What "Follow Your Dreams" Misses | Harvey Mudd Commencement Speech 2024

This segment uses the analogy of two talented musicians, Paganini (focused on technical excellence) and Taylor (focused on emotional resonance), to illustrate the difference between personal growth and adding value to others. While Paganini might excel in school, Taylor is better positioned for a successful music career because she focuses on creating something that resonates with people. The speaker connects this to career choices, suggesting that focusing on adding value is key to long-term success. This segment critiques the common advice to "follow your dreams," arguing that it's simplistic and overlooks pragmatic concerns. The speaker emphasizes that while passion is important, a successful career requires considering how your work adds value to others, not just focusing on personal enjoyment. He introduces the idea that the goal shifts from personal growth (in school) to adding value to others (in a career). now next, I want to take a moment to talk about whose dreams you should be thinking about, because it's not just your own. when I was visiting Harvey Mudd last year, I had the pleasure of talking to one of the gems in your math department, Talithia Williams, and I asked her, hey, what made you pursue math in the first place? she had a very clear story. she told me she hadn't thought about it very much until one distinct day in her high school calculus class, her teacher, mr.. Dorman, pulled her aside and said, Talithia, you're really good at this. you should consider majoring in math. evidently, she had never thought about it before, but that one comment was enough to knock over the first in a series of dominoes that led to a very flourishing career in the topic. over the years, I've asked a lot of mathematicians the same question, and you would be shocked how often I hear a very similar answer.. there was this one particular teacher, and one seemingly simple thing that they did, that was the beginning in a long series of encouragements. never underestimate just how much influence you can have on others, especially the ones who are younger than you are. growing older is a process of slowly seeing the proportion of people around you who are younger than you are rise inexorably closer to 100%. as this happens, you stand to have as much influence by shaping the dreams of those behind you as you do by following those of your own. and as a very last point, the biggest risk in the follow your dreams cliche is the implication that there's one static target point at all. in the next 10, 20, 30 years, the world around you is going to change a lot, and those changes are going to be unpredictable. I hardly need to emphasize this point. you are the class who spent your formative transition from high school to college under a pandemic. but it's not just the world around you.. tonight, when you're celebrating your graduation and hopefully remembering to celebrate Mother's day as well, take a few moments to ask the people who are older than you how they've changed, how their personalities, how their value systems have changed since they were a student.. you'll notice that essentially all of them has an answer, which suggests you have every reason to expect that there's going to be something fundamental about you that changes as well in the coming decades, probably unpredictably.. almost everyone I know has undergone some kind of shift since college. some came to place more value on having a family than they used to. some shifted from a trajectory that was oriented towards an academic career to going into industry. some went the other way around. And after spending some time in industry returned to grad school.. and so, so many of them have jobs that simply didn't exist at the time of their graduation. so rather than having any one particular goal that defines who you are, you'll take better advantage of whatever the future has to offer you if you remain nimble and if you're responsive to the changes in the world, and if you anticipate change within yourself.. on a stage, and he has bags of cash surrounding him. never stop buying lottery tickets, he says. no matter what people tell you, I failed again and again, but I never gave up, and here I am as proof that if you put in the time, it pays off. the caption notes that every inspirational speech should come with a disclaimer about survivorship bias. the obvious way that follow your dreams is susceptible to survivorship bias is that for all of the high--risk, high--reward paths, things like professional athletics, starting a social media company, making a career in the arts,, it's only the few who rise to the top who are in a position to give advice at all. but there's also a more subtle way that survivorship bias applies here. it's not just about the odds of winning a particular game. it has to do with whether the game you choose to play meshes well with the way that the future unfolds.. if you were a software enthusiast in the late 1980s, you would be well poised to ride the dot-com boom in the decade that followed. if you were someone with a niche interest and an act for film production, you would find science and programming, and I would spend my summers interning at software startups. but I distinctly remember coming back at the end of each of those summers and thinking,, man,, you know what I really want to do with my life, is spend more time doing math.. So I had a passion,, I had something I would want to follow. but in hindsight,, that passion was a lot more arbitrary and maybe a little more self--centered than I would have liked to admit at the time.. why did I love math,?, You know,, if I'm honest,, I think it had its roots in the fact that when I was young, the adults emphasized this is an important topic to learn., and they told me I was good at it.. this makes me spend more time with it.. spending time with something is how you get better at something., And that kicks off a positive feedback loop, in both senses of the word positive feedback.. now, as time went on,, I do believe it became less about perceptions when I was in college., I remember genuinely enjoying the aesthetic delights that beautiful math problem solving has to have.., but thinking of it as a career ambition,, not just a hobby, this had the fatal flaw that I was viewing the world through a lens of what I personally