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Readings and Links

READINGS

Why Talk About Success and Failure?
by Ariel Phillips, Sheila Reindl, Suzanne Renna, Abigail Lipson, Bureau of Study Counsel

Commencement Address, University of Ilinois 2004
by Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School


LINKS TO MATERIALS AVAILABLE ON LINE

Grades
Harry Lewis
Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard College
Morning Prayers, Appleton Chapel of Harvard's Memorial Church, October, 2003
But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living. Job 28:12-13   I rise to speak not of good and evil, but of good and bad. Of good students and bad students, or rather, of what counts as good and bad in official Harvard records. Your grades, students, and the grades we professors give you.  (more...).

Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation
 by William Firtzimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College; Marlyn Mcgrath Lewis, Director of Admissions, Harvard College; Charles Ducey, Past Director of the Bureau of Study Counsel, Harvard University
 "...It is common to encounter even the most successful students, who have won all the 'prizes,' stepping back and wondering if it is all worth it.  Professionals in their thirties and forties - physicians, lawyers, academics, business people and others - sometimes give the impression that they are dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot-camp. Some say they ended up in their profession because of someone' else's expectations, or that they simply drifted into it without pausing to think whether they really loved their work.  Often they say they missed their youth entirely, never living in the present, always pursuing some ill-defined future goal."  [more...]

A Ph.D. and a Failure
by Megan Pincus Kajitani and Rebecca Bryant
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2005 
"...As graduate career counselors at two major research universities, we encounter the F-word a lot, but not the one you think. The F-word we hear is "failure" -- a nasty, horrible utterance applied to many an overachieving Ph.D. who falls short of finding a tenure-track job. Fear of that word -- for the summa cum laude, the Phi Beta Kappa, or the NSF grant recipient -- can become debilitating and demoralizing, turning a once confident and optimistic young adult into a depressed, panic-ridden, and paralyzed recluse. ... [But] the real problem here is the painfully constrictive definitions of failure and success within academe." [more...]

Harvard Commencement Speech for the Class of 2000
by Conan O'Brien
"...After graduating [from Harvard] in May, I moved to Los Angeles and got a three-week contract at a small cable show. I got a $380 a month apartment and bought a 1977 Isuzu Opel.  I worked at that show for over a year, feeling pretty good about myself, when one day they told me they were letting me go. I was fired and, I hadn't saved a lot of money. I tried to get another job in television but I couldn't find one. So, with nowhere else to turn, I went to a temp agency and filled out a questionnaire. I made damn sure they knew I had been to Harvard and that I expected the very best treatment. And so, the next day, I was sent to the Santa Monica branch of Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. When you have a Harvard degree and you're working at Wilson's House of Suede and Leather, you are haunted by the ghostly images of your classmates who chose Graduate School. You see their faces everywhere... and they're always laughing at you as you stack suede shirts no man, in good conscience, would ever wear."  [more...]

Reflections on Academic Success and Failure: Making It, Forsaking It, Reshaping It
by Gary T. Marx
In B. Berger, Ed, Authors of Their Own Lives, 1990.
"My attitudes toward work and life were shaped by an unusual early career pattern - success beyond my wildest expectations, followed by unexpected failure..."  [more...]

You've Got To Do What You Love
by Steven Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Speech
"...I did go to college.  But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.  After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.  I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.  And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.  SO I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK."  [more...]

How Failure Breeds Success
by Jena McGregor et al.
"[F]ailure hardly seems like a subject Chairman and CEO E. Neville Isdell would want to trot out in front of investors. But Isdell did just that, deliberately airing the topic at Coke's annual meeting in April. "You will see some failures," he told the crowd. "As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process."  Warning Coke investors that the company might experience some flops is a little like warning Atlantans they might experience afternoon thunderstorms in July. But Isdell thinks it's vital. He wants Coke to take bigger risks, and to do that, he knows he needs to convince employees and shareholders that he will tolerate the failures that will inevitably result. That's the only way to change Coke's traditionally risk-averse culture." [more...]

Joy in the Endeavor
by Abigail Lipson, Director, Bureau of Study Counsel
"A vivid image in our culture is that of the writer, artist, or scientist who persistently pursues a private vision, unrewarded. When at last the individual's genius is recognized, early hardships are recast as merely "paying one's dues."  But this is hindsight, and shortsighted hindsight at that.
   Persistence does not guarantee eventual success, in the form of either fame or financial reward.  Even the highest quality of work does not guarantee success.  So what compels an individual to persist when success is not forthcoming—and may never come at all?  Why persist in the face of anonymity?  Of derision or criticism?  Of hardship and poverty?" (more...]

