Thursday, May 21, 1998 Remarks by
William R. Brody, President
The Johns Hopkins University Good morning. To our honorary degree recipients and our new members of
the Society of Scholars, to our Trustees and alumni, our
faculty and staff, to our parents, family members and
friends, but most of all, to our brand new graduates, I
offer greetings on behalf of all of Johns Hopkins
University. Having this chance to offer the commencement speech reminds
me of the historian and University of Chicago professor
William McNeill. When asked to perform the same service at
the commencement for Bard College several years ago,
professor McNeill began by telling the graduates: My job is
to bore you, and let the hardness of your seat and warmth
of your robe prepare you for what is to come. Let me assure you, that is not my intention today. And I
shall try my best not to make it my effect. For I am also
reminded of the words of another great academician and
teacher, a graduate of this university, and the 28th
president of the United States: Woodrow Wilson. President
Wilson once advised that if a man is a fool, the best thing
to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact — by
speaking. That's a thought that is sure to shave 10 minutes off of
any speech. I want to say a few words to you today about an unlikely
subject for a Johns Hopkins graduation ceremony. This
subject is a word you never expect to hear at commencement,
except, perhaps, in the very last line of the speech. Today I thought I d spend a moment talking about something
that many of us don't believe in. Or at least we say we don't.
I d like to talk a little bit about luck — specifically, good luck. This is a subject matter that may seem out of place in
today s ceremony. After all, it is late in the 20th
century, and we are one of the nation's preeminent research
universities. We are rationalistic. We are scientific. We
believe in cause and effect. In hypothesis and theory. We
can recite the second law of thermodynamics — or at least,
many of us can. Officially, at least, Americans don't believe in luck. Authors Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains recently
wrote a book about luck in which they point out that
Americans don't believe in luck, they believe in
pluck. We all know pluck — that good old-fashioned sense of
determination and resilience and resolution. Plucky people
are vigorous and focused and dauntless. They pick
themselves up by their own bootstraps. They brave the tide
and win the race because they see a particular vision of
the future, and they commit themselves to achieving it. Pluck is what America is all about. And to a great extent,
pluck is also what Johns Hopkins is all about — hard work
and self motivation and original thinking and making your
mark by grit and determination. We are an institution that
has always had at its core a devotion to advanced
education, and by extension, an expectation of advanced
thinking. We see ourselves as a collection of self-made women and
men. Individuals who got to where we are by our own efforts
and hard work. And will get to where we're going in same
manner. Nowhere does the idea of luck enter into the
picture. Imagine, for instance, that I d begun my remarks this
morning: Graduates, welcome to the 122nd commencement of
The Johns Hopkins University... Boy, are you lucky! To our thinking, it sounds like an insult. That's because, officially at least, we don't believe in
luck. But there is always, in human nature, a large disconnect
between what we profess to believe and what we do. Perhaps
nowhere is the gap wider than in matters of luck. So where
Americans champion hard work and self determination, last
year we also spent a third of a trillion dollars on
slot machines, bingo, horse races, video poker and lottery
tickets. We may not believe in luck, but we spend a lot of money
giving Fortune the opportunity to change our minds. Perhaps what I should say is that we don't believe in luck
as a value system. But we all know that sometimes people
just get lucky. Usually, it's the other guy. How else to explain the likes of Don Whitman Jr. of
Colorado? In 1989 he won $2 million in the Colorado state
lottery. Then, two years later, he won $2.2 million. Or
what about Joseph P. Crowley? In 1987 he won $3 million in
the Ohio lottery. So he packed it in, retired, and moved to
Boca Raton, where he promptly won the Florida
lottery — for $20 million. What I want to suggest this morning is that, despite these
outlandish examples of extreme good fortune, luck is not
some ghostly apparition only seen by other people. Rather,
I think it best to consider luck an equal opportunity
redeemer. Sooner or later, it visits us all. Often,
repeatedly. The challenge you will face in the years ahead
is to learn how to identify good luck — and cultivate the
bravery necessary to take advantage of it when it comes
your way. Most of us are familiar with the role luck played in Sir
Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928. But
few realize just how much luck was involved. Penicillin, or
rather, the mold from which it is derived, is not as common
or as easily grown as is generally supposed. After Sir Alexander's death in 1955, biographers and
historians investigating his discovery began to understand
just how lucky he had been. Here is what Oxford University
professor Gwyn Macfarlane wrote in his 1984 biography,
Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth. The whole chain of chance events involved in the discovery
has an almost unbelievable improbability. First, Fleming
inoculates a plate with staphylococci and it happens to
become contaminated with a rare, penicillin-producing
strain of mold. Second, he happens not to incubate this
plate. Third, he leaves it on his bench undisturbed while
he is away on holiday. Fourth, the weather during this
period is at first cold and then warm. Fifth, Fleming
examines the plate, sees nothing interesting and discards
it but, by chance, it escapes immersion in lysol. Sixth,
fellow researcher D.M. Pryce happens by, and Fleming
decides to show him some of the many plates that had piled
up on the bench. Seventh, Fleming happens to pick the
discarded penicillin plate out of the tray of lysol (in
which it should have been immersed, but isn t) and on
second inspection sees something interesting. That's how
penicillin was discovered. Does this imply that Fleming was something less than a good
scientist? Quite to the contrary. Fleming was a great
scientist. Part of that greatness was knowing how to take
advantage of good luck when it came his way. It's just like the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn said: Luck is
the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to
take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks, but everyone
also has opportunities. The man who can smile at his breaks
and grab his chances gets on. This morning I have the honor of addressing a group of some
of the most successful and capable graduates that this
university, or any university, has ever produced. You are
exceptionally bright, extremely motivated and unusually
well prepared. Many of you are capable not just of
achievement, but of great achievement. Yet even for the
most accomplished among you, luck and chance and unforseen
opportunity will play some pivotal role in the course of
your life. John Werner Kluge is a broadcasting and advertising
executive and the CEO of Metromedia in New York. His
achievements in those fields has made him one of the
wealthiest men in the world. When asked by a reporter to
sum up how he had achieved so much, he said: If I told you
it was all luck, I wouldn t be truthful. But if I told you
it was all strategy, it would be a downright lie. The actor Kirk Douglas was even more succinct. You can have
all the talent in the world, he said, but without luck, you
go nowhere. Not all successful people are as candid ascribing the
importance of luck in their fortunes as are J.W. Kluge or
Kirk Douglas. But maybe they should be. In the early 1970s Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks
conducted a study to try to discover why some people are
successful and others aren t. Using a 20-year study that
followed 5,000 families, he tried to identify the causes of
economic success. He looked at factors that are commonly
assumed to shape our financial destiny: a good upbringing,
going to the right schools, a high I.Q., strong college
test results, good grades or even choosing the right
career, like securities trading. What did he find? Well, he found that most of those things
don't matter all that much. In fact, he could identify only
two characteristics that separated the successful from the
unsuccessful. The first was on-the-job competence: how
well people performed the jobs they did. The second factor was luck. In the study, Jencks and his
researchers concluded: We suspect luck has at least as much
effect as competence on income. Of course, most people won't admit it. As Jencks says,
those who are lucky tend to impute their success to skill,
while those who are inept believe they are merely unlucky.
If one man makes money speculating on the stock market
while another loses it, the first will credit his success
to good judgement, while the second will blame his bad
luck. In the words of novelist Frank Clark, it's hard to detect
good luck — it looks so much like something you ve earned. Right this moment I could deliver the world's most
sensational commencement speech if I could give you the
formula for obtaining good luck, when you need it. But of
course I can't. Worse yet, I m not sure I can even tell you
how to recognize good luck when it occurs. Fortune doesn t
always wrap her gifts in bows and pretty paper. Take the example from early in this century of the
Midwestern farm boy who was bright enough to go to college.
