(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Beth.
Hello, students!
(audience cheers)
It's hard to imagine a warmer welcome,
especially for our family and friends,
but to the graduates I just wanna say this,
we have missed you.
Now, guess it's my job as your commencement speaker
to pay tribute.
Beth mentioned your resilience, your determination,
but you've already heard a little bit of that.
And, I think you know that already.
And today, I'd rather tell you something
that you don't know.
Something less obvious.
My message today is this.
You are a paramecium.
(audience chuckles)
Now I can tell some of the faculty and students
know a little bit about the paramecium because,
well, looking a little nervous.
The more you know about the paramecium,
the less this seems like a tribute.
After all,
the paramecium is among the most primitive of organisms.
It's just a fifth of a millimeter in length
at full maturity.
Just one cell, all in.
You, on the other hand,
are perhaps the most sophisticated creature on planet Earth.
You, each of you,
are composed of trillions of cells.
And a lot of those cells are up here.
And they give you something
that paramecium lacks altogether,
and that is a human brain.
A brain that can set goals and make plans,
dream dreams, chart a course to get you there.
Paramecium can't do any of that.
And yet,
the brainless paramecium survives and thrives.
And it does so using one basic principle.
If things are getting better,
keep swimming in that direction
and if not, change course.
So, I want to give you an example.
The water's too hot, it's too cold,
there's not enough to eat.
The paramecium gets stuck.
Well, it simply backs up and it tries another angle.
It happens again, it backs up, makes another pivot.
If this keeps happening,
the paramecium may have to do something more radical,
like, you know, even do a 180,
but eventually,
kinda like a Roomba vacuum,
the paramecium finds a way to move forward again.
In other words,
the paramecium makes its way in the world
through simple trial and error.
And this is usually all the paramecium needs,
to get unstuck,
to find nourishment,
to keep making its life better.
Now, at this point,
maybe especially the families might be wondering,
why did I fork over so much tuition money
to have a brainless, single-celled organism as a role model?
But I hope to convince you that the paramecium principle
has something valuable to teach us all.
Let me explain.
As Beth mentioned, I am a professor.
I specialize in the psychology of achievement.
I've studied the Green Berets,
NFL quarterbacks,
winners of the National Spelling Bee.
I've interviewed Olympic gold medalists,
Nobel Laureate scientists,
Grammy award-winning musicians.
So often,
when I've asked these remarkable women and men,
how do you feel about your work?
They've looked me straight in the eye and they've said,
"I love what I do."
Observing these high achievers at the peak of their careers,
I've found they're incredibly dedicated to their craft.
They're voluntarily obsessed,
relentlessly obsessed,
even in the face of setbacks and failure.
This combination of passion and perseverance
is what I call grit.
Now, early in my research on grit,
I concluded that a high achiever chasing a long-term goal
is a lot like a speed boat,
racing full throttle towards some distant shore.
You may wonder,
where does such unshakeable conviction come from?
Graduates, you may be panicking
because you're not sure you have that kind of conviction.
A lot of the recent graduates
that I've been talking to lately,
they tell me that they had more clarity
about what they're gonna do with their life
when they were at their high school graduation,
compared to today.
Well, for you especially,
I have good news.
More and more, I am convinced
that the vast majority of world-class performers
struggled for years,
figuring out where they were heading.
Today's paragon of passion and perseverance
for long term goals,
was yesterday's paramecium,
wandering around,
figuring things out through trial and error.
Take Joel Embiid.
(audience cheers)
Center for the Philadelphia 76ers,
five-time NBA All-Star,
the highest scoring player in the NBA this season.
Joel has said that one day
he aspires to be
the very best basketball player in the world.
But growing up in Cameroon,
Joel was passionate about not one sport, but two.
And guess what?
Neither of these sports was basketball.
The question in young Joel's mind was
whether to pursue soccer or volleyball.
And his first real game of basketball
didn't happen until quite late in his athletic career,
speaking to athletes here,
16 years old,
which is quite late for someone who is going to be pro.
New research shows that Joel is not the exception.
In fact, the very best athletes in the world
typically were not always specialists.
Instead, growing up,
they typically play a variety of sports.
Compared to lesser competitors,
they commit to their main sport later in life.
And compared to athletes who had a head start in that sport,
they tend to make slower initial progress.
Same pattern holds for world's best scientists.
They tend to take a much longer, winding path
than you might imagine.
For instance, one recent study
compared Nobel prize-winning scientists in Germany
to close peers who were not quite as accomplished.
Nobel Laureates were actually less likely
to have won a scholarship as a student.
And, deans,
they took longer to be promoted to full professor.
(audience chuckles)
Okay, yes, there are exceptions.
