Word: world
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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...
Then came your junior year, and suddenly there was no script. The world had 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?...
...unforeseen events of the past two years have forced us to imagine the world differently; they have demanded that we adapt and throw away the script we thought we were following. And they have reminded us once again of the value of the liberal arts, which are designed to prepare us for life without a script. Since you cannot know what you need to be ready for, we have tried to get you ready for anything...
...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...