Commencing Amid Crises

(My first draft, in May 2020, I wrote for those graduating amidst a pandemic. Since then, I've interpolated and polished. Until today, only a handful have read or heard this speech.)

Dear graduating students, trustees, parents, administrators, faculty, distinguished alumni, and assembled guests, thank you for this opportunity.

Parents, let me introduce you to what, here on campus, is called a trigger warning. I suggest you cover your ears for the next 47 seconds. You won't like what you hear.

Graduating students: your parents often say they only want what's best for you.

This is not true.

Rather, they want what is safest.

Once upon a time, safest and best were the same. When you might have taken candy from strangers, played with rabid dogs, or put forks into electric sockets, your parents could claim to know what's best for you. Even now, washing hands and wearing masks are both “safe” and “best”. But, as you entered adolescence, in most areas of your life, those two words diverged. ?

The Safety Dance continues here on campus. In place of your parents’ broad, lasting skin-in-the-game remains a narrow imagination. So, in loco parentis is the motto of the Administrator Guild. No trigger introduction needed for you, admins. [put hands over ears]

[sotto voce]: Hell, they invented trigger warnings. In fact, their dreaming up ever new ways to help you safe grows their ranks. And your tuition.

“Tuition”, of course means both costs and the lessons they pay for. So, today I aim to help you better bargain with—and for—your life. To get you a better deal than the admin’s treasurers and bursars here would indulge, let’s start with this imaginative reckoning:

Inexperience brings mistakes. Mistakes offer lessons. Lessons lead to wisdom.

The Covid crisis has accelerated this equation—and uncovered some life bargains.

To do so, I’ll first tell you my three stories of commencing amid crises. Then three lessons I gleaned, and honed into tools that I aim to show how you can apply to your own life.

A year before high school graduation my parents split. My college fund went to pay divorce lawyers and a second household. With my parents tied up with my younger, disruptive brothers, no one took me to visit schools. So, I didn't even apply to college. I had no plan.

...people that hate the 9-to-5 so much that they’ll work 80 hours a week. They’re called entrepreneurs.

But, as you learned in physics, nature abhors a vacuum. When you’re open to them, opportunities come your way. Two weeks after graduating, I found a job with a local startup. Commencement, as you know, means “a start”, so, I find it fitting I commenced my career there. They gave me a company car. And a car phone. Back then, phones didn’t fit in your pocket. They had to be retrofitted into vehicles. At that point, even doctors and drug dealers still used pagers.

Like teens today, then I was infatuated with my phone—and trying to impress my peers with it. Only much later I saw my real fringe benefit was working for these two cofounders. Both recent college grads, they had this vision, this optimism, this drive to create their own employment.

I learned there's a breed of people that hate the 9-to-5 so much that they’ll work 80 hours a week. They’re called entrepreneurs. While it took me another decade to self-identify as one, that seed was planted.

But first—finally—came college. My second commencement came seven years after my first, a day shy of my 25th birthday, and amidst a recession. With no good job prospects, a history degree from a small liberal arts college in the US Midwest, I had dread. I saw myself stuck, perhaps spending a year or more working in a bookshop. So, six weeks after graduation, I moved to post-communist Eastern Europe. I found a cheap, unscheduled one-way charter flight to the UK. From there, I took a 35-hour bus ride to Poland. At first, I volunteered for UNESCO, then copy edited. I taught English—the waiting tables of expat life; keep that in your back pocket if you move abroad—then got a journalism gig. At 26, I started my own publishing company. I sold that a few years later, yet my magazine survives to this day, during the quarter century most unkind to print publishing since Gutenberg.

After doing something—I’ve come to learn—I seek the theory behind it. I wanted to double down—and level up—in business. So, after my “first retirement” and a short stint at a bank on Wall Street, I went to business school. When my program ended, again I was jobless—though employers had flown me in, internationally, for interviews. Again, another seven years after my last graduation. Your literature classes call this foreshadowing. I came to know it as “that seven-year bitch”.

My backup plan was to move back to New York, where I worked until days before my MBA program began. I figured I had a decent network in town. The Big Apple seemed the safe, logical choice.

Fate doesn’t like safe. Two weeks after graduation, two planes flew into the World Trade Center. Any job prospects I had—both figuratively and literally—went up in smoke. Again, I hit the road. I bussed from Texas throughout Mexico and Central America. Within six months this newly minted MBA ran an NGO in an indigenous highland town in Guatemala. So remote, it was a 4-to-5-hour round trip to the nearest internet connection. While this eventually led to a decade-plus working in Latin America, the first benefits were internal. For one, rural life instills self-reliance: doing with much less. Working with the illiterate and innumerate—and in a second language for us all—distilled my ideas. Lack of digital distractions left plenty of time for writing and reflection. I began synthesizing my visceral experiences with the MBA speak of vicarious learning.

