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Professor, we can't imagine a more deserving award recipient.
And behalf of the student community, we thank you for your leadership and
service to this school.
In the words of one nominator, the GSB is a better place because of you.
Please join us now in congratulating the 2017 recipients,
the GSB distinguished teaching award, Professor Charles Lee.
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>> Woo!
[LAUGH] What a beautiful day.
Its blue sky, one sunshine,
The Golden State Warriors are in the western finals.
It's hard to think of a better day.
I'm incredibly grateful.
I was asked by a family member, what are you going to say?
I said, I'm going to try hard to sound deserving.
>> [LAUGH] But I realized also that it is pretty hard
to sound deserving of something like this.
The best things in life can't be earned.
They come to us not because we deserve them but
they came to us by the grace of others.
We can't earn love of our family.
We can't earn or we can't deserve many of the best things we can't control them.
And I am just incredibly grateful to have
the opportunity to be a part of this community.
I want to especially, I guess thank,
the Alphanomists, they are not a big group, but their obviously very loud.
So, I also have six minutes.
So six minutes is just long enough to get you into trouble, but
not long enough to develop any real theory.
So I want to make three comments, three life tips that has been
very helpful to me in my career and that I hope it might be useful to you as well.
Three observations, the first observation I would make of life is that the human
beings have intrinsic value.
Human beings have intrinsic value,
intrinsic value is not the same as commercial value which is a resume.
And it's not the same as functional value which is how useful they are to you.
It's been my experience that when I remember the human beings of intrinsic
value, good things happen.
So that's the first one.
The second thing I want to share with you is the pursuit of
happiness cannot be separated from the pursuit of virtue.
The pursuit of happiness can't be separated from the pursuit of virtue.
We all want to be happy, we all trying to figure out how to live well.
But if you try really hard to be happy without spending more time thinking about
some of the more amorphous things, the more difficult things of life,
like morality, and value and compassion,
you're going to end up in a selfish little corner in which you have neither.
The third thing that I want to share with you.
If the first two are true, the third comes as a corollary,
it's human beings have intrinsic value.
If the pursuit of happiness cannot be separated from the pursuit of virtue,
then it makes sense,
the third thing, which is to invest in the success of those around you.
To invest in the success of those around you.
It may seem paradoxical, because if you invest in their success,
maybe by comparison you look worse, but that's just not been the case.
It's not been the case in my life,
it's not been the case when I empirically observe people's lives.
Some people seem to have green thumbs, my mom was one of those.
You give her a plant that's half dead, and after two weeks it just turns green.
There's some people who are like that in relationships.
The people around them flourish.
And frankly the reality is, people around you are flourishing,
you're going to come out okay.
In fact, that's what has made this school so special.
It's a place where faculty have made investments,
reckless investments, year after year in the lives of the students.
Our hope is that you're going to do way better than we did in our lives.
And it's because of these generations of this type of
commitment that we have the place that we have here today.
So I'm incredibly grateful for this day.
I'm incredibly grateful to be a part of this community, and
I know that many of you are going to be leaving in a few weeks, even months.
It's my sincere prayer that you're going to go out there,
that you're going to be blessed in everything that you do.
And that you're going to become a blessing for many others.
This is an enormous privilege, an enormous honor, and
I'm going to treasure and remember it for the rest of my life.
Thank you so much.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> God bless.
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