weekly Standard,
Newsweek Magazine,
the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal
He is a frequent author
in his last book, The Social Animal,
the hidden success of love, character and achievement
has been a great hit/
Mister Brooks has received rave reviews for its honest, insightful, humorous and
sometimes controversial observations on politics, culture an our
American way of life.
He is widely-read
by politicians and policymakers alike
Although Mister Brooks lives in Washington DC he has roots in chicago
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Chicago
He worked as a police reporter in the
famous, some would say infamous, City News Bureau of Chicago
in line with our strategic directions Mister Brooks is a vocal and passionate
advocate for making college more affordable and accessible
increasing the number of students who
finish
and graduate
from a college
And he always encourages the special bond between students
and faculty
It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you Mister David Brooks
Mister Brooks
Thank you Dr. Ender
You know they say the American dream is buying a home but it's really
getting a degree
and you guys
achieved the first stage of the American dream here today
Now as i look out
on this audience the first thing i realize that some of you may not have
graduated from college before. You may not know the etiquette.
It's customary when you come to get your degree to give the president a little
tip
Ten or twenty bucks just to show you did a good job.
It's also customary to give the commencement speaker a little something.
No more than fifteen or twenty percent of your annual tuition.
This money is not for me it's going straight to the Ken Ender for
president campaign
This country has a long
leadership gap that only Dr. Ender can fill.
now even if you don't give I want you to know how great it is to be here on this
happy occasion
The parents are happy to have produced such outstanding young men and women
The faculty is happy to have produced such outstanding graduates despite
everything the parents tried to do to them
The administrators are happy to have such a standing alumni
despite everything the faculty try to do to them
The students are happy to have turned out so well
despite what the blowhards in all these categories tried to do
Well class of 2012
I am the final blowhard
I'm the last windbag between you and your degree
So on this happy occasion and since I'm here in illinois I hope you don't mind
if I start with little story about Abraham Lincoln
When Lincoln was a boy he had a little boat
which he kept on the Ohio River.
One day a pair of travelers asked him if he could row them to the middle of the river
where they could catch a steamboat.
Lincoln took them out
and as they boarded the steamboat they each threw a little half dollar coin into
the bottom of his little rowboat.
He later recalled
You may think it was a very little thing
but it was the most important incident in my life.
I could scarcely believe that I a poor boy
had earned a dollar in less than a day.
The world seemed wider and fairer before me.
Now i hope that earning a degree day makes the world seems wider
and fair before you.
I hope you see that all the work in trouble you've put in this led to this
important step today
and this step is one of many important steps you take in the years ahead.
And i hope you don't mind if i use my time today to clear up some bad advice
that people in your shoes are usually given.
The first bit of that bad advice that's normally made on this occasion
is that you should follow your passion and dream big dreams.
Now if you're like me in your twenties or like most people
you don't know what your passions are.
And you know what your big dreams are
you're not quite sure yet where you fit in the world.
And so the better advice is don't look inside yourself for your passions
look around the world to see what jobs
and questions you can help solve.
In 1947 Victor Frankel who was growing up in Europe
and he was put in an Nazi concentration camp
and he said to himself "this isn't the life i would have chosen
but this is a life that came to me."
So he became a psychologist studying pain
And he later wrote
"Don't ask what do I want from life
ask what is life asking of me.
What opportunities and jobs do these circumstances
put in front of me, for me to do."
The second bit of advice is you
shouldn't try to be a shooting star
you shouldn't try to burst into success all at once
now this is the message that shows like American Idol and all those
contest shows offers.
That success is going to come to overnight.
This is the message of all the rap song for the singer breaks about how fast it
blew up and how many records he sold.
It's a message of reality TV
It was the message this week on the Facebook I P O in which some guy can get
nineteen billion dollars by the time he's thirty.
And these messages have had their effects
According to one student eighty percent of college students think they'll
achieve their career goals in ten years or less
Seventy five percent believe they'll be millionaires
and half expect to be millionaires by age fifty.
Unless you name is LeBron James or Mark Zuckerberg or Drake
you probably won't be a millionaire by thirt.y
Like most of us you'll be a grinder.
You'll get up
and work every day and then you get up and you work the next day.
and your progress will come very gradually.
step-by-step, decade by decade.
Abraham Lincoln was a grinder.
He works slowly in a remorselessly. He hadn't really achieved anything spectacular
that the time he was forty.
But he was slowly building the skills that he needed to become one of the
greatest Americans ever.
Dwight Eisenhower was a grinder.
He was stuck in the same rank in the Army for nearly two decades.
But it was slowly building the character you need to become one of our greatest
generals.
Now these people are slowly building strengths and talents that lead to great
accomplishment and make for great people.
Let me put it this way you can divide your perches into two categories.
On the one hand there are things you might call the blooming virtues.
These are the virtues that happen when you're young.
