2008 Grand Recognition Ceremony Keynote Address
By Dr. Blair Sheppard, Dean of the Fuqua School of Business
Honored students, according to the folks at TIP, you are gifted. This is something you should be deeply proud of and thank your parents for, because it was their genes, care and attention that helped you become so gifted. Being talented is both a gift and a huge responsibility. And, it is a gift we will need you to nurture a great deal given the world we are handing you. The last thirty years has seen a host of miracles:
- Because of the dramatic economic growth of the last thirty years and globalization a billion people have been lifted out of poverty around the world.
- A wall that split the world has fallen, permitting people in countries who were submerged under the debate that formed the Cold War to emerge and take their place in the global dialogue.
- Due to air travel and computers and telephony we have shrunk and flattened the world so that you are probably wearing clothes designed in Italy, from cloth made in Indonesia, cut and sewn in China and shipped to you in Korean boats. With that has come much better and less expensive products, permitting a much larger swath of people to live in comfort.
- Advances in genetics, nanotechnology and the global IT network offer the promise of a more abundant food supply, greater health and remarkable opportunities for innovation.
But, with these miracles have come some huge challenges, challenges that we will hand to you and that will take all of the ingenuity, insight and skill you will be able to muster to solve:
- We have brought a billion people out of poverty, but with it we have created an economic model that cannot be sustained, we cannot continue to produce CO2 and other greenhouse gases at the rate we are doing, or we risk altering the earth permanently
- The Berlin Wall fell, but we now have to manage a world in which significant and proud cultures are all making a bid as the intellectual and cultural leader of the world. The opportunity for remarkable cultural growth is great, but so too a widening, bitter clash of civilizations.
- Clearly, the world is flat, with all its accompanying gain in quality of life, but with this flat world has come a host of challenges including much easier transmission of disease, significant disruption in the lives of those not able to keep up and a growing disparity between those with wealth and those without.
- Genetics, nanotechnology and network technology will allow us to make things possible only science fiction writers could have fathomed a decade ago, but the moral and societal issues needed to be grappled with are of a kind we have never seen before.
And, the challenges seem to be accelerating. Perhaps, like Moore’s Law with the power of a computer doubling every 18 months, the affiliated technical, cultural and moral challenges do so with it. We need your gifts and we need them quickly. Cherish, nurture and develop them they are invaluable.
To do so, will not always be easy. To illustrate why let me tell you about some of the gifted people I have known. I have always been lucky, everywhere I went I got to hang out with people more gifted than me. In High School we called them eggheads, four eyes or dorks. Kids who did well in school were not often cool. Two of those dorks were my best friends, I guess I was one too. I grew up in a steel town in Canada, where a good time on a Friday night was to cruise the street looking for someone wearing another school’s colors and hassle them mercilessly. To be smart was not to be cool. The smartest kid in the school found a way around the problem. He studied cool. He would read every major magazine he could get his hands on and memorize the great lines in each. He was captivating, he was cool. And, to sustain his status he never did too well in school and never revealed or pursued his own real interest, to be a writer. Our other friend was the second smartest kid I knew. Maybe because he hung around with the smart, cool kid or maybe because he was comfortable with himself, other kids tolerated his constant reading and his love for the Canadian Outdoors. I remember one summer laughing when he took 30 books on a camping trip. If you have ever done a canoe portage, you know books are not a great thing to bring with you. But bring them he did. He knew his two passions and he followed them. Ironically, today, HE is the leading writer for Canada’s most successful newspaper and a gifted novelist who has learned to weave wonderful, tragic and moving stories into the tapestry of the Canadian North, while our really smart friend works at a store selling those papers.
In college I again got to know two of the most gifted students in the school. Both were brilliant mathematicians with a special talent for physics and biology. Both were wooed by the pre-medicine folks, who always were able to sway the brightest students to study with them. One followed the sirens of pre-medicine even though his real love was Ocean Sciences; he had a special curiosity about the intelligence of ocean mammals. The other decided to pursue his interest in arcane mathematics, especially the emerging field of Bayesian statistics. He entered a field I had at the time never heard of and became an actuary, working to understand risks in order to better evaluate insurance. He went on to become a leader of that field in Canada and has his opinion sought whenever major new risks emerge in the world. The other continued halfway through Medical School and dropped out, he is having a good life, but not studying marine mammals.
Again, in Graduate School I was lucky to befriend two very gifted fellow psychology graduate students. Both had a special interest in how people processed information about other people. One was especially gifted and may have been the smartest person I have ever known. However, it was the other student who went on to become one of the leading figures in the field of Social Cognition, garnering a Chaired Professorship at the University of Illinois and publishing several hundred articles on the subject. My truly gifted friend had the dilemma of being so smart he could discern every way his ideas could be wrong. His work never involved a significant risk, or an attempt to work on something truly novel as he could never get over his fear that he might be wrong. His own preoccupation with the way he might fail caused him to never achieve the truly brilliant insights he was capable of. He too became a professor, but at a second tier university working on problems he was not really interested in, but knew he could answer without worry.
So, how do these three stories relate to my observations about the challenges the world is facing today. It is simply this:
You have the gifts the world needs to address the myriad challenges we now confront and to utilize the knowledge we are amassing to create a wonderful place to live. To do so, all you need to do is continue to develop your gifts and pursue that which you love. In each story, the person who realized their gifts did so, by pursuing without much thought really the things they loved to do, whether it was whitewater canoeing with a stack of books in his backpack, or math I could not hope to understand or experiments about how we come to perceive and understand one another they pursued the things they were interested in with passion.
Three things have the potential to stop you from doing so:
- Your peers may not like that you are smart and somewhat different and work hard to bring you back to mediocrity. But, remember ultimately being a part of a losing crowd is in the end not much fun.
- Well intended adults may suggest you focus on things with greater practicality, the things that will get you a highly prestigious occupation, even if that is not your true interest. But, remember according to the Department of Labor 8 of the 10 most popular jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2000.
- Your own worries about how you might fail have the potential to stop you from trying the thing you most want to try. But, remember that all of the great thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs, agents of change embrace failure as an opportunity to learn.
So your gifts are an honor and an obligation to pursue that which you love with a passion and sense of abandonment only someone aware of the world that awaits them could have.