Summary From Harvard University Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008
1. As high as 58% of Harvard graduates enter i-banking, finance or consulting. But there is this persistent question about why they are following this path.
2. It is a fundamental question about the values, about how to reconcile the seemingly conflicting goals for success and a meaningful life. (how to define success so that it yields and encompasses real happiness)
3. Harvard students want to be happy. That’s why they choose electives like Positive psychology and the science of happiness.
4. The president proposes that it is important to try. Pursue what you love. Do what you want to do and then do what you have to do. Liberal arts education is liberal in the sense that it allows individuals to make self-conscious, rational choices and at the same time challenge their own choices and prepare to change routes.
This is echoed by Henry Ford who firmly believes that one should never feel settled.
Some quotes from Harvard President Drew Faust's Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008
The answer is: you won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.
I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.
But what is ultimately most important here is that you are asking the question — not just of me but of yourselves. You are choosing roads and at the same time challenging your own choices. You have a notion of what you want your life to be and you are not sure the road you are taking is going to get you there. This is the best news. And it is also, I hope, to some degree, our fault. Noticing your life, reflecting upon it, considering how you can live it well, wondering how you can do good: These are perhaps the most valuable things that a liberal arts education has equipped you to do. A liberal education demands that you live self-consciously. It prepares you to seek and define the meaning inherent in all you do. It has made you an analyst and critic of yourself, a person in this way supremely equipped to take charge of your life and how it unfolds. It is in this sense that the liberal arts are liberal — as in liberare — to free. They empower you with the possibility of exercising agency, of discovering meaning, of making choices. The surest way to have a meaningful, happy life is to commit yourself to striving for it. Don’t settle. Be prepared to change routes. Remember the impossible expectations we have of you, and even as you recognize they are impossible, remember how important they are as a lodestar guiding you toward something that matters to you and to the world. The meaning of your life is for you to make.
Some quotes from My Life and Work by Henry Ford
Life is not a battle except with our own tendency to sag with the downpull of "getting settled." If to petrify is success all one has to do is to humour the lazy side of the mind but if to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep awake all day. I saw great businesses become but the ghost of a name because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in slavish following of its yesterdays. Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey.Even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled--he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.
Habit conduces to a certain inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble.
There is a subtle danger in a man thinking that he is "fixed" for life. It indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling him off.