The Character of a Doctor: Yale Medical School Commencement 2004
by Atul Gawande
"The truth is that before seven years ago, I never really knew how to write and I did not much care. I grew up in a small Ohio town in a family of immigrant doctors. My sister and I were not raised with books around us. ... I got a C on my first paper in freshman writing at Stanford. (And if any of you know Stanford, you know how hard it is to get a C there.)  In college I did take a fiction writing class once, but it was mainly because there was a girl taking it I had a rather keen interest in—we married a few years later—and the professor half way through took me aside and suggested I find something to do other than writing. ...I can tell lots of stories like these, unfortunately."  [more...]

To Giovanni da Pistoia, When the Author was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel
by Michelangelo Buonarroti, translated by Gail Mazur
"My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.  I am not in the right place, I am not a painter."  [more...]

Learning From Poor and Minority Students Who Succeed in School
by Janine Bempechat
Harvard Education Letter, May/June 1999
"When Raymond was four years old, his family moved to the United States from Mexico. As in many immigrant families, everyone worked hard to get ahead in their new country. The children helped their mother deliver newspapers before she started her day cleaning houses. Their father worked on an assembly line during the day, at a gas station later in the afternoon, and at a pizza factory at night. And the parents still found time to encourage their children to achieve in school. "They helped the four of us get through college and graduate school," Raymond recalls, "not with monetary support, but by demonstrating persistence. This is one family's story of success against the odds...."  [more...]

Chinese Americans: Compelled to Excel
WGBH Forum Panel
with Vivian Louie, Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mary Waters, Chair of the Harvard University Sociology Department, Suzanne Lee, Principal of the Josiah WQuincy School, and Peter Law, Guidance Counselor at Charlestown High School
"In the contemporary American imagination, Asian Americans are considered the quintessential immigrant success story, a powerful example of how the culture of immigrant families (rather than race and class) matters in education and upward mobility. Louie finds that Chinese immigrant families see higher education as a necessary safeguard against potential racial discrimination, and class shapes different paths to college. The views and experiences of Chinese Americans with schooling and the identities they are forming have much to do with the opportunities, challenges and contradictions that immigrants and their children confront in the United States."  [more...]

Rising Star Opts Out of Rat Race
by Benjamin Grizzle
Harvard Crimson, March 20, 2000
"At the end of Mark Albion's '73 first year at Harvard, his father came to visit him while attending his own 25th reunion.  Standing atop Weeks footbridge, his father asked him how he intended to measure success. "Do you want to become famous or become rich?" he asked the young student, who was considering concentrating in Greek and the classics.  "Most people can't do both."  But after about 25 years chasing both, the student who went on to win an appointment as a professor at Harvard Business School at the age of 31 says that while fame and fortune make a living, they don't make a life." (more...) 

A Left-Handed Commencement Address - Mills College 1983
by Ursula K. L Guin
Mills College, 1983
"Success is somebody else's failure.  Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don't even want to talk about it.  I want to talk about failure.
   Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong.  You'll work for possessions and then fine they possess you.  You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.
   What I hope for you, for all my sisters an daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place.  To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign."  [more...]

Cinema Veritas
by Harbour Fraser Hodder
Harvard Magazine, 2005
"Cinema verite teaches students to be ready for chance revelations, to trust the moment and their own instincts - which involves a bigger lesson.  Harvard students, "have to be trained to embrace failure," says [Harvard Film Archive filmmaker] Makavejev.  "They work like hell, it's unbelievable," he recalls. "For gifted and ambitious people, it's difficult to enter a field filled with dangerous moments.  When you work on a film, with so many variables - actors, machinery, environment, crew - things go wrong all the time.  Every second it is much easier to fail than to succeed."  [more...]

What Comes After Success?
by Jim Thornton
BestLife, 2007
"We have in our society this notion that success is transformative...In point of fact, this is a myth.  You finally reach a life goal--winning a Pulitzer, for example--and you think suddenly everything will change for the better.  In reality, only one thing changes:  You've won an award.  Many people become depressed when they reach their goal and discover that their career success is not transformative."

The Graduates
by Louis Menand
The New Yorker, June 18, 2007
"Everything you do in a meritocratic society is some kind of test, and there is never a final exam. There is only another test. People seem to pick up on this earlier and earlier in their lives, and at some point it starts to get in the way of their becoming educated. You can’t learn when you’re afraid of being wrong."

The Failure of Success
by Nicholas A. Molina
The Harvard Crimson, June 6, 2007
"Eighteen years of a lack of failure teaches Harvard students to avoid it at all costs; we become extremely risk-averse.  Ironically, classes might teach about the risk-reward relationship, but students who are too afraid to fail can only understand the former part of that relationship after experiencing it.  Even those golden children who sail through Harvard as they've sailed through high school fail, in a sense.  They've failed to experience failure, and their education is impoverished as a result.  The most rewarding academic experiences I've had have been in classes for which I had absolutely no preparation.  After all, what does an economics concentrator know about film or philosophy?"