I wrote this for my daughter, who graduated for the University of Michigan without a graduation...the photo is appropriate colors, but from her high school graduation.
For the last 17 years, the lion’s share of your waking hours was spent in school. Looking back at that time, I hope many of those days were fun. But we all know plenty of them were anything but fun, so take this day, this moment, right here and now, to celebrate every one of those days, for you will never again spend so much concentrated time
learning for learning’s sake.
Over those 17 years of learning you built an incredible library of information in your brain, one you can be proud of. This university, in particular, helped you acquire information that is extremely valuable… and thank goodness… because it was also expensive, as you and your parents know.
But 17 years of information will only get you so far, and especially because you’re not even likely to USE all of that information... which is a sentiment I bet you had one or two times like when you had to read early English literature or doing one too many geometry proofs.
Therefore, I’d like to suggest you start creating something more valuable than information. Knowledge. You’ll need knowledge if you want to be an expert or leader and to make that tangible, let talk about a knowledgeable expert you’ve heard of – Bo Schembechler.
Now Bo’s brain held a lot of great information, especially about football and sports… but then again, so does everyone other college coach. Clearly, a big pile of information, no matter how impressive, is not the defining feature of a knowledge expert or a great coach.
For greatness, in sports and in life, you need to find the concepts hiding behind and between information. Those nuggets are knowledge, and they are higher-order intelligence that is not readily seen by most people. A great way to spot knowledge is to examine whether it glues things together, creating more the sum of its parts.
So, for instance, a coach who leads his team to a few victories is not necessarily a knowledgeable coach, for he isn’t necessarily the type of coach who can bond a group of players together into a great TEAM.
You can spot a knowledgeable coach because they create great PROGRAMS, programs that are bigger than football, programs that produce more than one great team because it creates good PEOPLE, not just good players. And great programs inspire greatness from an even wider circle of people—trainers, referees, fans, and marching bands—to work together to be more than the sum of their parts. Greatness requires knowledge.
Want to know how I can tell Bo was a great coach who had exceptional knowledge? Because his most famous quotes have extraordinarily little to do with football. They make it obvious that what mattered most to Bo were the ideas that inspired people and communities to strive for greatness, to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
Listen in:
“You can NOT be a leader unless you like people! You’ve got to spend time with them, so you know them. You’ve got to be interested in who they are, what they do away from the job, and how they think.”
Here’s my favorite:
“You don't treat the so-called little people poorly, because we don't have any little people here! The trainers, the managers, the secretaries, the people who work in the dorms and cafeterias and classroom buildings are all professionals, and they're all important or they wouldn't be working for Michigan football.”
I believe you’ll have heard at least a part of this last quote. Ready?
“No man is more important than The Team. No coach is more important than The Team. The Team, The Team, The Team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything that you do, you take into consideration what effect does it have on my Team?”
Now let’s go back to you. You will be leaving this university with a degree that represents a lot of great information, and you’ll gain more through your lifetime. But that won’t make you great…and I want you to shoot for great. To get there, you’ll need knowledge, and now is the time to start creating it.
How do you do that? Well, the best teachers already got you started. They were the ones who cared more about you and your education than about the information they were teaching. They asked you very hard questions and then, shockingly, pushed for perceptive answers. They insisted you think creatively for yourself and expected a lot of you… and by doing so, inspired you to be a better person and to make the world a better place.
But I’m not going to lie to you. Knowledge is hard to create. For many reasons, knowledge usually requires expertise or experience, and since you are still working to acquire those things, I recommend you do two things. First always have a mentor in your life, one who already has both expertise or experience. Shoot for people you would describe as wise.
Second, and this is just as important, identify two experts in your field and start reading what they have to say. You are NOT looking for domain information from your field. I want you, instead, to listen for the ideas and concepts in between the information, ones that apply to more than just their area of expertise.
For instance, I’ve been listened to Warren Buffet, who is a successful investor and philanthropist, over a couple decades. I honestly didn’t consider his advice on investing, rather, I studied the way he thinks about and solves problems. Here’s a good example of advice Buffet likes to give that has nothing to do with investing, and it’s a piece of advice I think is valuable for you as well. "Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it."
Knowledge. There’s that word again. Only a little while ago we thought that only humans could create it. But recently, with the advent of artificial intelligence, machines are now creating knowledge as well, and your generation in particular has welcomed smart machines with AI into your life, even calling them by names like Alexa or Siri, and just as importantly, you listen to them. They suggest what you should read and buy and do, and you are happy to take their advice, and in many cases, if you are honest, you’re rather take their advice than any your parents might have to offer.
