Dear Class of 2012:
Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you.
Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of
you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects
in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy,
courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such
enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a
job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on
your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address
unknown.
No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or
taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West
Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which
she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes
brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she's in
Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.
If you're like that intern, please feel free to feel
sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn't.
Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you're nothing
like her. And since you're no longer children, at least officially, it's time
someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts.
Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based"
economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable
graduating class in history.
A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an
astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write
about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956.
He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the
United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president.
Pop quiz, Class of '12: Do you?
Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the
purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how
to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top
schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank
spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ.
It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are
in the first place.
Now to Fact Two: Your competition is global. Shape up.
Don't end your days like a man I met a few weeks ago in Florida, complaining
that Richard Nixon had caused his New York City business to fail by opening up
China.
In places like Ireland, France, India and Spain, your
most talented and ambitious peers are graduating into economies even more
depressed than America's. Unlike you, they probably speak several languages.
They may also have a degree in a hard science or engineering—skills that
transfer easily to the more remunerative jobs in investment banks or global
consultancies.
I know a lot of people like this from my neighborhood in
New York City, and it's a good thing they're so well-mannered because otherwise
they'd be eating our lunch. But if things continue as they are, they might soon
be eating yours.
Which reminds me of Fact Three: Your prospective
employers can smell BS from miles away. And most of you don't even know how
badly you stink.
When did puffery become the American way? Probably around
the time Norman Mailer came out with "Advertisements for Myself." But
at least that was in the service of provoking an establishment that liked to
cultivate an ideal of emotional restraint and public reserve.
To read through your CVs, dear graduates, is to be
assaulted by endless Advertisements for Myself. Here you are, 21 or 22 years old,
claiming to have accomplished feats in past summer internships or at your
school newspaper that would be hard to credit in a biography of Walter Lippmann
or Ernie Pyle.
If you're not too bright, you may think this kind of
nonsense goes undetected; if you're a little brighter, you probably figure
everyone does it so you must as well.
But the best of you don't do this kind of thing at all.
You have an innate sense of modesty. You're confident that your résumé needs no
embellishment. You understand that less is more.
In other words, you're probably capable of thinking for
yourself. And here's Fact Four: There will always be a market for people who
can do that.
In every generation there's a strong tendency for
everyone to think like everyone else. But your generation has an especially bad
case, because your mass conformism is masked by the appearance of mass
nonconformism. It's a point I learned from my West Point intern, when I asked
her what it was like to lead such a uniformed existence.
Her answer stayed with me: Wearing a uniform, she said,
helped her figure out what it was that really distinguished her as an
individual.
Now she's a second lieutenant, leading a life of meaning
and honor, figuring out how to Think Different for the sake of a cause that
counts. Not many of you will be able to follow in her precise footsteps, nor do
you need to do so. But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up
your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do
something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good luck!
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