First of all, thank you Dean James for such a kind introduction. It is the honor of a
lifetime to be able to speak in front of such a
talented group of students. So I'd like to thank all of you and your families for having me. Thank you to the faculty and the administration
of the Wharton School and the University more broadly. And thank you to Dean
James for your leadership of this great institution. (audience applauding) So what I thought I'd do
today is walk you through the lessons learned from
the mistakes I've made since walking onto this
campus 29 years ago. I've summarized them here on a short list, and for the next 10 or 11 hours, I plan to go through my
mistakes in a lot of detail. All kidding aside, when I
started preparing for this, I read online that the
best commencement speakers incorporate comedy into their
speeches to break the ice. Since that's not
necessarily my strong suit, I reached out to two of my friends in the entertainment business, Rob McElhenney and Jason
Bateman for joke ideas. And they both immediately
texted back all caps, Vivek, do not try to be funny, repeat, do not try to be funny. Now, I thought that was a little harsh. But since commencement
speeches are about advice, I'm gonna take that advice, leave the comedy to the comedians, and use the next 10 minutes of my speech to synthesize the highlights of my journey and what I wish someone
would've told me 25 years ago when I was sitting where you are now. I'm gonna start with
the topic of gratitude. I know we're all grateful to be here. This is a moment we will never forget. And as such, it is a great moment to acknowledge those
who helped get us here. Many of you are here with family. I want to thank my family,
my amazing wife, Sarika, and our three kids, Devan, Avni, and Diya. (audience applauding) My dad unfortunately passed
away about seven years ago, but he's definitely
with us here in spirit. But my mom is here. Hi mom. (audience applauding)
(audience cheering) And I just wanna say thank you and I love you to all my family and like to ask all of you to give a brief round of
applause for your family. (audience applauding) So I'm gonna dive into my background. My mom and dad were born in
very small towns in South India, though they most made it to Mumbai before moving to the United States. I'm sure you've heard that old adage that some parents exaggerate how they walked five
miles uphill to school both ways every day and did their homework without electricity and running water. Well, my dad didn't like
to talk about the things that he overcame, but having been to the
house that he grew up in, if he would've told that story, it actually wouldn't have
been much of an exaggeration. And so it was his passion for education that brought him to this country. In 1965, he won the
prestigious Tata Scholarship to do his second master's
degree in the US. And so he boarded a boat and left his family
with $60 in his pocket. And he managed to build and provide a comfortable life for my family, but he never forgot where he came from and how important education, values, and hard work were to dramatically improving
his quality of life. And so despite starting with
$60, he had a sense of duty to pay for whatever
school I wanted to go to. And so for my mom and dad, if that meant sacrificing
their own quality of life during their that saving
process, well duty is duty. And so 1995 came along and I really wanted to go
study business at Wharton. And notwithstanding the cost,
my mom and dad were thrilled. And I moved into the baby
quad in August of 1995. I remember walking around
the quad during orientation, and I was very impressed by my classmates, perhaps too impressed. As I started to second guess
myself, did I really belong? Many of the kids went
to fancy private schools and boarding schools. Others went to great public schools and it felt like almost
everyone was well-spoken, well traveled, they
had great study habits, They had a sophisticated understanding of what classes to take,
how to get internships, it really seemed like they
were ready for the big leagues and I belonged in little league. That worry only grew over the
course of my first semester. I had always been a straight A
student in my school district without needing good study habits. And I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't understand this concept
of a forced grading curve. So I went home for the holidays with the lowest grades of my
life, and I felt like a failure for the first time ever. Now, don't get me wrong, I had a lot of experience
failing at things. If I had more time in multimedia, I could show you a whole
blooper reel of air balls, strikeouts, four putts, fumbles. But academics was the one thing I was supposed to be good at. And so how was I gonna
explain to my parents who overcame real adversity
that I couldn't hang? And so I went home and I talked to my parents
about the unthinkable, would I need to transfer out of Penn? My more sophisticated friends had told me, unless I turned it around quickly, I'd be ineligible for IB interviews. That sounded really bad and
might've added to my stress. But luckily, I had no idea
at the time what IB was. That conversation I had with my parents, which I thought was gonna
be the worst of my life, ended up being the most impactful. And it leads to my first piece of advice, which is to focus on actions
and process and not outcomes. My parents' point was this,
grades are an outcome, but what's my process and what can I do to improve my process? What actions can I take to put
myself in a better position? If I improve my process, it
should lead to better grades, but I can't control the curve
or the outcome of the grades. You can only control what you can control. So if you can't control something,
you can't worry about it, but you can control your process. And so I focused on being more organized, taking better notes,
developing study habits, being proactive instead
of procrastinating, all the things that
you've already figured out because you're here graduating. And so of course the point of
this story isn't about grades, it's about resiliency. I think resiliency is the
most important life skill one can have, because no matter how talented you are, or the more things you
have going your way, the more success you have, the
more competitive it will be. And there will be times
you'll get knocked down. And so the question is not
if you'll get knocked down, it's how often, how hard, and how quickly you'll get back up. In the 25 years since I've
graduated, I've been very lucky that my work has given me the opportunity to be around some of the most
successful people in business, including founders of companies and CEOs. And my passion for sports outside of work has given me an opportunity to be around some of the most successful
people in sports. And while what it takes
to be successful in sports and business are different in some ways, there are some things
that are very similar, things like teamwork and hard work. But another big one is resiliency. Every successful entrepreneur
I've met has failed in some cases spectacularly
before they were successful. But you have to be willing to take risk and you have to be
comfortable with the fact that even the most calculated
risk won't always work out. But what's your process? How robust is it? Are you really making tough sacrifices? My friend, Duce Staley is here, former NFL player turned coach, two time Super Bowl champion. He flew in from Cleveland to be here. Thanks for coming, Duce. Thank you. (audience applauding) By the way, he should be a head coach in the National Football League. So hopefully we work
together to make that happen. But he likes to talk to his
players about their goals, and he asks them, what's your mission? But that's the easy part.
