Word: lesson
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...devil’s advocate, to challenge the opinions of our friends, to debate for the sake of debate. Harvard has taught us well. We neglect this education through our continuous and unquestioning accession. Like all parting shots, the message can be neatly summed up with a one-sentence lesson I learned in third grade: Agree to disagree. And, like all parting shots, I will now make this moral seem much more brilliant than it actually is: Debate sows the seeds of democracy. See, the first two letters of each word are the same...
...experiment with marijuana prohibition is just as misguided as was its earlier experiment with alcohol prohibition. We learned our lesson once; it is time to learn it again...
...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...
...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 world’s best minds working on the world’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 “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...