A New Year's Kick in the Pants (a Kind, Gentle one)

From an address by Mitt Romney that he gave at the graduation commencement at Suffolk University (not a political commentary so much as a life commentary)

Swim in the Deep Water

I don’t remember when it was exactly that I finally went past the sandbar. My family had a summer cottage on the shores of one of the Great Lakes. For the first 40 or so feet, the lake is shallow, warm, and protected from big waves by the sandbar. That’s where I spent most of the hot summer days as a boy. I liked it there. One day, my brother got me up on water skis. Perhaps fearing that a turn would make me fall, he drove the boat, and me, straight out into the deep. By the way, this lake is over 100 miles wide. I screamed at him the whole terrifying ride. He took me about a half mile. But ever after, the deep water is where I wanted to be: surfing in the breakers, water skiing, diving. I got out of the shallow water, for good.Over the years, I have watched a good number of people live out their lives in the shallows.In the shallows, life is all about yourself. Your job, your money, your house, your rights, your needs, your opinions, your ideas, your comfort.In the deeper waters, life is about others: family, friends, faith, community, country, caring, commitment. In the deeper waters, there are challenging ideas, opposing opinions, and uncomfortable battles.One business colleague, I’ll call Rich, told me that his life ambition was to be listed in Forbes among the 400 wealthiest people in the world. His ambition, his pre-occupation with self, overshadowed his marriage and his loyalties to his friends – so he lost them all. He became wealthy in the way he hoped. But he swims in the shallowest of waters, because he swims alone.Another business colleague, Bob, once told me he hoped he could make enough money to give away great sums of it. Remarkably, the more he gives away, the more he seems to have. He financed a program for troubled kids. They live for thirty days in the Anasazi desert. Young lives that were quite lost, have been found. He just told me that he’s leaving the firm that pays him millions of dollars to take his family for three years of service in Ghana.Don’t you just love people who swim in the deep waters of life!Almost every dimension of your life can be held to the shallows or taken into the deeper water. Your career, your involvement with others, your spouse and your children, your politics – each can be lived with you comfortably at the center. Or, they can draw you out of yourself, into service and sacrifice, into selflessness.That’s particularly true with your family, your children.I spoke with one of my old high school girlfriends a few years back. She said that she and her husband weren’t sure whether or not they wanted children. They could take so very much time. So as a bit of a test, they decided to buy a dog and see how it went.A girl I met when my wife was teaching explained that she didn’t want to wait until high school graduation to start having babies. She wanted a baby right away. She liked babies. And her friends had babies.Children can be about making us happy, as it was for these. Or they can be the object of the greatest sacrifice and the greatest investment we will ever make.My sister Lynn graduated from Stanford University. She put her career on hold to raise remarkable children. She uses all she ever learned to do that job. As mother, she is a psychologist, financier, counselor, therapist, educator. She has almost no time for herself. And she loves it.Your family can be all about you, or it can be all about giving in the most all-encompassing ways to others. When it comes to family, it’s a lot more rewarding in the deep water.You are, by now, thinking a good deal about your career. If you are at all like I was at this point in your lives, you are looking with some anxiety toward the prospects for your career. I believe the economic environment will be more turbulent and competitive than any we have ever seen. Some of you will be tempted to stay near shore, where there are no big breakers.I sat next to a father at parent’s night at high school a few years back. He said he worked as a manager at the MBTA. He had found a way to put in less than five hours a day and still get paid a full salary (kind of like George Costanza’s job at the Yankees).You can take the same approach to your career – put in as little as possible. I’d recommend a different course: give your job as much as you can. Push yourself beyond expectations.An engineer faculty member from MIT sat in the audience at Hanscom Air Force base in Bedford looking at the tapes of the Patriot missiles taking out Scuds that were bound for Saudi Arabia. The success or kill percentage was better than 80%, as I recall. The session was a self-congratulatory event for those who had been part of the project. But there was something about the data that caught his attention.He spent days and days analyzing and reanalyzing the data. He just wouldn’t let well enough alone. And then he announced that the reported success was all wrong. The debris on the tapes was from the Patriot missiles exploding, not the Scuds. The military and the manufacturer protested. But he proved he was right. As a result, designs were changed, programs were revamped, and now the Patriots actually save lives.Look beyond the money and perks and benefits: do you love what you’re doing? Are you making a difference? Is your heart in it? In almost every career I have known, there is a way to serve others, to contribute. Find it, and let that drive your effort.At some point in your life, a few of you may be presented with the opportunity to step off your career path, to give yourself fully to some kind of service. When I was asked to leave my investment company to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City, I dismissed the idea out of hand. I was making too much money, I didn’t know bupkis about running a sports event. The job would pay me nothing. The organization was in the worst condition of any I had ever seen. And, after the Games were over, the position would lead nowhere. It was a dead end.I took it. It was the highlight of my professional life. I gave more of myself than I ever had before. I came to know and respect remarkable people. There are currencies more lasting than money. It can be enormously rewarding to take the unobvious course, to jump into the deep water.That’s true in politics as well. I grew up in a political family. As a teenager, I was out collecting signatures. I visited every one of Michigan’s 83 counties. I love arguing about politics. But I meet a lot of people who don’t care about government or who are more comfortable hanging around people who agree with them than exploring ideas and arguments with people who don’t. Some people like to buy a daily paper that’s just filled with columnists and editorials that agree with their own prejudices and perspectives. It’s easy and safe staying with shallow reasoning that doesn’t test you, challenge you and maybe cause you to change your mind. I chuckle when I read some of our newspapers. There is almost no diversity of opinion on their pages, just ridicule and invective toward those who have different views.I’m afraid that even some educators have become less devoted to exploring and testing different positions and viewpoints than they are to promoting their own bias.Bias is shallow thinking and shallow water. Read widely, particularly from people who disagree with you. Argue to learn rather than to win. If you don’t respect, I mean really respect, the views of people who disagree with you, then you don’t understand them yet. There are smart people on both sides of almost every important issue. Learn from them all. If you have life all figured out in neat little packages, you’re in Neverland, not the real world. And it’s boring there.There’s one more thing I’ve seen in the people who swim in the deep waters of life. They don’t fashion their values and principles to suit their self-interest; they live instead by enduring principles that are fundamental to society and to successful, great lives. I learned important lessons about those principles from some of the Olympians I saw in Salt Lake City, like bobsledder Vonetta Flowers.Vonetta was brakeman on USA sled two. All the attention, however, was on sled one, the sled that had taken the World Cup and was a lock for the Olympic Gold. But just before the Olympics, the pilot of sled one dropped her partner and invited Vonetta Flowers to join her.Vonetta had a tough decision. On sled one, she’d get a gold medal for sure – the first Olympic gold to be won by an African American in the Olympic Winter Games. Those of us rooting for US metals hoped she would jump to sled one. She didn’t. She decided that friendship and loyalty to her longtime teammate on sled two was more important than winning the gold.Of course, sled one did well. But when sled two beat them all, coming in first, the crowd went nuts. And tears dripped off Vonetta’s cheeks. Friendship and loyalty above gold.You live one time only. Don’t spend it in safe, shallow water. Launch out into the deep. Give yourself to your family, to your career, to your community. Open your mind to diverging viewpoints. And live, not by what suits the moment, but by the principles that endure for a lifetime. Jump in, the water’s fine!