President Lentini, Trustees, Professors, Graduating Students and Guests,
I am grateful for the honor you've given me of this honorary doctorate. I'm especially grateful because my first doctorate involved endless sleepless nights, anxiety dreams, and more espressos than I can count. For this one, I just had to hide Jaylen Morris's car keys so that I would get a last-minute call to take his place. Also, the first time I received a Ph.D., I had to return the robe? I get to keep this one, right?
Now I don't know any more today than I did yesterday, and I have not suddenly become a repository of great wisdom with the conferral of this degree or this robe that I’m not giving back. But on an august occasion such as this, the recipient is expected to give all of you advice about how to planfully enter this next stage of your life. I am sorry to disappoint you/ I cannot offer any useful advice because my own life unfolded in strange, wonderful ways that seemed utterly resistant to planning.
To begin with, I left college thinking that my bachelor's degree meant I had finally finished my education. I began school at age 5 or 6 (I don't remember, I was pretty young at the time) and then marked milestones with ceremonies celebrating graduation from kindergarten, 8th grade, high school, and college. Most of those involved cake. Some involved other organic, plant-based celebratory ingestions. This was the 1970s. My college graduation seemed to represent the end of the educational period of my life, a piece of paper that served as a kind of license for me to go out and get a job, a certification that my brain had been stuffed with at least some minimal amount of knowledge that would ensure my success in the workplace.
Wrong.
What I discovered as soon as I began working was that every job requires knowledge I wasn't taught in college. The purpose of the degree then wasn't to certify I could do algebra or recite the Gettysburg address or knew that a “score meant both 20 years and a large bag of marijuana.” Again, this was the late 1970s. My degree certified that my curiosity had been ignited to the extent that I could figure out how to do that learning outside the artificial constraints of the classroom.
Don't ever stop learning. Whatever job you have, learn more about whatever it is you're doing than you think you need to just barely get it done.
I remember that during the years I was "just" out of college, from about age 22 to 35, I felt unmoored, adrift. Nothing made sense. I made lots of plans for my life and none of it came true. Nothing! Especially the sex. And despite the fact that it was the 1970s. Other marvelous things happened instead but my plans all went to waste.
I left college to play lead guitar for a rock band. Instead, I ended up in a country band because they were the only ones who wanted me, and I learned an enormous amount about stage craft. When they broke up, I tried again to join a rock band. The best band I auditioned for asked me to be their bass player. I'd never played bass in my life. My father said: “Would you rather be the lead guitar player in a mediocre band or the bass player in a great band?" My friend Jeff said, "You've been waiting for the opportunity to knock at the front door, and you didn't hear the knocking at the back door." Most of what Jeff said came from 1950s blues songs.
So: Opportunity doesn't always knock where you think it will.
The period in my life when I felt most lost and adrift turned out to be the most important part of my life. The people I met between the ages of 21 and 35 all kind of converged when I was 40 and helped me create the life that I now have.
When the rock band fell apart, I was offered an unpaid internship at a fledgling record company. That fledgling record company was eventually bought by Sony and I became a Vice President doing a job I didn't even know existed: producing albums. Your grandparents may have heard of some of these bands. Maybe even you have. How many of you have heard of The Afflicted? Show of hands? (No, I'm sorry, that was not the name of the band—I'm actually asking you to raise your hand if you've heard of The Afflicted.) Midnight Oil? Long Island's own Blue Oyster Cult? Joni Mitchell?
My unpaid internship job was to get coffee for the musicians, or, if it was Carlos Santana, to keep the incense in the studio lit (remember, the 70s). The reason I agreed to do all this is that I got to be in the room when great records were being made, and I got to ask questions if I didn't understand what was happening or why it was happening. Which was most of the time. Things like "Why are you using a Neuman microphone…Van Halen uses a Telefunken." Or "What is a Telefunken?" One day, the lead singer of Blue Oyster Cult, Long Island native Buck Dharma was recording his vocals in the booth. The producer, Sandy Pearlman from Hempstead, LI (are you starting to see a theme? All roads lead to Long Island) said "I'm going to lunch. You're in charge." When the take was over, I got onto the talkback mic—a fancy name for a microphone that allowed me to talk through three layers of glass to the guy in the booth–and I said "That was really good. Want to try it one more time?" I had heard Sandy say that a lot and it's the only thing I knew. Buck said, "Yeah, I think I can do better. Wait a minute…is this, Dan?" "Yes," I said. "Oh, OK." We kept doing this and an hour later Sandy came back from lunch, he saw that Buck and I hadn't killed each other, so he took the rest of the day off. That day I became a record producer.
For a decade I wasn't able to make any money from music. That fledgling record company, started by a guy from Stony Brook, couldn't afford to pay any of us a living wage so we all had side hustles. The President of the label was a D.J. The publicity director worked as a rock journalist. The accountant, well, he was just an accountant. And not a very good one, because he never figured out he could be working for IBM instead of a fledging record company.
So, I took a bunch of temporary jobs to pay the bills. Office jobs. A graphic designer for an ad agency and a computer company because I had worked for the college newspaper. Then a spreadsheet analyst for a bank and the phone company, because I had used spreadsheets in my psychology classes.
In those early work years, there was always a cohort of us who had just started working for a company, all fresh out of college, all trying to get ahead. We saw each other as competitors, just as we had seen certain classmates in college as the "ones to beat."
Wrong.
In my forties, those people with whom I'd been competing for recognition in one organization had now spread out to other organizations. We were no longer competitors but colleagues. They were in positions to offer me jobs, and I was in a position to hire them. Many of the ones I thought I'd been mean to seemed to have forgotten—God bless them. And many of the ones who hadn't seemed all that impressive in their 20s had suddenly become very skilled and valued in their fields. Not the accountant. He was mediocre at best.
Even when you feel you've settled comfortably into a career and a life you like, you should still listen for those knocks at the back door. In my case, it led to something wonderful and that I thought I was totally not qualified to do: write for a hit tv show. I loved "The Big Bang Theory" because it made fun of what me and all my science nerd professor friends really sound like. I wrote the producers a fan letter and the next thing I know, the head writer starts inviting me to Hollywood to ask for advice about various plot points and scenarios that would actually happen in a science lab at a major university…well, if not a major university, at least CalTech. I never dreamed I'd get a job working on a TV series. How would you even plan for that? So, I worked as a consulting writer for them for five seasons. It's just another weird thing that knocked at the back door.
As the writer George Saunders says, writing a story takes thousands of iterative adjustments. It doesn't matter what sentence you start with or whether you have a master plan. The writer reacts to the words on a page, makes adjustments, and then the story becomes her own.
A life is that—a series of iterative adjustments you make, reactions to what happens. These reactions are not decisions really, but responses in the moment that make life uniquely yours, one full of surprises you could never plan.
Look around you and these people you’re sitting with here today. This group of MU students are likely going to be the people who will pop up in your life in the most unexpected of places. They will become your future colleagues, friends and champions. Look for ways to help each other. You are more valuable together than working separately. These and other relationships you will form (and curiosity both about people and systems) will lead you to good places and sometimes better places than you imagined.