The virtues that got you know where you are today
and these are things like intelligence energy
curiosity, charm and humor.
And those are things you have
or you wouldn't be here
but then there what you might call the ripening virtues.
These are the virtues that develop slowly
and which will build in you over the next many years.
These are the virtues that really lead to character and success.
The ripening virtues and please include things like self control so you can do
the right thing
even when you're tempted to do the wrong thing.
They include things like knowing how to learn from failure
and how to survive the death of someone you love.
They include knowing yourself and others well enough to know who used for friends
who you should fall in love with
and who you should marry
and then include being brave enough
when you do get married or if you are married
to let the people who are closest to you
deep into your life and to be vulnerable in front of them.
These reckoning virtues which of the most important ones they only develop
slowly
but they're the ones that really matter.
One of these reckoning virtues tremendously important one is self
discipline.
now i know i'm a middle-aged guy but the older i get
the more i realized that being well organized
is really important.
When I was young i had a messy desk in a messy room
and I spent most of my like life looking for my keys.
I thought being organized his assigned you were boring or preston kind of ***
but now I realize that discipline an organization is the key to everything
and one of my favorite management gurus is a guy named Jim Collins.
He wrote books like Great by Choice
and he spent his life asking this question
who really makes it in this world?
And he discovered the people who really leave a mark on the world
are not necessarily the super talented ones or the super flamboyant ones.
They're not the people with the perfect grades or the highest A C T scores.
Collins looked at people who succeeded
and he asked other people to describe them
and here's what he wrote:
Throughout our research
we were struck by the continual use of words like discipline,
rigorous,
dogged, determined, diligent,
precise, fastidious,
systematic,
methodical,
demanding,
consistent,
focused and accountable.
These are not the sexy traits. These are not the exciting trades.
They're not the ones that are celebrated in movies and TV
but these are the reckoning virtues that really lead to accomplishment.
In one book Collins describes explorers who in 1899
tried to be the first person to reach the South Pole.
One of them was a guy named Roald Amundsen.
He trained rigorously for this expedition.
He biked from Norway to Spain to build up his leg muscles.
He lived with some Eskimos for months
to learn how they adapted to the cold.
He noticed that Eskimos never hurry through the snow. They move slowly and
deliberately.
They wear loose fitting clothes to help the sweat evaporate when they're
exerting themselves.
He learned how to kill a needed dolphin
just in case you got shipwrecked any needed to eat a dolphin to survive.
Another guy Robert Scott
could have done all that boring preparation but he was little more
daring.
He thought it would be faster to use horses
to get to Antaractica.
not dogs the way Amundsen did.
But because he didn't have preparations and didn't realize that horses sweat on
the outside
and in conditions that cold their bodies get coated with ice.
He also didn't stop to think that horses eat grass.
There's not a lot of grass in Antartica.
Amundsen prepared his route by putting twenty supply depots along the way.
He marked them with black flags on high bamboo poles that wouldn't get
covered with snow.
Scott had one supply depot
marked by a single flag.
Amundsen worried that he might get lost
so we bought three tons of supplies for five men.
Scott was confident he could get there and back on schedule.
So he brought one ton of supplies for seventeen men.
In short Amundsen did the boring thing and prepared for failure.
He prepared for the worst.
He diligently prepared for all the bad things that might happen.
Scott raced ahead
confident in his own plans.
Amundsen successfully reached the Pole and came back a hero.
Scott reached the Pole and found Amundsen flag already there
and Scott and his party died on the way back.
In exploring and in life
discipline actually does work.
Productive paranoia works, preparing for failure
and grinding works.
Now to me and to Collins the most impressive thing about Amundsen
was how he organized his walking.
He traveled twenty miles a day.
When the weather was good and he was tempted to go further
but he said no we're gonna stop at twenty miles.
When the weather was bad he want to stop earlier
but he said we're gonna go twenty miles.
Everyday twenty miles, regular as clockwork
and that's a good metaphor of what a successful life is like.
Whether you're working at a plant or raising kids or working at a travel
agency.
Every day you're putting in your twenty miles.
Collins general point is that the people who do really well on this earth
combine two traits.
that are intention with each other.
Extreme personal humility
and extreme personal willpower.
They understand their weaknesses and they prepare for them
but they push ahead relentlessly
twenty miles day after day.
Late last year I asked readers of my newspaper column who were over seventy
to look back on their lives
and report to me how they'd done in life.
What they've learned from life and what grade they would give themselves for
their life.
One of the interesting things is the most people gave themselves pretty high
grades for their careers.
Generally an A-.
Most
people gave themselves lower grades
for their personal and family lives.
Lots of the C- and B+.
Most people regretted the things they didn't do.
Very few regretted the things they did do.
For most people it took a long time to realize
you can't change other people.
You have to accept them as they are
but the best essays were written by people who just grind away through life.
Maybe they didn't start out fast
but they just kept doing that twenty-mile hike day after day.
