Remarks by William R. Brody
President, The Johns Hopkins University
Koς University — 2008 Commencement Ceremony
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Rumeli Feneri Campus, Istanbul [Note: Prepared text. Not checked against delivery.] Thank you, President Askar, and to the trustees and faculty
of Koς University for this tremendous honor. There are many
research universities across the world, but very few with
the clear and defining sense of purpose of Koς University.
Your commitment to expanding the frontiers of knowledge on
behalf of all of humanity is a goal we strive to achieve at
Johns Hopkins University as well. I know from personal
experience the rewards and the difficulties that come with
this challenge, and so I find this recognition doubly
meaningful. Thank you. I am especially pleased and honored to be here with Rahmi
Koς, an alumnus, friend, supporter and himself an honorary
degree recipient of Johns Hopkins. Rahmi is one of a small
number of truly visionary philanthropists at work in our
world today. He shares with people like Bill Gates, Michael
Bloomberg and Warren Buffet an understanding that great
philanthropy does more than help the present; it shapes the
future and moves us all to a better world. Ten years ago, I
had the privilege of awarding Rahmi an honorary degree from
Johns Hopkins in recognition of his philanthropic
leadership in education, health and culture. I am very
pleased that Rahmi is here to see this similar honor
extended to me. Good evening. To President Askar and honored guests, to the distinguished
faculty and proud family members, but most of all to the
joyful graduates and members of the Class of 2008, I bring
greetings and warmest wishes from the students and alumni,
faculty and employees of The Johns Hopkins University. I have been given a few minutes in this part of the program
to offer a commencement speech. President Askar was kind
enough two months ago to come see me in Baltimore, where he
took the time to answer my questions about what might be
appropriate for me to say on this occasion. He told me my speech should be inspiring. Preferably,
somewhat amusing. It should offer a fresh perspective on
the age-old problem of the meaning of life, or at least,
the meaning of life after university. It should be wise and
warm, witty and insightful, but most of all, he said, it
should be brief. In the next few short minutes, I will keep this foremost in
my mind. Graduation speakers are generally selected for their
supposed wisdom and their insights about things that have
happened in the past. The graduates in the audience,
however, are intensely interested in the future. This
presents a dilemma to which there is no easy answer. The one thing I can tell the graduates today with the
utmost certainty is that the future unknowable. The second
thing I can tell them is that this is probably just as
well. In college, I had a friend who was very concerned with
knowing what was to come when we were graduating, so he
decided to go see a fortuneteller. The fortuneteller asked
my friend to sit, and had him lay his hands, palms upward,
on the table. She spent several minutes carefully examining
the lines in his hands, and the patterns on his fingertips.
Then she announced: You will be poor, and miserable, until
you are 45 years old." My friend was taken aback, but he thought he saw a glimmer
of hope. And then? he said. What happens when I m 45? "By then, she said, you'll be used to it." So this morning, though they are very much on our minds, I
will leave the graduates' futures in their own
quite-capable hands. I want to say a few words to you today about a subject I
chose to address 10 years ago, when Rahmi Koς was in
Baltimore receiving his honorary degree. It was an unlikely
topic for a Johns Hopkins graduation ceremony, and so too
it is something perhaps unexpected at a great scientific
and research institute like Koς University. This subject is
a word you never expect to hear at commencement, except,
perhaps, in the very last line of the speech. Today, I d like to talk a little bit about luck — specifically, about good luck. I have come to Istanbul to 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 unforeseen
opportunity will play some pivotal role in the course of
your life. John Werner Kluge was formerly a broadcasting and
advertising executive and then the CEO of Metromedia in New
York. His achievements in those fields 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 American movie star Kirk Douglas was even more direct.
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 judgment, 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 of the American Midwestern farm boy who
was bright enough to go to college. Unfortunately, just as
he was graduating high school, his father lost everything
gambling in the stock 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 — a
considerable sum in those days — and it would take him
more than 15 years to pay off those debts. More bad luck. He got by, however, when an army friend with political
connections offered to help him run 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
race for the U.S. Senate, an opportunity already turned
down by three others who thought the contest was
unwinnable. Harry Truman decided to enter. He won the
election. He later won re-election, and then election to a
higher office. At the age of 60, he became president of the
United States, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt.
Today, he is remembered for his integrity and
forthrightness while he was in office. 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. What Picasso meant is that we 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 21st century is that we
can expect the unexpected. One day several years ago, my
daughter announced that she was studying to be a Web
designer. I said, What s a Web designer? I thought Web
design was something spiders did. Now I can t imagine
running a business without one. The important point is, 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 am sure that the graduates in this audience are as
prepared, and ready, and willing as any graduates the world
has seen. You know a lot. The education you received here
is an ideal preparation for a world full of uncertainty and
change. Luck favors the prepared mind, according to Louis
Pasteur, and today I see before me a sea of prepared minds. Members of the classes of 2008: Today has been 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;
your country will glory in your achievements; the world
will be grateful for your gifts. May all of you fare well on the journey ahead. Thank you, and — dare I say it — good luck. | 