His follow up question is, do your habits reflect your mission? So it's easy to want to be
great, or want this job, or that promotion or that award, but is your process the right
process for getting there? In the National Football League, games are once a week
and they last 60 minutes. But from Sunday night
to Wednesday morning, the average coach spends
40 hours reviewing film, and then later in the week, another 40 or 50 hours game planning and coaching for the next game, which again is only 60 minutes. Think about that ratio. They look at every play from their player and each player on their team and the other team from
every camera angle. All of this is in the hopes of finding something subtle to improve that can make a difference
in next week's game. In the business world, you see similar or greater levels of
preparation to the actual event. For every couple hour client
meeting we have in my business, we spend hundreds of hours analyzing the topics for that meeting. The clients themselves have board meetings and earnings calls, and they
have similar preparation to performance ratios, but preparation is only
part of the process. The other important part is how honest are you about evaluating the output of your process and making it better the next time? Everyone makes mistakes. We spend a lot of time recruiting from the best and brightest
from schools like Wharton and the number one area for development when you look at review
feedback for first year analysts and first year associates
is attention to detail. What differentiates people a
few years into their career is how much they've learned
from their mistakes. So the first step is learning from mistakes that are pointed out to you. The good news is that's easy. The next step is learning from mistakes that were not pointed out to you. Going back to football,
if you're a defender and the receiver notices a
subtle tell in your footwork, that helps him remind you, but the opposing quarterback
didn't see him open and so he didn't get the ball, you got away with a mistake
that no one noticed. But if you don't admit to yourself that you made that
mistake, then guess what? It'll happen again and
you probably won't be as lucky the next time. And so do you have the
discipline to learn from mistakes that no one notices? And how are you at taking
constructive criticism? Do you seek it or do you
push back when you get it? Do you have mentors that
give you tough feedback or mentors that make you feel good? By the way, I think you need both. But my experience is even if you disagree with a piece of feedback, there's something to be learned from it. And there's value in trying to understand why the feedback provider
has the perception they do, and how you might fix the perception. The minute you think you don't
need to work on something because you've perfected it, is the minute that someone else will figure
out a better way to do it and then all of a sudden
you're playing catch up. Now, notwithstanding all
this talk about process, let's acknowledge the role of luck. I'm a big believer in meritocracy, and while hard work and talent are absolutely critical to succeeding, every successful person
I've noticed, I've known has benefited from some degree of luck. And it's important not to become arrogant or lose sight of that. Now, of course, you can't control luck, but you can put yourself
in the best position to benefit from luck. Great general managers of
sports teams will tell you, you can't really plan
to win a championship in any given season. What you can do is build a good team that can consistently get to the playoffs. And if you consistently
get to the playoffs, you increase the odds,
you'll win a championship. But the point is, you can't control what happens
once you're in the playoffs in any given season. There could be injuries, fluke plays, officiating mistakes,
hot streaks, bad weather. Sometimes the field is
slippery in Arizona, but winning the
championship is an outcome, and at least some percentage
of that outcome is about luck. And so if luck matters
and you've succeeded, which definitionally
involves at least some luck, the question then becomes, what are you doing about giving back? You as a group have
already accomplished a lot just to get here, and you will no doubt accomplish
a lot more in the future. But don't lose sight of how
you were helped along the way and how you can help others. And don't underestimate the
impact that you can have because if each of you has
even just a small impact, when you multiply that by the
number of people in this room, the cumulative impact gets
very big, very quickly. And so pick causes or
charities that matter to you and figure out how you can help them and start that process today. And believe it or not,
the pride you'll feel from building that bridge and seeing the impact of that help will feel even better than
the feeling you'll have as you rack up your own championships. Thanks again for having me. Best of luck to all of you going forward. And we're gonna close this speech the way that we break a huddle. So I'm gonna count to three. And everyone in here very loudly is gonna yell hard work, ready? Hard work on three, one, two, three, hard work. Thank you. (audience cheering)
(audience applauding)