Terms like switching costs, cost of failure, and opportunity costs gave names to concepts I experienced firsthand.

Your switching costs—the friction of trying new things—will never be this low again. Between high school and college, along with that startup, I became a Realtor, worked for a DC think tank, managed another small business (a fleet of pedicabs), plus menial gigs: waiting tables, a bike courier, in retail, selling door-to-door …. I learned what worked for me—and what didn’t.

Now, “Works for Me” has two faces. One is styled as advice, yet is mere “mesearch”—with its own replication crisis. The other requires scratching the surface, and digging deeper. So, if I could give you each a my graduation gift, it would be a Works-for-Me coin of the realm. I’d stamp each side with 4 letters: Y-M-M-V and W-I-T-H. “Your Mileage May Vary”—a caveat few commencement speakers mention—applies even to machines. Cars can be tuned up, while you need to tune in. You’ll each have to find your own “works for me” ways. You best do so by asking how that “works with me”: with one’s own talents, with one’s tendencies, with one’s callings, with one’s values. The “for” points out where to dig for your “with”. Explore this positive feedback loop.

This is that part of every good commencement address where the speaker drops the F- bomb. When it comes to finding that stuff to work with—and that works with you—the most valuable data will come wrapped in failure. It too comes at a cost.

Your cost of failure is also lower than it will ever be. For me, a demotion—plus pay cut—as a journalist eased my jumping ship into my own publishing business. ?Now, if you’ve always been near the top of your class, if you’ve dropped classes and extracurriculars in which you struggled, then you’re already risk and ambiguity adverse. You’ve likely already been conditioned that failure is not an option, at least in school and work. Then, find other outlets. You haven’t yet pushed yourself in the ways that matter.

Finally, there’s opportunity cost. That’s a fancy way of describing tradeoffs: the value of what you give up when you do what you do. While these costs are cheap for anyone at the commencement of their careers, the Covid crisis has made them downright bargains. When you’re already near the floor, the downside is low; the upside is limitless.

As you get older, you’ll add credentials, promotions, lucrative options. You will take on mortgages, romantic partners, then spouses, and maybe kids of your own. It will seem increasingly expensive to pursue detours, digressions, and dice rolling.

All those “costs”, keep in mind, are calculated extrinsically. They may cost you in status, salary, and such. Yet, they—even that F-word—hold intrinsic benefits. Don’t run your life like a business.

While risk management guides business decisions, our lives are better served by regret management. Both risk and regret signal. You manage both by seeing their role. You’ll see regret skews heavily to things you don’t do—as those provide no lessons. Such inaction-based remorse smolders, easily ignored, while it emits noxious gases. Later, given enough oxygen, it grows, engulfs, and is hard to extinguish. While regret from wrong action burns like a signal flare. It draws our attention to a mistake, then falls and fades away.

You’ll minimize regret by really living. Your professors may call this "lived experiences".

Now, dear faculty. I didn't forget to single you out. [cup hands over ears] Time to plug your ears, so we might still enjoy our drinks and discussion together after the ceremony.

[lean forward, look stage right: "There will be drinks afterwards, right?”]

"Lived experiences" is a retronym, like snail mail or analog watch. That faculty members invented—and use—the term is a self-own. It tacitly acknowledges that chalk & talk, reading books & blogs, attending conferences and meetings aren't real experiences.

Since experience is the root of our word "expert", your profs are instead examiners: they "draw out or forth" as the etymology says. They research and investigate. Now, you can still learn from examiners. There are still roles for them. Yet, there is one role you'll have to fill yourselves. Above all, become an expert in yourself.

That entails reconfiguring your current dream-machine selves into memory makers. The memories that will leave their mark on you can be found by looking broadly. Maybe it's that nonprofit that under normal circumstances can’t afford you. Maybe it's working for that scrappy startup—or launching your own. Maybe it's going somewhere far away. (By the way, you can still travel many places in the world. It may require a charter flight, or a slow boat or cost you two weeks in quarantine. Bring good books.)

Maybe it’s some combination of the above.

Maybe, it’s something I can’t even bring to mind. Like with your parents, profs and others, there’s a limit to what older generations can imagine.

Nor is it likely something your peers—or influencers—are also already doing. Now called mimetic desire, aping others runs deep in our evolution. Covid-19 has shown how there’s not always safety in numbers.

Think of the Corona Crisis as your blank check, your get-out-of-jail-free card. Under these circumstances, it’s become much easier to say no, whether to your parents, peers, society—or what that earlier, na?ve, less-mature version of yourself wanted for you. Whenever you worry someone in the future will doubt your road-less-traveled choices, you can remind them—maybe with a wink, “You remember, 2020.”

The most important words I can leave you with today is Don’t waste a crisis.

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