Please
lower your expectations, I am not that good of a speaker. I
assume all of you are feeling a little bit cheated because you
felt that you should have as your graduation speaker, Oprah
or Nobel Prize winner or coach K. To be honest I felt a little
cheated myself with the selection this year. I am
finishing up my term as chairman of the board and after four
years, I wanted to sit back and listen to somebody who would be
far more interesting and far more enjoyable, and far more
inspiring that I am going to be. So I feel a little cheated as
well but let me explain to you how the decision was made. I
have made a few speeches in the outdoors over the years and it
seems that every time it happens, the son shines
So Dick Broadhead said why don't we take a chance because
we don't want the rain so to some extent the weather is with
the good luck that I have somebody up their like me and
when I give outdoor speeches. So I take a little credit for
the weather. (Laughter)
(Applause) The second factor really is
that there was a letter that came from James B Duke, our
founder, to Dick Brodhead not too long ago and saying to Dick
Brodhead the chairman of your board to be honest has done
nothing over the last four years of any consequence. Make him
do something before he retires as chairman of the board. Make
him give the commencement speech and that is how I was selected,
I think (Laughter)
Some of you may wonder what exactly
does a Board Chair do? And how does one get to be a Board
Chair? And I have wondered those questions myself many
times. What does a Board Chair actually do? Well, let me tell
you what the Board Chair actually does. Anything good
that happens at the University, he takes credit for it
(Laughter) Anything that doesn't work
well, he looks for somebody else to blame. Now I got that
technique from Washington, DC where I lived. People always do
that there. (Laughter)
(Applause) And think about what has
happened over the four years as my chairmanship has gone
forward. The University has really increased its status
around the world. It was a very good university when you all
entered here, a far better university then when I was a
student some 40-plus years ago today and over the last four
years, the university is gone from a great national university
to a great international university and his widely respected around the world. And
you are all the beneficiaries of this because you now have a
Duke degree or you will shortly have a Duke degree and think
about this, the rest of your life, wherever you go, people
will say to you what is your name? Where are you from? What
do you do? And where you go to school? Where did you go to
school? Where did you get your degree? And you will always be
able to say you went to Duke and take great pride in that. As
you go through life, you can change your name, you can change
your looks, you can change your profession, you can change many
things, but one thing you will not be able to change is where
you went to school. You will always be a Duke graduate, and
you should take great pride in that because there are 170,000
alums around the world who are eager to help you because there
is a great spirit among Duke alums to help other Duke
students make their way in the world. So always take great
pride in the fact that you are a Duke graduate, and you should
always feel that you earned this degree, you worked hard to get
it and now you are part of N elite group of people who
benefit from having a Duke education.
The truth is I really had nothing to do with your enhanced
status. The enhanced status of the Duke degree over the last
four years is due to many people. It is due to the
faculty, the administrators, it is due to you, due to the
alumni, due to the alumni, do to the parents, due to the donors
and it is due to many different people. And I honestly had
little, if anything, to do with it. But over the past four
years and really over the past 13 years, the great leader of
this university, Dick Brodhead has been the guiding course who
made the Duke University degree or so much more than it was
before (Applause)
And in his honor, yesterday the Board of Trustees decided to
honor him and keep his name alive here at Duke after he
retires as president of the university by renaming West
Union the Richard H. Brodhead Center for campus life
( Applause)
Over the years I have met many university presidents and I
have worked with many of them, but I've never met a university
president who is as hard-working, asked smart, as
articulate as Dick Brodhead and all of you are the beneficiaries
of this extra nearly talented person and the University will
certainly miss him and it is my honor to say on behalf of the
Board of Trustees, it is a great pleasure to have worked with
you, Dick, and I hope with you, whatever you decide to do later,
keep Duke in your mind, and always return, and you will
always have a willing and receptive audience back at Duke.
We love what you have done at Duke and thank you very much,
Dick. (Applause)
Now Dick will be succeeded by a very talented individual as
well, Vince Price who is the Provost of Penn. He has very
large shoes to fill pair at my shoes are much smaller to Phil
and I will be succeeded by somebody far more talented,
trend by. Jack is the vice-chair of the board and the
former CEO of HCA, the largest hospital in the unite states,
and he led the new search for the new president and jack, I am
sure you will do a terrific job leading the university.
