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...second lesson: Embrace riskâ????it is inescapable. You worry, I know, about the burden of Harvard, about â????the pressure to be extraordinaryâ???? within a narrow definition of success, as one of you told me. â????What will I say at my fifth reunion?â???? you wonder. What is â????extraordinary enoughâ????? It is, quite simply, having the courage to write your own script. You can be a risk taker. In fact, as we have learned, you will be a risk taker whatever you choose because...
...third lesson: The world really needs you. Bill Gates reminded us of this when he visited a couple of weeks ago. We must, he said, have the worldâ????s best minds working on the worldâ????s biggest problems. But you knew that already. You have developed an enhanced sense of both opportunity and responsibility. You are choosing careers and lives that reflect an outlook and an urgency derived in no small part from what has happened in the world since you arrived in Cambridge less than four years...
...fourth lesson: Living in a world without a script demands and rewards creativity. You need to be the authors, the entrepreneurs, of your own lives. Columnist David Brooks wrote recently of a process he called â????leading with two mindsâ????â????the balanced influence of people who can be, as he put it, â????practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next.â???? â????The ability to create knowledge and put it to use is the adaptive characteristic of humans,â???? Professor Louis...
...class knows how to do this, it is yours. It is what the worldâ????s crises, and your liberal arts education, have trained you to do. Keep asking the big, irrelevant questions; keep thinking beyond the present. Then live what you have learned...
...Robert F. Kennedy â????48 addressed a gathering of South African students struggling to end apartheid. â????Like it or not,â???? he told them, â????we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history.â???? This message is just as forceful and meaningful here today as it was in South Africa nearly a half-century ago, although now he would say women and men. That particular script, that...