HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
commencement speeches very
seriously. It’s such a special moment for the graduating class—a
pause, a kind of parenthesis in
time following four (or five, or
six) years of nonstop learning and
growing just before the start of an
adult life spent moving forward
and putting all of that knowledge
into action. It’s a unique marker
in their lives—and for fifteen
minutes or so I have the graduates’ undivided attention. The
challenge is to say something
equal to the occasion, something that will be useful during a
charged time of new beginnings.
“Commencement speakers,” I
told the women graduates, “are
traditionally expected to tell the
graduating class how to go out
there and climb the ladder of success. But I want to ask you instead
to redefine success. Because the
world you are headed into desperately needs it. And because you are
up to the challenge. Your education
at Smith has made it unequivocally clear that you are entitled to
take your place in the world wherever you want that place to be. You
can work in any field, and you can
make it to the top of any field. But
what I urge you to do is not just
take your place at the top of the
world, but to change the world.”
The moving response to the
speech made me realize how
widespread is the longing among
so many of us to redefine success
and what it means to lead “the
good life.”
“What is a good life?” has been
a question asked by philosophers
going back to the ancient Greeks.
But somewhere along the line
w e abandoned the question and
shifted our attention to how much
money we can make, how big a
house we can buy, and how high
we can climb up the career ladder. Those are legitimate questions, particularly at a time when
women are still attempting to gain
an equal seat at the table. But as I
painfully discovered, they are far
from the only questions that matter in creating a successful life.
Over time our society’s notion of
success has been reduced to money
and power. In fact, at this point,
success, money, and power have
practically become synonymous in
the minds of many.
This idea of success can work—
or at least appear to work—in
the short term. But over the
long term, money and power by
themselves are like a two-legged
stool—you can balance on them
for a while, but eventually you’re
going to topple over. And more
and more people—very successful