Congratulations on the position you will assume.
(Applause) Now I asked earlier what a
Board Chair does and I told you it is designed to get credit for
everything that goes well but how you become a Board Chair?
Well, when I was sitting where you are some 40-plus years ago I
think it will be fair to say that my class was say the least
likely person to become Board Chair at Duke ever was me. And
I think Jack would say in his class probably the same thing.
Nobody would have selected us and impact fact had there been a
bet, a million to one odds would have been against me to
become a Board Chair. It was a fluke. And all of you who are
not stars at Duke or even modestly successful at Duke, you
too can wind up as Board Chair someday
(Laughter) So how did I do it? It was
a series of good luck. I had the good luck to hear about Duke
University the day before applications were due. Somebody
gave me an application form that he had. I did not know
Duke and I could not afford a typewriter in those days.
Typewriters were things that existed before computers. You
were able to put your fingers to them and you put words on it
and it was a unique device at the time, but
honestly I could not afford one. So I wrote out my application
in longhand, and it was very illegible and I think the Duke
admission officer feeling sorry for me excepted me. I had the
good luck to get accepted at Duke and the good luck to get a
new job at Duke working in the library, and to get financial
aid, which enabled me to come here. I had to good luck to go
to law school and practiced law and be told by people when I was
practicing law you are not a very good lawyer. Get out of
the practice of law (Laughter)
I had the good luck to work for somebody who is running for
president of United States, and he dropped out after 30 days so
I did not have to worry about that campaign.
(Laughter) I had to good luck to get
involved with another person running for president and he did
win. And I got inflation to 19 percent and nobody has done
that since. (Laughter)
But I had the good luck to lose the election with him and
so I had to go out and find a job again and I had the good
luck to practice law once again with people who also told me you
are not a very good lawyer; get out of the practice of law and
I did. I had the good luck to start a financial investment
firm and that financial investment firm, I had the good
luck to pick people who knew something about investing and
the result is the firm did pretty well and; therefore, I
had the good luck later to realize that making a lot of
money while it seemed pleasurable and interesting at
the time really wasn't as good at thing as I once thought. It
is no doubt a great benefit to making money, but I thought
I had the good luck to realize that giving it away in a
sensible and intelligent way was a much more meaningful way to
lead my life and so I had the good fortune to learn that
before I was too old to do something about it. And I
realized how important was because I had the good luck to
have a mother who told me this. When I was building my firm she
would never call me to say congratulations on buying a new
company or congratulations on selling a company profit,
congratulations on taking your own company public. She
probably read about it, but she never actually said that was a
great thing. When I started giving away money and doing
things to get back to society, she started calling me all the
time and said you are actually doing something with your life.
So I had the good luck to have a mother who knew the value and
that was the greatest good luck of my life.
(Applause) Now one of the other great
looks of my life was that when I was at Duke there was a math
requirement and I didn't want to take a math course, but
fortunately in those days there was a course in logic and that
somehow fulfill the math requirement and so I took the
course in logic. I don't know if any of you have had the same
dilemma taking math courses. And in that logic course, I
learned a lot about codes and how to decipher codes and use
logic. And I want to tell you today what I have learned as a
result of my course in logic and I am going to give to you today
the code, what I call the da Vinci code of being a Duke
graduate. This is only for Duke graduates, so please, all of
you who are not Duke graduates, do not listen to this part.
This is only reserved for Duke graduates, or if you do listen,
make sure you don't tell anybody. Let me tell you what
it means. Now we have used in basketball and football and
other athletic events a phrase called, "Go Duke." Some of you
heard of it. Now sometimes it is said in conjunction with a
reference to another school 8 miles to the south and given the
dignity of this event and the fact that the Dean of that
school is, I will not mention what that phrase is but can any
of you remember what it is, "Go to --" right. Let me skip that
part and focus on what go Duke really means. The G actually
stands for gratitude and today it is very easy for all of you
to say thank you to your parents, to your guardian's, to
your grandparents, to your siblings for helping you get
through this time at Duke, but doingbut doing that today or
tomorrow really doesn't punch the gratitude ticket. If you
are going to get anywhere in life, you learn you have to work
with other people and express your appreciation. Nobody can
do anything worthwhile by him or herself. Albert Einstein by
himself realized that you need other people to help you and so
as you go through life, remember to try to express appreciation
to other people for helping you and do it with humility.