Of course there are.
But the rule?
The rule is this.
Before specializing in one thing,
comes sampling a lot of things,
including the things you eventually quit.
(papers rustle)
Now, you may not realize this
but you already know how to live life
according to the paramecium principle,
because when you were a little kid,
you had picked up a toy
and you played with it for a little while,
and then you dropped it and you picked up another.
When you were a baby,
you put things in your mouth
and if they tasted bad you spit them out,
and you moved on to something else.
Young children have everything to learn.
So they naturally gravitate to sampling.
Of course you can't sample forever
and expect to get very good at anything.
The older you get,
the more logical it becomes to specialize.
And a big reason why,
is that with every passing year, you know more.
And, TBH,
you have less time left to make use of those lessons.
Graduates, perhaps achieving the milestone of this degree
makes you feel like time is running out.
But relatively speaking, you're young.
In fact, over the last two centuries,
human life expectancy has doubled.
In other words,
compared to Penn graduates from 1820 and 1821,
you quite literally have a lot more living to do.
For you, sampling makes even more sense.
My research suggests that graduates,
years from now you will have a more focused,
developed passion than you do today.
But even then,
I recommend making a little room for sampling.
New research on creativity,
shows that the most dazzling chapters
in a professional career,
what scientists sometimes call hot streaks,
they're proceeded by periods of heightened sampling.
For instance, just before their hot streak,
movie directors, painters and scientists,
they tend to sample a lot.
Trying one thing, dropping it,
trying another.
So, sampling isn't just for the young.
It's never too late to sample.
At any age, there's enormous value in exploration,
in chance encounters,
in cross fertilizing what you already know well
with an entirely new idea altogether.
Sampling opens the door to serendipity.
Personally, I thank the paramecium principle
for helping me become the specialist I am today.
When I started college, I was pre-med.
I assumed I'd graduate,
go right into an MD-PhD program,
become a medical school professor,
just like Dad told me I should.
None of that happened.
Spent a full decade,
as Beth mentioned,
a full decade after my graduation
with no idea where I'd end up.
Right outta college,
as Beth said,
I started a summer school for kids.
I ran that for two years.
Then I decided to change course.
I entered a program in politics, philosophy and economics.
In the middle of that program,
I learned that I do not love politics,
philosophy or economics.
(audience laughs)
So I switched.
I got a Master's Degree in Neuroscience.
After that,
again, as Beth mentioned,
I did management consulting for a year,
quit that,
became a seventh-grade math teacher and so on and so on.
In total,
I zigzagged through a half dozen different career paths
before landing here,
at Penn,
starting the PhD in psychology at the age of 32.
My journey looked nothing like a speedboat
racing full speed toward a distant shore.
Though I was hard working,
I was nobody's idea of passion and perseverance,
aimed at a single, long-term goal.
Instead, I was a paramecium.
Graduates,
my advice is not to worry
if you don't have your whole life mapped out right now.
If you feel a little lost,
try something new.
A new job, a new city,
a new friendship.
If you feel like things are getting better,
keep going in that direction.
And, if not,
change course.
It's messy,
it's kind of random,
it's unplanned.
All the things that high achievers like you,
sometimes struggle with.
The paramecium principle
is understanding that when you sample,
instead of optimizing same-day performance,
you optimize long-term learning.
Now let me conclude by telling you about the scientist
who helped me prepare for today's remarks.
His name is Romain Brette,
and he lives in Paris.
- [Participant] Whoo!
- And he
(chuckles)
oh, shout out to Paris.
(audience laughs)
And he is a world expert on the paramecium.
After asking him all my technical questions,
Romain, how does a paramecium move?
Romain, how does a paramecium eat?
Et cetera.
I asked him to tell me how it was that he'd gotten
so fascinated with this particular microorganism.
Romain told me that originally,
he expected to become a computer scientist.
That's when he went off to study.
"But I was really bored,"
he told me,
"because it was really theoretical, not really fun.
It's not what I wanted to do, anyway."
So Romain changed course.
And he started doing math on neural networks.
"So artificial intelligence was more interesting to me,"
he said,
"but at the same time I was a bit disappointed
because I don't know,"
and no offense here,
"but it was just math."
(audience chuckles)
Again, Romain had to back up and pivot.
"I wanted to go more and more
toward understanding the biology of neurons,
so I did a PhD that was basically
between math and neurobiology.
And then I moved more and more to biology and, well,
here I am today."
After listening to his story,
I couldn't help but exclaim,
"Romain, you are a paramecium."
And he laughed and he said,
"Aren't we all?"
Thank you very much and congratulations.
(audience applauding)
- [Presenter] Thank you, Professor Duckworth.