[APPLAUSE] NOUBAR AFEYAN: Thank you. Thank you, Mark, for that
generous but somewhat embarrassing introduction. President Kornbluth, trustees,
and faculty, students and families, alumni and members
of this remarkable community of scholars and solvers,
it's a special honor to be with you today. Graduates, I once sat
where you now sit, brimming with excitement and
the sense of accomplishment that comes with a
hard-won MIT diploma. Congratulations to all of you. [APPLAUSE] Families, as the father of two
MIT alums, Taleen and Lena, I know firsthand the pride
and emotion you feel today. Faculty members, as a senior
lecturer here for 16 years, I saw up close how well
you prepare these graduates for what lies ahead. And fellow trustees,
it is a great privilege to serve alongside you. I spent my childhood
in Beirut, Lebanon. Three generations of my
proud Armenian family shared an apartment on the
ninth floor of our building. The window in the bedroom
I shared with my great aunt looked out over the red tiled
roofs of Roman, Ottoman, and Byzantine buildings and
beyond to the Mediterranean Sea. When Civil War erupted in 1975,
and the government imposed strict curfews, the
state broadcaster often shifted from airing
three hours of TV a day to offering around-the-clock
programming of mostly American television shows, a
diversion for my brothers and me when we were
forced to stay inside. One show in particular
had me captivated. Just hearing the theme song
would set my heart racing. Perhaps you know too. ["MISSION IMPOSSIBLE" THEME
SONG] NOUBAR AFEYAN:
That's right, Mission Impossible, even if you
never saw the TV show, you likely know the movies with
Tom Cruise as agent Ethan Hunt. The encoded self-destructing
message to the agents always began the same way. Your mission, should you
choose to accept it-- no matter how long the
odds or how great the risk, the agents always
took the assignments. In the 50 years since, I
have been consistently drawn to impossible missions. And today I hope to convince
each and every one of you that you should be too. Class of 2024, one incredibly
challenging mission is already under your belt.
You are given the assignment to begin your studies at
MIT without being at MIT. Going to college
without going to college was not a mission
you'd signed up for. But it is what you got. A handful of you
did move to campus. But even for you, masking,
testing, social distancing, and virtual classes meant
orienting to a foreign land. You even learned a new language
as terms like Q-Week and SCUFFY entered your MIT lexicon. No one knew what would happen
next or when it would end. And yet, you found
ways to thrive. You dove into your
coursework and started to build mostly
virtual friendships. In the words of your
classmate, Amber Velez, who rented a Cambridge apartment
with three MIT roommates, you patched together
a little lifeboat in this vast sea of students
spread out all over the world. Earlier that year,
just up the road in Kendall Square, my
colleagues and I at Moderna had received another mission
that seemed impossible. Develop a safe and effective
vaccine that could save lives, restart the economy, and
do so in less than a year. Oh, and while you're at it, get
a billion doses manufactured, distribute them
around the world, and get them into
the arms of people. It was clear that if we
accepted this challenge, it would take everything we had. We would have to slow 20 ongoing
drug development projects and focus on solving COVID. We embrace this mission. And I'm so proud that my
colleague and friend, Professor Langer, is here. He was a main driver
of this as well. Just 48 hours after Moderna
obtained the sequence for the SARS-COV-2
spike protein, we deployed our mRNA technology
to produce a potent vaccine. Less than two months later,
we enrolled the first patient in a clinical trial. And on November 16th, the
vaccine was determined to be 94.5% effective
against COVID-19. By some estimates,
Moderna's vaccine saved over 2 million
lives during the pandemic. [APPLAUSE] How did we do it? Well, that's another
speech for another day. But what I do want
to talk about is what it takes to accept
your own impossible missions and why you as graduates of MIT
are uniquely prepared to do so, uniquely prepared
and also obligated. At a time when the world
is beset by crises, your mission is nothing less
than to salvage what seems lost, reverse what seems inevitable,
and save the planet. And just like the
agents in the movies, you need to accept the mission,
even if it seems impossible. I know the odds don't
appear to be in your favor. But this age of
polycrisis is also a moment of poly
opportunity fueled by artificial intelligence,
machine learning, quantum computing, and other
modern technologies that are changing the
world faster than people believe is possible. Now, you are uniquely equipped
to turn science fiction into science reality. With the right mindsets,
Mission Impossible can become mission improbable
