2012美国普林斯顿大学毕业典礼迈克·刘易斯的演讲
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\-- Michael Lewis
June 3, 2012 — As Prepared
I've never been up there.Thank you. President Tilghman.
Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012, wherever they put you. Members of the Class of 2012. Why don't you give yourself a round of applause. So the next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black, it'll be awkward to do that.But enjoy the moment, Enjoy the moment.
Thirty years ago, I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experiences. But I don't remember a word. I couldn't even tell you who spoke. And you won't be able to, either. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, maybe even a little relieved that you are getting out of here. And maybe all of you are. I was not. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they rewarded me by throwing me out. At that moment I was sure really of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a start. Even then majoring in art history was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less well prepared than you are for the marketplace. Yet somehow I've wound up rich and famous. sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one for yourself. So I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt really the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while I was working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a really gifted man, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis I wrote for him tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatelloused Greek and Roman sources, which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. Actually more than engrossed: totally obsessed. When I handed it in, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: I want to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, over in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to tellhow well written my thesis was. He didn't. So after about 45 minutes I finally said, \What did you think of the writing?\— not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I should write about.
One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a big Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be
where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the Wall Street we have all come to know and love today. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in the place to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the in-house derivatives expert. A year and a half later, Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors. Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend they were experts about money. I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis. At that point, I called up my father. I told him I was gonna quit this job that promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was this long pause on the other end of the line. \\years, make your fortune, and then write your books,\like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling. I would have felt it too risky. The book I wrote was called \was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative.
All of a sudden people were telling me I was a born writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, more true narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm to write the story of the age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said \sense of \into Princeton in the first place? This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck! especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world doesn't want to acknowledge it either. I actually wrote a book about this, called \something else. There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team,the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players. The poorest team was the Oakland A's. They were spending about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning more games, or as many games as the New York Yankees. and more games than every other team, all of them were richer than they were. This isn't supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had figured something out that no one else has figured out: the rich teams didn't really understand who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success. Players got given credit for things they did that depended on the performance of others: pitchers got paid for winning games, hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base. Players got blamed and credited for events totally beyond their control. Where balls that got hit happened to land on the field, for example. Forget baseball, forget the game of sports. Here you had these corporate employees, being paid millions of dollars a year. They were doing exactly the same job that people in their business had done for more than a century. In front of millions of people, each of them think they
are an expert on what a good baseball player is. They had statistics attached to every move they made on their job. And yet they were misvalued! Because the wider world was blind to their luck. So I think you have to ask: if a professional athlete paid millions of dollars a year can be misvalued, who can't be? If the supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can't distinguish between the lucky and good, who can? The \story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But, to me, it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck! And with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky. I make this point because along with this speech, it is something that will be easy for you to forget. I now live in Berkeley, California.
A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students like you, to use as his lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, on a team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one member of the team to be the leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus. Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn't. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool pooling at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were the crumbs on the leader's shirt. This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He'd been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it left him with a sense that this cookie, the 4th cookie, should be his. This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses, CEO pay, and I'm sure lots of other human behavior. This is how people behave, when they are blind in their own luck. But it's also relevant to you, to new graduates of Princeton University. Because in a general sort of way, you have been appointed the leader of the group.Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense right now its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything. All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may deserve the extra cookie. But you'll be happier, and you will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.
So never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all nations. Thank you. And good luck.
中文翻译稿
我（在普林斯顿上学的时候）从来没有上来到这里（演讲在普林斯顿学校教堂里举行）。谢谢，Tilghman校长。校董和朋友们，2012年毕业生的家长们，不论你们坐在哪里（有些家长在教室看现场直播），2012级的成员们，给你们自己一轮热烈的掌声吧！下一次再有那么多穿黑衣服的人在教堂里，这样做恐怕就没有那么自然了。但是现在可以，享受当下。 三十年前，我就坐在你们现在坐的位置。我也一定听过某位“老人”分享他的人生经验。但是我已经一个字都不记得了。我甚至都记不得演讲的是谁。估计你们到时候也不会记得。但是让我记忆犹新的是毕业本身。别人都说你应该激动兴奋，甚至应该感到些许释然，因为你终于从普林斯顿毕业出来了,也许你们是这种感受。但是我不是。我当时极度地愤慨。我来到这里赋予她我生命中最好的四年光阴，她就这样回报我，一脚将我踢出？那个时刻，唯一我可以确定的其实也就一件事：我对校园以外的世界毫无任何经济价值。首先，我是主修艺术史的。哪怕是在那个年代，艺术史也被认为是只有疯子才会选的专业。在就业这方面，几乎可以肯定我比你们现在准备得都差。但是，我现在也还是做到了有钱，有名！相对而言。一会儿我会解释这是如何发生的。但我想在你从学校走出去开始职业生涯之前你能先认识到职业道路是非常难以预测的。就这样我从普林斯顿毕业了，没有在任何地方发表过任何文章。我没有给《普林日报》写过稿，什么都没有。但是当我在普林斯顿学习艺术史时，我第一次真切地体会到了文学抱负给人带来的刺激。那是我在写本科毕业论文时。我的导师是一个非常具有天赋的考古学家，他叫William Childs。我和他一起写的论文探讨了意大利雕刻家Donatello如何融合了希腊和古罗马的作品。这当然和今天的主题无关但是请包容我，因为我一直想把这个告诉大家。没人知道Childs教授当时是如何想的，但是他让我深深地投入了进去。应该说不仅是投入，可以说是完全痴迷了。当我完成论文时，我知道这就是我这辈子想做的事。我想一直写“毕业论文”。或者说：写书。随后我参加了答辩。就离这里不远，在McCormick Hall教学楼。我期待着Childs教授赞赏我的论文写得有多好，他没有。所以45分钟后，我终于忍不住问他：“那么，你觉得我写得如何啊？”“这么说吧”他说“你千万别以写作为生。”后来，我确实也没有。我做了和所有（面临毕业又）不知道自己该做什么的人一样的选择，我去了研究院。我开始在晚上写作，但也没啥特别的效果。主要因为我对应该写些什么毫无头绪。
有一天晚上，我被邀请参加一个晚宴，我碰巧坐在了一个投资银行界大佬的夫人旁。那个投资银行是所罗门兄弟（Salomon Brothers）她几乎是以强迫的方式让她老公给了我一份工作。当时我对所罗门兄弟一无所知。然而，所罗门兄弟又处于正发生剧变的华尔街的风口浪尖，那个现在大家都十分了解和“热爱”的华尔街。当我到了那里，我几乎是被随机地安排到了可以见证那段疯狂历史的最佳岗位。他们把我培养成了公司内部金融衍生品的专家。一年半后，所罗门兄弟开始付给我好几十万美金的工资来让我给职业投资人提供关于金融衍生品方面的指导。这下我就有了可以写的东西：所罗门兄弟当时的华尔街已经变得疯狂到付着可观的薪水，让那些刚从普林斯顿毕业的对钱毫无理解的学生假装自己是金融专家一般。我
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