Unfortunately, just as he was graduating high school, his
father lost everything gambling on the futures market, and
so the boy was soon guiding a plow behind a mule on his
grandfather's farm. Bad luck. He went off to France to fight in World War I, and came
back to start his own clothing business, which soon went
bankrupt. At age 38 he was $35,000 in debt — an sizable
sum in those days — and it would take him more than 15
years to pay off the debts. More bad luck. He got by, however, when an army buddy with political
connections offered to put him up for county judge. He ran
and won. When he was 42, the office of presiding judge
opened. He ran and won for that as well. The day he turned 50, he had no better prospects than to
one day retire from a lifetime service in some minor county
office. But a week later, he was approached to enter the
primary for the U.S. Senate, an opportunity already turned
down by three others who knew that two popular congressmen
had also thrown their hats in the ring. Harry Truman
decided to enter that contest, and the rest is history. In retrospect, it's hard to say if his time spent plowing
fields behind a mule, or the years spent repaying his own
bankruptcy, were in fact, bad luck for Truman. They were
difficult but important events that shaped his character
and prepared him for the future. They enabled him to become
not just a successful politician, but an effective leader
as well. Part of the secret of learning good luck from bad is being
able to change our minds — to change our goals and
aspirations and even our careers when the right opportunity
to do so comes along. If you always know exactly what you
want, said Pablo Picasso, that will be the most you ll ever
find. The point, of course, is not that you can't have goals, or
that you shouldn t plan; the essence of Picasso's statement
is the need to be open to opportunities we aren t
anticipating. We need to be ready to follow the paths we
didn t expect. Life after commencement is not a matter of carefully
mapping out your future and then dutifully following from
point A to point B. The reality of life in the closing days
of the twentieth century is that we can expect the
unexpected. As one observer put it so well: the future will
be more of the same — only much different. Many of you graduating today will have not one career, or
two, but several — maybe dozens. We're living longer,
working longer, and we're lucky enough to be alive to
witness one of those periodic cataclysms of technological
change that is putting the world on its head. Old
occupations will fall away to mere historical curiosity:
like a scrivener in the era of Xerox machines. New ones
will arise, some that we can't even begin to imagine. So don't be concerned if you aren t exactly sure what you
are going to do in the future. It's truly impossible to
plan for a career that doesn t yet exist. But we can at least be prepared to seize opportunity when
it knocks. We can be ready to expect the unexpected, and
willing to view these discontinuities not as challenges,
but opportunities. Hap and mishap govern the world, goes the old English
proverb, to which Confucius supplies an important coda. The
more you know, he said, the more luck you will have. I m pleased to say that the graduates in this audience are
prepared, and ready, and willing. You know a lot. Your
Johns Hopkins education is an ideal preparation for a world
laced with uncertainty and change. Luck favors the prepared
mind, goes the old saying, and today I see before me a
tentful of prepared minds. This morning's ceremony is rich in the kind of pageantry
and ritual and tradition we associate with momentous
occasions — and well it should be. The robes and hoods,
the processional music, formal invocations and high
seriousness of it all are meant to reinforce the
significance of this event. I hope you have enjoyed them.
You certainly have earned them. But now comes the hard part. All of what came before was just preparation. The real
tasks lie ahead. No doubt, you will need every skill you
have so far mastered — and many you have not yet begun to
possess — to overcome obstacles that will arise in your
paths. And while I cannot stand here this morning and predict
which of you will blaze like stars, and which will go
quietly and competently about hour business with little
fanfare but no less success, I can at least say with
considerable confidence that all of you are capable and
motivated and exceptionally well prepared. Members of the classes of 1998: Today will be a wonderful
day, memorable for us all. Let me again offer my
congratulations to those of you who have received degrees
today, and my good wishes to your family and friends who
have stood beside you and supported you throughout your
studies. Your university is proud to call you graduates;
you will always be welcomed here. May all of you fare well on the journey ahead. Thank you, and — dare I say it — good luck. | 