These machines will work alongside of you in the coming years, and in some cases compete for your jobs, but more importantly—and more poignantly—they will challenge you to consider what makes you uniquely human.
Which is why, in the years before his death, Stephan Hawking gave humanity this advice. "Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins."
Wisdom is vastly different from information and from knowledge because the CONTEXT of wisdom is very different. Wisdom concerns all of reality and is in fact embedded in the fabric of reality. In contrast, information and knowledge are only concerned with small, specific pieces of that reality. To visualize the difference, think of your favorite pie. Wisdom is the creation, consumption, and appreciation of that wonderful pie. Information and knowledge are two main ingredients of that pie. The two are important to the pie, even critical, but they are insufficient. To make and enjoy a pie, many other factors are needed, like a recipe, additional ingredients, an oven and a hungry person who likes pie.
Let explore the critical idea of wisdom…and in order to do that, take a moment to ensure you can think outside of your box. Clear you mind and get ready to think creatively, flexibly and visually.
Ready? Imagine you can create silk threads made of brilliant light, strands of light that are fine but incredibly strong. Get ready to make a bunch of them.
First, I want you to create enough threads to connect yourself to every other student here. These threads honor your connection as a cohort—a group of people graduating from the same university at the same time. Next, throw out more threads, connecting yourself to every professor, teacher, and friend you met during life’s journey up until this moment. And don’t forget the important people who’ve loved and supported you throughout it all, people like your parents, guardians, mentors and family. Make their threads slightly thicker thread so you don’t lose them.
Now, stand back and take a look at all those connections. You’ve created one big, beautiful ball of bright threads over the short span of two decades, evidence you have a vibrant and rich community around you. Being able to appreciate this incredibly rich ball of threads is critical for wisdom, so envision it with as much detail as you can, then commit it to memory.
Now comes the fun. Ready? Imagine you can see all the atoms in your body… slowly rewind time and watch as they go in and out of other people, plants, animals, and matter. Now connect them all with those same bthreads of light...because they were YOU before you were YOU in this here and now.
Next spin webs into the future, in anticipation of all the people, things, and events you will encounter and the future generations you will create.
Now… can you envision this vast network of threads, every one of which is connected to YOU? …pause… Let me answer that question for you. You cannot. None of us can envision the infinite nature of reality as a finite being. But what you could be able to envision, or at least feel, is the wonder that is YOU and all of your connections. You exist in the playground of a vast universe, and throughout your life, you’ll interact with many people who, themselves, will interact with even more. Over both space and time, these interactions will weaver together the threads of reality, a reality that has no single guide or rule book.
Wisdom comes from seeing that enormous whole, and then placing oneself within it. To create a meaningful life for yourselves, you will need a guide that helps you navigate in this whole, and its one only you can create because it requires you answer these three existential questions for yourself - who are you, where are you, and what do you value.
At this pivotal moment in your life, as you transition from school to career, those are the three questions you should be asking and answering, for if you have meaningful answers to them, you will leave this place today with purpose. So I’m going to ask you those questions again, and as I do, I want you to picture yourself and your network of beautiful thread embedded in the amazing fabric of reality. Ready?
Who are you? …… Where you are? …… What do you value? …… You must answer those difficult questions and your answers will guide your interaction in the world. If those answers are respectful of yourself and your place within the fabric of reality, you will have a WISE guide, one that can help you USE your one and only life wisely.
But existential questions like “Who am I?” can’t be answered with the information you gained during your education. They can’t even be answered with the higher-order intelligence of knowledge. And that makes sense, right? Because machines can also create information and knowledge, but they don’t ask such an open and existential question as “who am I?”. Machines are focused on a single end goal or a finite problem within a narrow context, in other words, there are focused on a limited aspect of reality in order to solve a specific problem.
But wisdom wonders about the biggest of all pictures —the fabric of reality—and wise thinking helps us find our place within it. This, of course, is very different from the way machines approach the world and, perhaps, this way of viewing life might be the defining difference between you and machines.
Because you can be filled with a sense of awe that your one and only life exists in the playground of a vast universe. You can have a bigger purpose, and if you can define that, you will also find meaning.
Machines don’t stand in awe of our big and beautiful world and all of the possibilities it holds. They don’t ask themselves if they’re being wise, if their life has meaning, and they don’t wonder if they are creating a better life for themselves and others.
But you I hope YOU do. I hope you stand in awe of reality, filled with wonder at your one and only life, a life that has meaning and purpose if you are wise. I hope you’ll ask yourself if you’re acting wisely, if your life is creating a better life for yourself and others.
Therefore, I challenge you to cultivating wisdom, and to conclude, I will share some very wise words from Wendell Berry.
"We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe…. I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."
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