as you overcome obstacles and seemingly long odds by
imagining and innovating your way to novel solutions. So how do you go
about doing that? How do you become the
agents the world needs you to be starting from today? Well, you already have
a head start, Quite. A significant one. You graduate today from MIT. And that says volumes about
your knowledge, talent, vision, passion, and perseverance,
all essential attributes of the elite 21st century agent. And I forgot to mention our
relaxed, uncompetitive nature, our outstanding social skills,
and the overall coolness that characterizes each
and every MIT grad. But more seriously, you are
trained in science, mathematics, engineer, and technology, fields
that when properly harnessed and supported, can be deployed
against almost any seemingly impossible challenge. You may not realize it yet. But your MIT education
has given you a superpower, like
X-ray vision, that lets you see through the
illusion of impossibility and surface the
blueprints for solutions. And as of today, you even have
a secret decoder ring, better known as the Brass Rat. MIT'S history underscores
these special powers. The telephone, digital circuits,
radar, email, internet, the human genome project,
controlled drug delivery, magnetic confinement fusion
energy, artificial intelligence, and all that is enabling, these
and many more breakthroughs emerged from the work of
extraordinary change agents tied to MIT. Now, let me ask you a question. Aside from MIT, what do
such agents have in common? What equips them to accomplish
seemingly impossible missions? I'd argue they do three things
that make leaps possible. They imagine. They innovate. And they emigrate. And now, it's your turn. Start by unleashing
your imagination. People often see imagination
as the exclusive province of the arts, of moviemaking,
of literature, painting. I think that's nonsense. Imagination, to my mind, is
the foundational building block of breakthrough science. I'm not making an argument
against reason, let alone, at MIT. Reason has a role to play. But in accomplishing
impossible missions, it's the servant,
not the master. You can't expect reasoning to
do the work of imagination. At its best, scientific research
is a profoundly creative endeavor. You have mastered
proofs, problem sets, and design projects. But in the words of
mathematician and author Lewis Carroll, imagination is the only
weapon in the war with reality. To the great Irish writer
George Bernard Shaw, its role is even
more fundamental. As he put it, imagination is
the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire. You will what you imagine. And at last, you
create what you will. It is also your
turn to innovate. Think of innovation as
imagination in action, or perhaps, mens et
manus or mind and hand. But I hear that
lines already taken. MIT did not prepare you to
shy away from the unknown. Quite the contrary, you are now
prepared to leap for the stars, sometimes, quite literally. Just ask the more than 40 NASA
astronauts with MIT degrees. Leaps often involve unreasonable
or even seemingly crazy ideas. Ordinary innovations
are often judged by how reasonable the
idea is and an extension of what already exists and how
reasonable the person proposing it is. But ask yourself
central question. Why do we expect
extraordinary results from reasonable people
doing reasonable things? As you've probably
guessed by now, I'm utterly unreasonable
and an eternal optimist. As a lifelong entrepreneur
and innovator, I have to be. But I've always practiced
a special kind of optimism. I call it paranoid optimism. This means toggling back and
forth between extreme optimism and deep seated doubt. The kind of paranoid
optimism needed to make scientific or
technological leaps often starts with
an act of faith. By that, I mean,
belief without facts, the very definition of faith. Now, I know faith is generally
associated with religion. But interestingly,
in my experience, pioneering science
also starts with faith. You take leaps of faith,
and then you do experiments. And on rare occasions,
the experiments work, converting your leap of
faith into scientific reality. What a thrill when that happens. On your innovation journey
beyond optimism and faith, you will also need the
courage of your convictions. Make no mistake, you leave MIT
as special agents in demand. As you consider
your many options, I urge you to think hard
about what legacy you want to leave and to
do this periodically throughout your life. Not every mission
you are qualified for is a mission
worth accepting. You are far more
than technologists. You are moral actors. The choice to maximize
solely for profits and power will, in the end,
leave you hollow. To forget this is
to fail the world, and ultimately,
to fail yourself. I know many of you here and
some in the class of 2024 not with us here
today are deeply troubled by the conflicts and
tragedies we are witnessing. As an Armenian descended