One woman who wrote to me was a woman in Regina Titus.
She grew up shy and
sheltered in Long Island, New York.
She didn't go to college. She took some clerical jobs at first
and she worked with people who treated her poorly.
Her first husband died after six months of marriage
and her second husband committed suicide
but she just kept grinding.
At age fifty six studying nights and weekends
she obtained acollege degree
*** laude
from Marymount Manhattan College.
She moved to Wilmington, Delaware and now she's in her seventies.
She gives tours of local museums.
She studies opera.
She leads hikes.
She volunteers and does a thousand other things.
She wrote to me
I did not have the joy of holding a baby in my arms.
I did not have a long and happy marriage.
But every day she kept growing
and now she leaves a large and happy life.
and the lesson is maturity come slowly real progress comes slowly
and even affluence comes slowly.
Money destroys you if it drops down fast
on you like a blizzard.
Money doesn't destroy you if it settles down gradually like a mist.
Now when I look back on how my own life style has changed
in terms of money I realized one of the most important things happened when I
crossed the orange juice line.
Just after i graduate from college i no money to all
and i couldn't afford to buy a constitution supermarket.
After a certain point my career at a steady income
and I could buy
orange juice without worrying about it
and I confess
even today in the supermarket
I feel a high degree of satisfaction
when I put a carton of orange juice in my cart.
The chief pleasure of making money
is that I can buy orange juice without thinking about it.
You can
think less about money and more about other stuff.
After buying the orange juice money has really added that much.
In this talk I've tried to emphasize the importance of the ripening virtues
over the blooming virtues.
I've tried to emphasize the importance of discipline, steadiness organizations,
and all those boring and *** traits.
And I've tried to emphasize the twenty-mile hike day after day.
And I've spoken mostly about professional life
but I want to end a bit by touching upon personal life which is more important.
Over the last few years we've learned a lot about happiness.
We've learned that the relationship between money and happiness is weak.
Once you get to be middle-class,
getting richer doesn't make you any happier.
We've learned there's a relationship between age and happiness.
People in their twenties tend to be pretty happy
than happiness levels begin to get down into middle age
and most people bottom out an arthur most unhappy
at age forty seven.
That's called having teenage children.
But then it goes up again
and people are at their most happy
between sixty five and seventy five
in the ten years after retirement.
But the strongest relationship
between happiness is between happiness
and relationships.
Joining a social club that meets just once a month
produces the same happiness gain is doubling your income.
The daily activity that contributes most to happiness
is having dinner with friends.
The daily activity that detracts most unhappiness
is commuting.
And the biggest relationship between happiness is between happiness and love.
If you're around people you love you'll be happy.
If not you won't be.
If you have a great career and a crappy marriage
you will be unhappy.
If you have a crappy career but a great marriage you will be happy.
Now the people who know most about marriage emphasize it like everything else it's a
grind. Twenty mile hikes everyday.
I recently came across a very smart blog post
by woman named Lydia Netzer on how to stay married.
Some of her advice is counter-intuitive but i thought it was
smart.
For example one lesson she said is
go to bed mad.
The conventional advice is that couples should never go to bed angry.
but Netzer argues sometimes you just need some sleep.
Wake up,
make some pancakes,
you'll feel better about it.
Another bit of Netzer's advice
is brag about the person you love.
Go-around bragging about them. Let them hear you brag about them.
Good advice.
Another is
don't think temporarily
Don't say to yourself
if he does this to me it's over between us.
Operate under the assumption that it will never be over. it's the two of you
against the world forever and ever.
there's no if and then.
There's no hypothetical divorce in the back of your mind.
It's just forever.
Another bit of advice is to make a pact with your friends.
You will listen to them *** about their spouses,
you will share their anger and frustration,
but after the *** and moaning
you will still know their spouses the greatest thing ever.
You will like the slate clean.
You make this pact because you want to be able to vent to your friends
without your friends ever hating your spouse.
I recommend Google-ing Netzer and finding her advice. There's a lot more and
it was very smart.
So you know already if you don't know you'll find out
life is hard and takes resilience of toughness.
It's a slow steady grind
but if you do the grind
every day you get these wonderful moments.
Some of the moment so wonderful like today
begin caissons with formal ceremonies of a large audience
and everybody can see what you've accomplished and everybody can feel
happy and proud.
Some of the wonderful moments happen when the art even thinking about 'em.
When you're out playing softball or having dinner with your friends.
Some of the wonderful moments are actually quite hard
when you've learned how to fix an engine or make a sale or in the middle of the
job
and you are using your skills to the highest.
Some are as trivial as picking up a carton of orange juice in the grocery store
and i'm really happy you let me share this happy day with you.
I have every confidence
you will go forth like Lincoln
to a fair and open world.
And I have every confidence
that you will grind it out year upon year
twenty miles a day upon day.
Thanks very much.