Humility will get youll get you far more along the way of life
than arrogance people. Don't tell people how great you are.
Nobody really wants to hear that. Tell people how great
they are and they will appreciate that. Remember what
Ronald Reagan once said, "There is no limit to what a human can
accomplish if he or she is willing to share the credit with
others." So remember when you are doing things in life,
express gratitude to others and don't tell other people how
great you are. Now the O in "Go Duke" stands
for originality. People who really accomplish something
great in life do something original. They don't just
follow what other people would do. As do graduates now or
about to be do graduates, you have the capacity, the mental
ability and other great qualities to be able to be
original. Try to think outside of the box. Don't just do what
somebody else tells you to do. The people that you admire, to
graduate degrees, the honorary degree recipients behind me are
all people who did something original. Try to think of
something that somebody else has done. As do graduates you can
live a relatively nice life and go through life relatively
easily and people will always be impressed with the fact you
have a Duke degree. But if you want to make a mark in the
world, tried to do something truly original. Now D, now D,
everybody thinks it stands for Duke, but really not. A stands
for difference. Try to make a difference in the world. All of
us are on the face of the earth or in the grand scheme of
things a nano second. Humans have been on the face of the
earth for a few million years. We will be on the earth for 70,
80, 90, may be 100 years or something like that, but it is a
nano second in the grand scheme of life and you have a chance
to go through life very comfortably taking the path of
least resistance and really not doing anything that makes a mark
in the world. But if you want to make a mark on the world, do
something that really is different and tried to make a
difference, tried to get back to society. As Duke
degree recipients you have a responsibility in my view to
make a difference in the world. So cherish this responsibility,
accept this responsibility, be proud of this responsibility.
You stand in the docket of history and you can make
history, but you have to be willing to make a difference and
try, whatever you do, to make a difference in your society, in
your community, in your country; tried to make the world a
slightly better place than you and it. And then I think you
will make not only everybody at Duke proud, but yourself proud
for having made a difference. Now U, what does U stand for.
Is stands for unrelenting. It means taking no for an answer
is not the acceptable way of proceeding. Don't accept no.
When people will tell you you want to do something and it is
different and it is creative and original, they will inevitably
tell you no. Because if it was so easy to do it, to be done,
people would have done it before. So you will find many
times in life that people will tell, you know, you can't do
that, but you have to be unrelenting. If you have a
great idea, pursue it. Bill Gates didn't take no for an
answer when people told him personal computers didn't really
have a future. Jeff pesos didn't take no for an answer
when you told him you could not sell anything over the Internet.
Steve Jobs did not take no for an answer when people told him
smartphones would never work. Wendy Kopp did not take no for
an answer when they told her teacher of America it did not
have no future. Barack Obama did not take no for an answer
when people told him an African-American cannot be
president of United States. You should know that to make a
difference, be unrelenting, persist, persist, persist and if
you do so, will make yourself a much happier individual and
make yourself happier in the world.
Knowledge, K stands for knowledge. And although
Kchevski, Micah Kchevski is a great person and his last name
stands up for the letter K. Some of you will get a degree
and some of you will learn 2 degrees and some of you will
earn 3 degrees. But having a degree is the beginning of
knowledge. If you think by having a degree you have
knowledge, you are in a very bad shape. Your brain is a muscle
and it has to be continuously exercised. And if you stop
exercising it at the time you graduate, you accomplish
virtually nothing in life. It is hard to believe, but it is
virtually true. 30 percent of college graduates never read
another book and their entire life. That is because these
people think when they have a college degree, that is all they
have to do. They don't have to do anything else to exercise
their brain. The great pleasure of life is exercising its
brain. So today you can celebrate perhaps your degree.
Maybe don't have to read a book today, but try to keep reading.
