Daniels quoted Thomas Edison:
"Opportunity is missed by
most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Hall of Fame baseball
player Eddie Murray:
“Once, after his
wrong-field bloop double had scored a winning run,
Murray was yelled at by an opposing fan who shouted, ‘You must be the
luckiest hitter in baseball.’ To which Murray politely replied, ‘You
must not watch batting practice.’ ”
Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and current president of
Purdue University, knows that no one in the audience is there to hear a
commencement speaker. When, however, he addressed his institution’s
class of 2016, it heard him distill into a few lapidary paragraphs a
stance toward life that illuminates this political season.
A rite of spring in America is, Daniels noted, the dispensing of
diplomas that are similar in what they announce but dissimilar in what
they actually denote. They all pronounce the recipient to be a bachelor
of this or a master of that.
There is, however, evidence, as abundant as it is depressing, that
there are enormous differences between the seriousness of the
curriculums students study and the rigor with which their mastery of
them is measured: “As employers have come to learn, many diplomas tell
little or nothing about the holder’s readiness for work or for life.”
This matters, because diplomas often are credentials that are not
credible, and because ample studies of happiness demonstrate that the
most important predictor of it is, Daniels said, “earned success.”
This involves sustained, difficult effort to surmount setbacks. And
yet, said Daniels, perhaps the most dangerous of today’s many
pernicious ideas is that “life is more or less a lottery. That we are
less masters of our fate than corks floating in a sea of luck.”
Daniels spoke six days after Barack Obama told Howard University’s
class of 2016: “Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky.
That’s a pet peeve of mine: people who have been successful and don’t
realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t
nothing you did.” [
Full
Wonderfulness]
