Speech given at the Phi Eta Sigma Banquet on March 27, 2014

Life, one grand tournament

Congratulations!

You are here because you are focused, disciplined, hard-working, and intellectually talented students. Make no mistake: tonight is a victory—your victory—and this event is your triumph.

While most of you are expecting me to encourage you to seek greater victories, I will do the opposite. I urge you to seek failure—not just any failure, but the grandest failure.

Doesn’t life seem a bit like a tournament? Victories were easy in youth, but as you age you find yourself competing against better and better opponents, making each accomplishment harder than the last. Your parents begin you competing in all sorts of activities at an early age. Your mother wanted you at a first-grade reading level before pre-K, and your father wanted you to score soccer goals before you knew which way to kick the ball.

Those victories came easy, because you were rewarded just for participating. When my oldest daughter was four she played in a soccer league where they didn’t even keep track of the score, so there were no winners announced at the end the game. She wasn’t even aware it was a game where one could win or lose.

As you get older you play in sports where there is a winning and losing team, but you always get your trophy regardless of the outcome, and your parents proudly display it on a shelf in your bedroom. Classes get harder. Now you are assigned grades based on your performance, but good grades are still easy to achieve.

As you age the tournament progresses and you are moved up a bracket with tougher competition. In high school not everyone is a valedictorian, and the coach doesn’t give every football player time on the field (something I know very well). Still, it is easy to make A’s, and they still let people like me wear a jersey and sit on the bench.

Now you are at college. Those not inclined to academics did not follow you here. They stayed home to work, or perhaps join the military. Now, the A grades are harder to achieve. You are not competing against all kids your age, but all kids your age who are disciplined and smart enough to attend college. And no matter how much you want to play football, soccer, or run track, acceptance on a college team is based on skill alone, and the skills college athletes have are astonishing.

Although you are currently in a highly competitive environment, I don’t worry about the remainder of your college career. You will continue to be disciplined and your intellect will only sharpen. You will earn high grades, and scholarships, and awards, and more than once a person will take the stage as I do now and praise you.

But what then? Perhaps you will attend medical school, where you then compete against the sharpest students in the world! Or enter business, where the marketplace could care less about your intentions or your effort, caring only about your performance. Or politics, where competition is brutal, where competition is perpetual. Perhaps some of you will, like me, enter graduate school in a scientific discipline, where for the first time you will learn what it is like to have to compete against geniuses.

In all of these post-college scenarios the competition is not just fierce but the outcome highly consequential. If you don’t pass medical school, you will feel a fool for taking on $100,000 of student loans in your attempt. In the business world, even the smartest, hardest working people sometimes find themselves in poverty. If a politician, your defeats will feel humiliating. In the scientific world, where publish-or-perish is a reality, you will learn just how hard it is to discover something new when the brightest minds have been attempting the same thing for millennia. From Socrates to Newton, they got the low-hanging fruit, whereas you must climb to new heights just to spot new fruit.

If you keep challenging yourself and seeking greater honors you will rise to higher and higher levels of the tournament, against better and better rivals. Unless you are one of the very few who fight throughout their lives and die undefeated, you will suffer defeat at some point. The only way to avoid such defeat is to quit now, before the tournament becomes serious. But I doubt you will forfeit in the great tournament called life. No, not you.

The pursuit of defeat

Every great person dies defeated. Alexander the Great did not conquer the world. Hannibal may be among the most admired military generals, but he did not defeat Rome. Einstein did not discover a theory of everything. Socrates could not convince Athens to spare his life. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball. Bill Gates helped create the age of information, but now, we all yearn for the day our PC’ run as well as Steve Jobs’ iPhones. Martin Luther King Jr. had to leave much of his work to others after his assassination. He succeeded in convincing most of us that people of all color were equal, but he failed to convince the man who shot him.

We admire these people for their temerity, their audacity to never stop throwing punches. When Alexander was dying his generals asked him who gets his kingdom. He answered, “To the strongest.” Alexander wanted the battle to continue even if he could not participate. Who did Einstein think he was to say that time slows down on a flying plane relative to people standing on the ground? Talk about audacity! Socrates did not beg Athens for his life, but instead told his fellow citizens that they should be grateful for his contribution to the city. That took guts. Michael Jordan was willing to exit the sport where he was an emperor and enter a sport where he was a peasant, all because when he wasn’t satisfied with winning just one tournament. That is a man not afraid of failure. And Martin Luther King Jr.? Well, I can’t help but think that he knew he would probably be assassinated. And I bet that only encouraged him to fight harder.

To dream big is to invite great failure, and I say that if you are afraid of failure then you are not ready to play at the higher levels of life’s tournament, so you best check yourself, suck it in, tell yourself to be braver, because the game for you has barely begun. If you are afraid of failure then you are afraid of life, and once life knows that, it circles you like a shark. You don’t lose in life by being defeated. You lose by forfeiting. You don’t win at life by defeating others, you win by accepting ever greater struggles.

Tonight is a mere pause from the struggle—a time-out, a rain-delay. Your purpose in life is not to merely sit there and be praised by me. Your purpose is to leave here and struggle, and resist, and clamor, and attack, and fight, fight, fight ...

You see, your life will ultimately be judged not by your victories but by the magnificence of your defeat. Keep studying hard. Graduate with honors. Go to medical school, or the business world, or graduate school. Rise to more prestigious positions and higher salaries. Then fail to become the world’s greatest surgeon after becoming so close, fail to become a CEO after multiple interviews, fail to win a Nobel Prize after being awarded tenure at a major university, fail to be elected President after being a two-term governor, fail to exceed Beethoven in genius after composing your fifth symphony, perhaps even fail to give an inspiring speech to young geniuses after working on it for so, so long.

Pursue this great failure like Alexander pursued every king, like Hannibal pursued Rome, as Einstein pursued the secrets of the universe, and as Michael Jordan tried to desperately to hit a baseball. These failures are superior to any victory, because after you have been knocked-out, you will realize that most other people would not have had the tenacity, the audacity, the endurance, the resolution, to fight even half your battles.

And so, I congratulate you once again on today’s victory, and I congratulate you in advance, on your magnificent failure. Let the next round begin!