Graduation Address: Three Formulas for Growth

I was invited to give a graduation address to a small school's graduating seniors. This is what I shared.

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Just two weeks ago, I flew back to the United States for four days for my 10-year high school reunion. I was fortunate enough to attend a great high school called Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Every five years the alumni are invited back for a reunion, filled with pomp and circumstance and eating and dancing.

My five best friends and I rented a nearby house for two days before the reunion to spend time together before reconnecting with the other 45 classmates who would later attend. The house was nothing fancy, but it had a grill outside and a small fire pit, around which we crowded and talked until the early hours of the morning, looking up at the stars and watching the sparks crackle from the fire before eventually disappearing into the crisp spring air.

Around the fire, just like you might imagine from a Hollywood movie — though a really long and boring one — we shared all that we had learned over the last ten years since graduating from high school: what we had enjoyed, what we wished we had done differently, and where we hoped the next ten years would take us.

Of course there were regrets about drinking too much beer in college from one person. Another said he didn't drink enough beer. One said he wished he had spent more time attending classes. Another said he should have cut class more often to enjoy time around his college campus. One is about to get married to his long-time girlfriend later this year. Others have expressed their youth still has another decade before wanting to settle down.

Although not entirely surprising to me in the moment, nor likely to you sitting here today: everyone has a remarkably different college and post-college experience and I think there are few pieces of advice or sage wisdom that will apply to everyone here today. Whereas I might share the old adage "follow your passion" or perhaps the opposite, "prepare yourself best for a stable career," I think in 50% of these cases my advice may fall on deaf ears, because you may have already decided to do one or the other.

Instead, rather than direct advice, I'd like to share three lessons I learned in and after college.

All of you are traveling soon and embarking on an adventure whose true goal is personal growth. Whether that takes the form of a certification, subject-matter expertise, increased maturity, finding the love of your life, or figuring out how to earn enough money to buy your parents that home in San Francisco they so desperately want, personal growth will be at the heart of your journey.

So, what exactly did I learn in college related to personal growth?

I showed up in the fall of 2008, just ten years ago, to Hanover, New Hampshire, to attend my first term at Dartmouth College. I was pretty set on pursuing something mathematical and engineering focused. My favorite subjects in high school were math and physics and my senior year graduation project was to build a solar-powered electric car from scratch with the help of classmates. Statistics and calculus were never supremely easy for me, but they were never that challenging either. I thought I was going to pursue a maker or builder career.

Little did I know I would never finish a single math or physics course in my time in college.

Instead, during my freshman year, I changed my focus to Philosophy, Economics, and Asian Studies (specifically religions of East Asia). Had I stayed for all four years of school, I would have graduated with a triple major. But what I learned is that reflecting on plans and pains can lead to growth in unexpected places.

So although I did not finish any math courses, the lessons I learned were still mathematical. Here is the first one:

Pain + Reflection = Growth

The old adage "No Pain, No Gain" is certainly true. But what they don't tell you is that pain without reflection is a waste. In order to grow from your mistakes, I found that without reflecting on my mistakes, I could not improve at all.

Academically, I found that during my first year in college I spent little time or effort actually engaging with professors' comments on my work. I would receive a paper back, glance through it, look at the grade at the bottom, and shove it into a desk drawer or folder. It was my interpretation that only the weaker students actually approached the professor for extra help and guidance. Instead, over the rest of my time at Dartmouth, I learned that it was the top students who explored more deeply how they could improve their writing and project work through long discussions with professors and by submitting written reflection pieces on what they could have done to deliver higher-quality finished products.

Athletically, I was fortunate to play on a competitive NCAA Division I athletics team. We dedicated nearly 30 hours per week to training and competition, and during peak season often over 40 hours per week. Our coach encouraged all of us to keep training guides and journals, working with our trainers and strength coaches to examine exactly how, where, and when we were lagging behind in our fitness tests. Without reflecting upon key areas of strength and weakness with those who are perhaps more capable or more informed than you, it is so challenging to grow.

To this day, I spend 60–90 minutes per week (generally on Mondays) reviewing my previous week, documenting where my life is wonderful and where my life is just less than that. Honestly spoken, most of us live a very charmed existence. You would not be here today if you were not already in the top few percentile of the entire country of both personal capability to achieve and family capability to support your achievements. But that does not mean you cannot strive for greater and greater versions of yourself at every moment.

