A Few Things I Want to Tell the Class of 2009

It’s graduation season, but alas, once again, none of the fine high schools of America, or elsewhere, has asked me to bestow my great wisdom on their graduates. I’m not sure how such a thing could have happened yet again this year.

This season brings back the painful memory of the two valedictorian speeches at my high school graduation. One argued that life is like a mountain. We climb up and up, meeting new challenges, always rising higher. The other spoke about how life is like flying an airplane, we climb up and up, meeting new challenges, always rising higher. Those two speeches, and their strange resemblance to each other, pretty much encapsulate everything I hated about my high school years.

I’m not saying I’m a sage. I’m not saying anyone should follow my advice. Especially not with respect to money. But I think I can do better than "Life is an airplane." And just because I’m horrible at taking my own advice, does not make it bad advice.

So here’s what I would tell a crowd of restless high school students, veins coursing with hormones and minds and bodies, itching to get this over with and get on to the graduation party.

Welcome Graduates

Welcome,

Parents, grandparents, teachers and, above all, the Class of 2009 [pause for exuberant, self-congratulatory, cheers and applause].

I know some of you are asking how this dashing, exuberant youth before you could possibly have any wisdom to impart. To you, I say that I am here not for you, but for your grandchildren. They are the ones you have humiliated by forcing them to wear those silly hats and gowns and who, only seconds into what will, I’m sorry to say, be a long address, are already nudging their neighbor and saying "That old guy is boring."

Boring I may be and certainly no wiser than your grandparents and parents and teachers, but since you won’t listen to them, I have been recruited in a last ditch effort to repeat the same old saws you’ve heard many times these last 17 or so years. But don’t worry, this will all be over in less time than it takes to watch the Lords of the Rings movies. The director’s cut.

I have a few things I’d like to impart to you, the graduates of the Class of 2009 (pause for self-congratulatory cheers). Some are things I’ve learned through hard experience. Most of them are things I made up yesterday when they told me that they told me I had a full two hours this afternoon. In no particular order, here are eight things I wish I had known at your age, rather than waiting until yesterday to make them up.

1. Write Your Biography Now

You have a summer before you. Write your biography, but don’t stop at 17. Go to 70. It may seem early to write your biography, especially for the years you haven’t lived yet, but everyone is telling you who they think you should be. By everyone, I mean television ads, inane magazines at the supermarket, teachers and parents, friends and enemies. Take some time and sit down and write the biography you want to be able to write when you’re seventy. Record now the life you hope you will have lived. What will you have done? Who will you have been? Who will you have loved? Where will you have lived? Feel no need to stick to the boring details of your actual life. I certainly haven’t in my biography [originally, by the way, I had thought Raised By Turtles would be a place for people to exchange such biographies, and that's where it got its name ("I was raised by turtles"), but I never quite figured out how I would get people to do it].

This biography is not, in the end, a blueprint, a plan, a roadmap or a tick list. What it is, is a safe spot. It’s the place you can go to remember who you are and who you should be when your tin foil hat falls off and you get confused by those messages the government is beaming into your head.

2. There Is No Plan.

Why isn’t your biography a plan? Because there is no plan. There is value in planning for the long-term, which is fundamentally planning for uncertainty and varied outcomes. That’s different from thinking you can predict the future and make a step-by-step long-range planning. When you make a plan, you exclude the things that have a one in a thousand chance of happening. But played out over thousands of options, sometimes the one in a thousand chance will come to pass and your plan is out the window. If every five years since I was 15, I had predicted where I would be living and what sort of work I’d be doing, I would have have been wrong on one or both counts every single time. You’ve heard of Plan B? I think I’m on Plan BB now, having already gone through the whole alphabet once. Or twice.

That should be liberating. You don’t have to know now what you will become. You’ll work it out as you go mostly. One of the most dangerous myths foisted upon you is the idea that you should know today who you will be and what you will be doing (particularly what type of job) in twenty years. In addition to being dangerous, it’s ridiculous.

