Defining Success

Abstract

The purpose of this day is to celebrate the many successes that you, the graduates, have already achieved and to look ahead to your future successes. To fulfill that purpose, we need to know how we define success. I know how I was told to define success. When I arrived at an institution much like this one we were handed a directory of the headshots and addresses of everyone in the class; those are the ancient origins of Facebook. In the front of the book, taking barely a paragraph was a list of what were obviously considered the only statistics we needed to know for the incoming class of 1987—how many high school football captains, vale-dictorians and class presidents were among us. Our University President gave a welcome speech which, looking back now, surprises me in its inconsistencies. We were told of what we could expect from our college years, the laudatory aspects of the education that we were preparing to receive. All this was shared with pride; it would be fair to call it a self-congratulatory pride in our adulation for the spirit of inquiry and human creativity. But we were also told to look around at our classmates, where we would find future senators and congressmen, CEOs of companies, judges of high courts, winners of Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. It was a mixed message that the totality of human experience was being laid at our feet, but that all you needed to know about us could be divined by counting valedictorians in the Facebook, or guessing who would become the richest and the most famous. I am now 28 years from my own graduation and 32 from my arrival on campus. I want to offer my sincere thanks to the faculty and trustees of the University of Pennsylvania for giving me this opportunity to deepen my already growing mid-life crisis. I still want the signifiers and trappings of a conventional definition of success. I still work for them, I draw self-esteem from the ones I have attained and to be honest, I hope I still attain more. But if I stop cultivating in myself an ability to see that most of life's successes are occurring outside those definitions, I am missing out on most of my opportunities to make something of my life for myself, for others around me and for the generations that will come after me. …