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When you appeared for freshman registration in 2006, five years to the day after 9/11, President Bush was declaring us ??safer” if ??not yet safe”; the Dow was climbing toward its all-time high; and the world was rumbling along, or so it seemed, toward eternal prosperity. It was a world in which growing proportions of Harvard seniors were set to join Wall Street or consulting firms, a world of relatively secure jobs and high-paying careers, a world that was your oyster...
...shifted. It was the year of Obama. Who could have anticipated that? It was the year of entropy, with catastrophic floods and fires, an imminent flu pandemic, and the biggest meltdown of world financial systems since the Great Depression. Jobs you had counted on evaporated. Opportunities vanished. Phrases like ??bailout” and ??too big to fail” were suddenly being applied to companies you had hoped would someday recruit you. And the University was not immune. We didn’t have to melt down the roof of Harvard Hall into bullets...
...economy has steadied a bit, and the word ??recovery” is in the air, even if we are not confident about its strength and pace. Yet this heavy dose of disorientation is an inescapable part of these extraordinary recent years. What have we learned that can serve us in times of calm or crisis...
...second lesson: Embrace risk—it is inescapable. You worry, I know, about the burden of Harvard, about ??the pressure to be extraordinary” within a narrow definition of success, as one of you told me. ??What will I say at my fifth reunion??? you wonder. What is ??extraordinary enough”? 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...
...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 ??leading with two minds”??the balanced influence of people who can be, as he put it, ??practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next.?? ??The ability to create knowledge and put it to use is the adaptive characteristic of humans,?? Professor Louis...