I’ll wager this: the adults that you really admire did not become what their sixteen year-old selves thought they would become (in my case, a medical doctor). My father was a university athletic director who had trained to be a math teacher, a fighter pilot and a health researcher, but never an athletic director. When I was 23 and anguished by the prospect of trying to plan my future, he said as only a father can "Remind me, how old are you now?" and then said "If someone had told me when I was 23 that I would end my career as an athletic director, I would have laughed. Just keep trying new things until you find something that excites you or you’re old enough to collect Social Security." That works for me.

Make plans. Have goals. But don’t be too upset when you have to scratch them and start over.

3. Life Takes Patience and Persistence.

I just made it sound like it’s no big deal to cast aside goals and plans, but it is. All I meant to say is that it was necessary, not that it was easy. Lou Reed says:

You’ve got to be very strong,
Because you start from zero
Over and over again.

Most great things are achieved not with brilliance, but with persistence and patience. That’s good news, because unlike genius and innate talent, those are things we learn, not things that we have to be born with. So they’re available to all of us.

Having patience does not mean sitting around waiting for something wonderful to happen miraculously, out of thin air. It means working the hard work and getting your hands dirty and sticking to it as the seed grows bit by bit until finally, something wonderful pokes through the soil. But when it doesn’t, when Plan A fails, you need persistence, because you start from zero, over and over again. The most powerful metaphor I’ve known in life is that of the phoenix, the bird that burns to ash and rises again stronger and renewed. It runs through my mind whenever I face hard times and setbacks. Sometimes in life, you need to burn like the phoenix before you can rise again and for that, you’ve got to be very strong.

4. Life gets easier.

Patience? Persistence? That makes life sound nasty, brutish and long. But in truth, for most people, life gets easier as you move from childhood to adulthood. That’s the secret that adults hate to tell kids. In fact, they constantly try to make you believe it’s the other way around.

In third grade they started telling me I wouldn’t be able to get away with that when I got to fourth grade, where we would get letter grades, the threat of which was supposed to shake me to my bones.Then they threatened me with the specter of not being able to get away with that in middle school, then high school, then college and then with the most ominous threat of all, the "real world". Nobody ever clearly defined what that was, but it was always something vaguely related to my laziness, incompetence, poor penmanship, inability to sit still in class or some other supposed deficit of mine that, in the end, never once hurt me in any way shape or form in the supposed real world.

That’s just me. I can’t guarantee that life will get easier for all of you, but the part they don’t tell you is that in general, the tools you have to work with and the freedom you have with which to use them will increase in much greater proportion than the tasks you’re given. So yes, you’ll be expected to do five times more and to do it five or fifty times as well, but by the time that expectation is placed on you, it will actually be easier than what you’re being asked to do now. If an adult in your life scoffs at this idea, ask if he or she wants to trade places. I guarantee none of them will. They’ll tell you "if only I could" but they are not being even remotely honest.

And adults in the audience, I have a request. I don’t know why so many of you have decided it’s your duty to fill the next generation with pessimism and foreboding for the future. Do me one favor: please, help them get started. Then get out of their way and let them create their future. They’re the ones that have to live there.

5. You Are More Free Than You Know.

It’s difficult for me to watch kids being told not to do things that their parents do. Really? That food is bad for them, but not for you? Me, I lead by example. The other day my wife and I were passing by the Lake Champlain Chocolates store in Waterbury, Vermont. Since they have the best chocolate ice cream in the universe, we decided to have chocolate ice cream for dinner. Being a grown up is great.

Sadly, most people don’t know how free they are. Much of what they see as natural and obligatory is just a set of circumstances handed to them because of where they live and who they know. When I was a few years older than you, I had the chance to meet Michel Foucault, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. He gave me something valuable that I keep with me at all times and which I bring out in times of need. Now I’m going to give it to you. What he gave me was an idea. He said "The purpose of my work is to show people how free they are." When you feel boxed in, you can pull that out too and remember how free you are.

It doesn’t mean you can be anything you want. Adults, please stop parotting that claptrap at young people. Some things are impossible or so difficult that only the foolhardy would even try. Some things require innate talents you don’t have. You can’t play pro basketball if you’re 5′2" and 120 pounds and you can’t be a pro jockey if you’re 6′10 and 280 pounds. Do not believe the snake oil salesmen who tell you that can do anything. You can’t. Being free doesn’t mean you’re God, Superman, Einstein or a shapeshifter.