Stress + Rest = Growth

As a competitive collegiate athlete, both my body and brain were continually put under stress: academic stress from my courses and athletic stress from my sport. What I did not learn until too late is how important Rest is to growth. In much the same way that Pain without Reflection is just Pain, Stress without Rest is just Stress.

The best athletes in the world, such as LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, often sleep 10–12 hours per day to let their bodies recover. While this seemed preposterous to me, it seemed less so after I took a course in college where I learned that the net positive benefits your body gains from hours 7–9 of your nightly sleep are just as valuable, if not more so, than the entire first 7 put together.

On a micro level, I found this was also true. Going into college, I was used to spending 3, 4, 5 hours straight working on assignments in high school without breaks. By the end I was a nervous wreck and completely exhausted. In college, I learned to work for 50 minutes and take a 10-minute break every hour. Soon, I was able to spend an entire day, from 8 am to 8 pm, productively working (with a break in the middle of the day for my athletic practice and meals). I could often complete an entire week of homework in one day and then spend the rest of the week enjoying myself.

What I also found is that staying up all night with friends talking, playing a game, or eating late-night snacks always seems like the right idea. And frankly, in 9 out of 10 times, it is. But sometimes I required the courage to tell my friends, "Hey guys, I need to get some rest. Big day tomorrow." They might protest for a moment, but in the end, everyone understands the necessity of rest. As a freshman, I tried to cultivate a reputation as someone who was "always ready and willing to have fun." That sounded great in practice, but then when I needed to actually deliver on my reputation, at the expense of my rest, it was unsustainable.

Your Community = Growth

More than anything I learned in college, I found the people I invested and spent my time with defined who I was more than anything I studied or place I visited. I've also since discovered that the most important decisions in my life have not been about my career, but in fact about my friends, my significant other, my colleagues, and my family.

Research from the National Institute of Health in the USA shows that if you have a friend who smokes, you are nearly 50% more likely to start smoking. If you have a friend of a friend who smokes, you are nearly 20% more likely to start smoking. The people around you shape what you say, do, sound like, walk like, and are interested in. For me, I realized too late that the people around me were the most important influence on my life.

As a freshman in college, I sought role models in all the wrong places. Many of them are still friends of mine to this day, but they were not the types of people I truly wanted to become. My closest friends, to put it mildly, were 'party animals.'

My classmates who loved spending time with competitive, hard-working, and smart people found investment banking and management consulting were great options. My classmates who preferred to spend time with people who valued their health and well-being over making more money are now perhaps working in a fitness or lifestyle brand. And here's the dirty secret — most are equally content with the choices they've made.

In my experience, it is the college classmates, teammates, and housemates around you that will generally define your happiness. Looking back, I wish I had:

• Selected my early friends more carefully — these are the ones who truly define you.
• Spent time with older people in the community — these are the ones who show you the paths of your future.
• Strived to actively meet people who are very different than me — these are the ones who cause you to re-evaluate yourself and the beliefs you hold so dearly.

I was fortunate enough to graduate from Dartmouth after only three years because I had worked hard and had enough course credits. Rather than stick around on campus, I moved to China and spent seven months in rural Anhui province learning Chinese and exposing myself more to Chinese culture. It was in this moment, when every single person around me was very different than me, that I truly realized the meaning of your community defining you.

I realized that you find comfort among those who are similar to you and growth from those who challenge you.

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You will come out of college or university a different person than you went in. This is actually the goal of college or university, believe it or not. And if you remember these three simple mathematical formulas, I hope you will find the growth you are looking for in yourself:

• Pain + Reflection = Growth
• Stress + Rest = Growth
• Your Community = Growth

Rather than seeing college as a time to tick boxes and prepare for the next step, please view it as an opportunity to grow as an individual. The habits of growth you form during college are likely to define how quote-unquote successful you will be in your twenties and thirties.

These habits of growth are: to reflect on your mistakes and grow from them, to take enough rest when you need to, and to invest time with only the highest quality people you can surround yourself with.

Have a memorable afternoon, everyone. Congratulations to all.