Try to keep learning, exercising your brain. One of
the great pleasures of my life is reading. I now try to read
100 books a year and I think by doing that I have made myself a
much better person then when I graduated from Duke. And so all
of you remember knowledge is essential. Continuous knowledge
and make sure you exercise your brain continuously. E, E is
enjoyment. I've talked about all the hard things you have to
do to get forward in life. But life is not designed, so that it
is just drudgery and hard work and pushing and pushing to get
somewhere. You have to enjoy life. Surely God did not put us
here to suffer. He put us here to enjoy life and there is
nothing better than enjoying life. As Thomas Jefferson
called it, "The Pursuit of Happyness." I f you can pursue
happiness without hurting yourself or hurting others,
nothing can be more pleasurable. You should enjoy life, but how
do you enjoy life? All of you are not going to do what you
enjoy right away. It took me many years to figure out what I
enjoyed and like. I was 37 before I started my company so I
spent many years doing things I didn't really enjoyed wasn't
good at. Experiment, try many things, but you have to enjoy
what you are doing. Nobody ever ever won a Nobel Prize hating
with they are doing. If you are going to accomplish
something in life, a work of no, have to enjoy it.
Experiment and find many things that you ultimately will think
will make you enjoy life. And if you enjoy what you are doing,
you can accomplish great things. Now I was given a
degree at Duke many years ago and in those days the degree, we
were handed out them at the stadium. It was hot as hell, no
air-conditioning, and I really could not remember who the
speaker was and I could not remember when he was speaking
who he was. I cannot remember a single thing he said. Fifty
years later I don't remember what he said and I did not
remember what he said 50 minutes after he said it
(Laughter) I tried to use a little
pneumonic device, so you will remember what I said at least a
four maybe 50 minutes and "Go Duke"," really stands for
gratitude, originality, difference, unrelenting,
knowledge, and enjoyment. Try to remember that. Of those
qualities are the da Vinci code of being a Duke graduate. Now
there is one other part of this I would like to have you
remember. The first three letters, of "Go Duke" are
G-O-D. And it is my theory that God looks favorably upon
Duke graduates. (Applause)
Now I can't prove that; I can't prove that, nor can the
divinity school, but why would you want to take a chance that I
am wrong? (Laughter)
So in my view, all do graduate are God's new chosen
people, and you should feel that you are especially selected and
you have a great deal of responsibility because God is
looking down favorably upon you pair just think of the weather
he gave for your graduation today. Now, of course, you
can't just rely on God. As President Kennedy said in his
famous inaugural address, at the end of it,, "With a good
conscience our only sure award and the history the final judge
of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking
his blessing and help, but knowing here on earth God's work
must truly be our own." So go forward, and as you go forward
you cannot depend only on God, but you can do the things I have
said and if you express gratitude, if you are original,
if you try to make a difference in the world, if you are
unrelenting and you pursue knowledge and you enjoy what you
are doing, you can make a life that will make your parents
proud and make your children crown and make Duke proud and
make you proud. And I encourage all of you to think about this,
not just today, but tomorrow and well into the future. Now a
final word, today is Mother's Day. How many people here are
mothers? Raise your hand or stand up if you are a mother.
Please raise your hand or stand up if you are a mother.
( Applause)
You have done a great service to humanity by bringing people
onto the face of the earth and raising them well, and
particularly if they are due graduates, very important
contribution to society. I had intended to have myed to have my
mother come here to hear my speech today because as I was
finishing the term as chairman of the board, I told my mother
to come and this would be the last time I would be on this
platform and she said okay. Who is the commencement speaker?
(Laughter) And I explained it and she
said oh, I was hoping for Oprah (Laughter)
Sadly a few weeks ago she passed away and she was not here
to see me give this speech, but I have given it in her memory,
and in her honor because I recognize that she taught me the
value of giving back to society and she was never so pleased as
when I gave back to society. And I really want to rededicate
my own life to giving back to society and give back to our
country. And one of the ways I plan to do so is to get back to
something I think is very important to our country and
that think that is Duke. I think Duke is an important
national treasure and those of u s who can support Duke, give
your time, energy, ideas is something I think really helps
our country and humanity because if Duke does well, the United
States does well, and indeed the whole world does well. And so
that is what I intend to do to honor my mother. And I hope all
of you who have mothers and are blessed to be able to have them
with you today cherish them. And those of you whose mothers
are not here today, I hope you call them. It is a rare
privilege to be able to call your mother and a privilege I no
longer have. But I hope all of you who also no longer have
that privilege will do things to honor your mother and to live a
life that makes your mother proud of what you are doing.
Bank you. Godspeed. (Applause)
thank you -- Godspeed. (Applause)
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very
much.