But too many people see compulsion where they should be see choice. Consider two people:

• One says "I wish I could go skiing tomorrow, but my boss won’t let me".
• The other says "It would be fun to go skiing tomorrow, but I value my job more than a day of skiing."

One sees nefarious, external forces at work (the boss). The other sees a personal choice. One sees constraint. The other sees decision. We, as Americans in the 21st century, are unlikely to be sold into bondage. We lose our freedom in our minds. Never forget how free you are.

6. These Are Probably Not the Best Years of Your Life

Why do we tell people who are 17 to "enjoy it, these are the best years of your life"? That was actually the line they used to try to sell me a yearbook when I was your age. It seemed ridiculous to me then and now it makes me sad to think of the kids who believed it, who believed that at 17 years old their best years were behind them. Screw that. My grandmother told me her eighties were her best years, and not because the ones before that were especially bad. Her eighties were especially good. Let’s just stop and think about that for a second [pause].

If your high school years have been great, think how lucky you are. Even better years probably await and it’s way more fun to believe that anyway. If your high school years have been miserable, don’t despair just yet. Lots of happy, well-adjusted, successful adults with great friends and wonderful spouses and children were miserable in high school. How happy you are in high school is not a good predictor of how happy you’ll be as an adult.

If you have felt awkward, possibly miserable, these last years, don’t worry, you have a lot more company than you think. For the vast majority of you, better years are ahead. It’s dramatically easier as you get older to find a circle, a group, a tribe that you belong to. Just because you can’t be anything you want, doesn’t mean that the doors of possibility are not about to be thrown wide open.

7. Fear Is the Mind Killer

I stole that title from Frank Herbert’s Dune, a story about Paul Atreides, a boy who becomes a God. Your future is not nearly scary as his, but trying new things is a scary business. Remember this: the things that you fear the most will rarely if ever come to pass. Everyone repeat after me: "The things I fear the most, will rarely if ever come to pass." [repeat until crowd says it] You will worry and you will fret and you will at times be paralyzed with fear, and most of the time, nothing bad will ever happen. Remember that while you’re remembering how free you are.

8. Do What You Love, But The Money Probably Won’t Follow

I don’t know why adults insist on telling kids that if you do what you love, the money will follow. For the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet, that is not true. In most times and places, the idea that the thing you love the most would also bring you enough money to live on wasn’t even reasonable. Most people will have to make a choice. If your passion is medecine, law or business, you might be able to have it all. Me, I loved history and I have been able to support myself as a historian in some form or another since 1989, though the first years were real lean. I’ve made a living, but it would be hard to say "the money followed". God forbid I should have loved to write poetry or spend my days fly fishing or playing basketball or writing a blog and hoped to make a living doing one of those. Perhaps for every 100,000 boys who love basketball, one makes a living at it as a pro. And let’s be clear here, you’re one of the 99,999. And that’s okay.

For the most part, if you are like 99% of humanity, your job simply will not be something you love. You can still do the things you love. You’ll spend less than half your waking life at work. So do what you love. But it need not be your job. Almost nobody can make a living writing poetry. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be plumber and a poet.

Last Words

I know I was supposed to tell you that life is wonderful, a world of possibility lies before you and you can do anything. I think my closing words were supposed to be "And now go out and change the world". That seems to be the standard script. Well, you can’t do anything, but it is true that the range of possibility stretches beyond your imagination and mine. You will change the world, but only a little bit. Still, try to change it just a little for the better if it’s all the same to you. And life is wonderful. But sometimes it’s hard too.

But I’m an optimist. I think a world in which you can both make a living and do what you love is a pretty good place, even if you can’t do both at the same time.

And now one last thing: take the rest of the afternoon off. Remember, life takes patience. Pace yourself.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what goes into making good decisions. There are, of course, countless considerations and ways of looking at the decision-making process. So these are not the three keys to good decisions, just three chosen from among many. That said, these are three factors that I often see people, including myself, get wrong:

• Use absolute numbers, not proportions
• Ignore sunk costs.
• Watch out for confirmation bias.