from genocide survivors and co-founder of the Aurora
humanitarian initiative, I feel deeply the wounds
of these conflicts. I wish I had answers for all
of us, but of course, I don't. But I do know this, having
conviction should not be confused with
having all the answers. Over my many years engaged
in entrepreneurship and humanitarian
philanthropy, I have learned that there is enormous
benefit in questioning what you think you know, listening to
people who think differently, and seeking common ground. As you grapple with today's-- [APPLAUSE] As you grapple with today's
hard choices and the many that lie ahead, rely again
on your imagination. Imagine the world you
want to create and work backwards from there. Be open to the many paths
that could carry you towards this goal,
and let the journey inform which ones will succeed. Now, I've urged you to
imagine and to innovate. The last thing I want
to leave you with is the need to emigrate. I'll say more about what I
mean by emigrate in a second. But first, I want
to give a shout out to others who, like me,
have left their homelands. For those of you who have-- thank you. [APPLAUSE] For those of you who have
emigrated here from far away or whose parents did or whose
grandparents did, please stand. [APPLAUSE] I applaud you. It may often feel
like a disadvantage. But you will soon learn,
it is quite the opposite. When I first arrived at MIT, I
worried I did not belong here. I spoke with an accent. I still speak with
a little accent. My pastime wasn't
hockey or lacrosse. But it was Armenian folk dance. Then one afternoon,
late in my first year here, I was walking down
the Infinite Corridor when a poster caught my eye. Staring back from the poster
was a Native American chief in full headdress, eyes defiant,
fingers pointed seemingly right at me. The poster read, who are you
calling immigrant, pilgrim? [LAUGHTER] I can't tell you what an
impact that had on me. Aside from Native Americans,
we all, at some point, come from somewhere else. It helped me realize
that I belonged here at MIT, in the United States. And graduates and
families, you do, too. But here's the really
interesting thing that I've learned
over the years. You need not be from
elsewhere to immigrate. If the immigrant
experience can be described as leaving familiar
circumstances and being dropped into
unknown territory, I would argue that
every one of you also arrived at MIT
as an immigrant, no matter where you grew up. And as immigrants, you are
all at an advantage when it comes to impossible missions. Why? You've left your comfort zone. You've entered
uncharted territory. You've forgone the
safety of the familiar, yet you persist and you survive. You figure out how to
accomplish your mission. Like elite agents, immigrants
are the ultimate innovators, equipped to navigate
obstacles, to never say never. In fact, I often
describe innovation as intellectual immigration. Just like those of us who
emigrate from other countries, innovators pioneered
new environments, seeking a better future, not
just for themselves, but also for the larger world. So whether you grew up in
Cambodia or in California or right here in Cambridge,
you can immigrate. You need to keep immigrating. You need to leave your comfort
zone, to think in new ways, to acclimate to the unfamiliar,
and embrace uncertainty. If you imagine,
innovate, and immigrate, you are destined to a
life of uncertainty. Being surrounded by uncertainty
can definitely be unnerving. But it's where you need to be. This is where the treasure lies. It's ground zero
for breakthroughs. Don't conflate
uncertainty as risk or think of it as extreme risk. Uncertainty isn't high risk. It's unknown risk. It is, in the
essence, opportunity. Now, I began with a show. I'll end with a movie, the
most recent Mission Impossible film released just last summer. The film is a daunting
reminder of all that your generation
is up against, complicated geopolitics, climate
and technological pressures, and AI tools that
will both simplify and complicate our world. But graduates, as I
look at all of you, I see a large team
of agents who are entirely capable of
completing your missions. I see agents for good,
agents for change. MIT has prepared you to
tackle impossible missions, to harness the future, and
bend it towards the light. My wish for you,
my fervent hope, is that you not only choose
to accept impossible missions, but you embrace them. Welcome long odds. Embrace uncertainty. And lead with imagination. Approach the unknown with
the courage, the confidence, and the curiosity of an
immigrant with paranoia and optimism. And always remember the
strength of working in teams. Show the world why Mission
Impossible Teams inevitably shorthands for MIT. [APPLAUSE] Graduates, set forth on
your impossible missions. Accept them. Embrace them. The world needs you. And it's your turn to star in
the action adventure called your life. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