Absolute Numbers Rule

Remember absolute numbers: essentially the postive value of the difference between two numbers. When the decision we’re making has a big number involved, that big number tends to make other numbers seem inconsequential. Ask a few people to assume that they are about to buy a TV for $800 at a store 30 minutes away. They open up the newspaper and see an ad for the same television on sale for $200 at a store that’s a two-hour drive away. Would they drive three hours round-trip for that amazing deal? Now ask the next few people to imagine they’re buying a $52,000 luxury car and they find out that they can get it for $51,400 two hours away.

Researchers find that when faced with this type of question, people will commonly say they’ll drive the two hours each way to save on the television, but rarely for the car. Why? Because it seems like an inconsequential part of the price of the car, so not much of a deal. But in both cases, the total savings is the same. It should either be worth $600 to drive for three hours or not. The price of the item you’re buying shouldn’t matter.

Strategy: Look at the absolute number that’s truly at play and ask yourself: if someone were to give you the cash to make the same decision, how would you decide. In other words, if someone said "I’ll pay you $600 to drive around for three hours for no particular reason" would that be worth it to you? If so, then the deal in the other town is worth it. If not, it’s not. The total price of the item makes no difference.

Forget Sunk Costs

A friend opened my eyes to this one many years before I had the name or the concept of sunk costs. He went to a movie that had a terrible, violent opening that completely turned him off. He walked out after five minutes and told me later, "I had already wasted seven bucks, I didn’t see the point in wasting two hours on top of it."

Sunk costs are costs that you can never recover. Let’s say you’re writing a book and you’ve worked on it for 500 hours and you realize that at the rate you’re writing, it will take another 500 hours, for a total of 1,000 hours. There are two possible traps here.

• You feel like it’s not worth another 500 hours, but you can’t give up because you’ve already put in so much work and you can’t bear to let it go to waste, so you stick it out and finish.
• You feel like the book simply is not worth 1000 hours, so decide to quit.

However, since the first 500 hours are gone and can never be recovered, they shouldn not really count in your decision. The proper question is: if I were starting from scratch today and knew that I could complete the book in 500 hours, would I think it was worth it?

There’s another, interesting version of this that Dan Ariely talks about in Predictably Irrational. They asked people to imagine they were going to a concert where the tickets cost $80. They then asked one of two questions:

• You buy tickets in advance. On the way, you lose your tickets. Do you buy another ticket at the door and go anyway?
• You’re planning to buy tickets at the door. On the way, $80 falls out of your wallet, but you still have your credit card and the rest of your money. Do you still buy a ticket and go to the concert?

People who lose the ticket are much more likely to say they would turn around and go home, because they couldn’t bring themselves to spend $160 for the concert. People who just lost the money, though, didn’t see that as a cost of the concert, so they were less likely to change plans. But in fact, all that really matters is whether you have the budget to lose $80 in whatever form and still spend the $80 on the tickets. If it was worth $80 to you originally and it’s still worth $80 to you, it makes no difference whether you lost $80, lost a ticket, or found a Franklin on the sidewalk. What happened before is a sunk cost and not part of this particular decision, except insofar as $80 would break your budget for the week.

Confirmation Bias

This is the hardest one for me. Basically, when we arrive at a decision, we then tend to look for corroboration. I catch myself doing this a lot in my scholarly work. This is typically the way criminal investigators work: find a likely suspect and then gather evidence to prove the case. From a consumer point of view, you find what appears on first look to be the best camera for you, then you look for other positive aspects. The problem is that the information that you uncover early in the process is not necessarily the most salient information and yet, because of confirmation bias, you’ve closed yourself to other options.

I still find this one tough, but when doing scholarly research I try to divide my investigation into a discovery phase and an analysis phase. So the first thing is to frame the question properly. Ask not "Is Little John the same as John Jacobs?" but rather "What do I know about Little John?" The second thing is to gather a set amount of data ("I will consult these five sources") before starting analysis. This increases the possibility that you will find and, more importantly, still be open to contradictory information that comes to light late in the process. Then always ask this question before making a final decision, "If I knew when I started what I know now, would I make the same decision?"

Putting It Into Practice

Of course, even if this helps with analysis, making the right decision can still be hard. I have a friend who, after seven years of study (sunk costs) was about to become an ordained priest. Meditating the night before on a prayer of Saint Francis, he realized that he never would have entered seminary if he had known what he knew at that moment, seven years later, about the support he could count on from his community of brothers. In other words, he had overcome the confirmation bias problem. From there, it took an act of will and great courage to ignore the sunk costs not just of the seven years, but also the sunk costs of commitments to family and friends to whom he had said he was becoming a priest. It was not an easy decision, but by framing the question correctly, it was possible to make the right decision for him. But as his case shows, often courage is more important than reason and courage is harder to learn.

This is not exactly my usual fare for Raised by Turtles, but I had the occasion to get a little firefighting training some time back, and recently had need to write this up. In our rural neighborhood, response times are very long (over one hour), so it’s important that residents have some idea of what to do in event of a fire. So here’s what I learned from our local fire chief.

Obviously, if a home is on fire and you can’t put it out immediately, you should evacuate the home, go to your meeting place and call the fire department from a safe location. But what then? Or what if you arrive on the scene of a home or other building that is on fire? When you arrive on the scene, you will typically find either one of two conditions:

• The fire is contained in the house and you see black smoke on the inside and moisture on the windows.
• There are flames coming out of windows, doors, or other openings in the building.

Don’t Enter a Burning House

In both cases, the first rule for avoiding an accident when you find a house on fire is that you should not enter the building. This is probably obvious in the case where the building is engulfed in flame, but may not be obvious when the home appears to have a slow smoulder that you could put out. The rule nevertheless still applies for two reasons:

• Obviously, you put yourself in danger, and yet you do not have the proper training or equipment to fight the fire and may be overwhelmed once inside.
• More importantly, you may cause serious damage. A burning house will often put itself out. A fire in a modern home with the windows shut will burn as long as there is oxygen, but it will quickly use the available oxygen and become a low-temperature fire. If you open the door, you will introduce oxygen to the home and this will reignite the fire and put both you and the home at risk. This is the main reason fire experts recommend against trying to enter the home to fight the fire. It’s generally much better to wait for the firefighters with breathing apparatus to arrive. They will quickly enter the building, closing the door behind them, and fight the fire from within.

What Should You Do for a House Fire?

If the home is engulfed in flame, you should not approach the house, but there may be things you can do to help the firefighters and to limit damage to the house.

• Do a walkaround looking for hazards. Make quick mental notes of holes, flammable materials, or other hazards. By the time the firefighters arrive, it’s possible they will no longer be able to see these areas and you information could save the life of a firefighter.
• Shut off the electricity. If it is safe to do so, pull the main breaker on the house.
• Shut off the gas. Again, if it’s safe to access the gas shutoff, kill the gas supply to the house.
• Stay on the scene if safe so that when firefighters arrive on scene, you can report the information from your walkaround and whether or not you’ve shut off the power and gas. This alone will make the firefighters very happy.
• If you might get trapped, for example if you live in a forested area where a spreading fire might cut off your safe escape, and the fire begins to spread beyond the initial structure, you should flee the area and let the professionals deal with it.

Fighting A House Fire

Only at this point should you attempt to fight the fire. Remember, if no flames are coming from the house, do nothing for the reasons listed above. If flames are visible, first and foremost, think about what will happen if a gas line or a gallon of lawnmower fuel or lacquer thinnner explodes. You must keep your distance.

If your only tool is a garden hose, you will probably not be able to maintain a safe distance and do anything constructive to fight a serious fire. At best, you can wet down vegetation or neighboring structures to keep them from catching on fire. That should be your first priority in any case.

If there is a firehose or other firefighting equipment available, you can attempt to fight the fire. Remember, it is up to the firefighters to enter the house and try to stop the fire. Your goal is not to stop the fire, but to keep the temperature down and keep the fire from spreading to adjoining structures or vegetation. In other words, your goal is still to contain rather than extinguish the fire. If you have enough water, the fire will "flee" and you will have to keep moving around the building to where the fire is the hottest. In any case, you should focus your attention on monitoring the fire and moving around the house to stop the spread.

Thanks to Chief Jim Wilson, of the Mariposa County Fire Department, for some excellent fire safety training.