Graduation Address to St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Class of 2002

Steven Tomlinson, Ph.D.

This morning I’d like to share some words that you may not be ready to hear – words for your future – and I share them today because I’ve been where you are and I know what’s ahead, and you’ll remember these words when you need them.

Every week students come into my office at UT, and they want to know what they should do with their lives. These students are under a lot of pressure. They’re trying to pick a major and a career path that will impress their friends, make money, and keep their parents happy without making themselves miserable. From their perspective, this is a huge problem.

I tell them all the same thing: “You will find your calling where your passion meets the world’s deep need.” Most students are unimpressed with this advice, because they’re looking for something a bit more practical. They want the problem solved, summed up, and calculated to its conclusion – as if they could discern the best use of their gifts in the same way that they balance their checkbooks. But your life is not a problem. It is a creation. You do not need a formula. You need a reliable source of inspiration.

Let me offer you three things to consider as you take what you have learned from this great academy and go on to make a life out of it.

First: Your Passion: Do what you love.

My father almost never gives me advice, so when he does, I always listen. I was 24 years old, working on a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University, and he called me one night when I was in my dorm room, sweating over my econometrics problem set.

He said, “What’s econometrics?”

I said, “It’s the application of statistical methods to mathematical models that predict empirical irregularities.

He said, “Why would anyone want to do that? That doesn’t sound like you, Steven.”

I said, “Because, well, econometrics is the most prestigious macho subdiscipline in economics, my friends are very impressed, and econometricians make a lot of money.”

“Steven,” he said, “You sound depressed. You are doing something very foolish. You are getting good at something you hate. And when you get good at it, people will pay you, and you’ll have to do it for the rest of your life.”

It was profoundly comforting to discover that my father did not expect me to complete the econometrics course, and I went and dropped it that day.

Two years later I was on the academic job market when he called to ask, “How’s the job hunt going?”

I said, “Fantastic. I’ve got an offer from Pepperdine, an offer from Oberlin, I’m negotiating with the University of Texas, and I’m holding out for a position at Harvard.”

“Steven,” he said, “you sound depressed. Tell me. How would you want to spend your day if no one knew what you did and you didn’t have to worry about money?”

And I had no idea whatsoever, because I had to that point spent my entire adult life completely focused on doing whatever it would take to get good grades, to win awards, to impress people, to keep climbing to the next level of success, and any muscles I had for enjoying life for its own sake had atrophied.

He said, “Go lie under a tree and don’t leave until you can identify three things that you enjoy doing for their own sakes.”

I said, “Does it have to be a tree?

He said, “Yes, this is an emergency. The tree is not an option.”

So I went and I lay under a tree and I watched the wispy clouds pass through the branches and I felt bugs crawling on me. And I was bored, and I was angry, and I was surprised that someone who was ostensibly an adult could have so little knowledge of his own heart.

And finally, after a while, I had a revelation. It occurred to me that I loved bowling. And I hadn’t been bowling in years, and why not? And I liked telling stories. And I liked making dinner with friends. And long speculative theological conversations. And walks at night. And teaching children. And singing. And when I left the tree I had rekindled a bit of passion.

In Management we study two kinds of motivation. Extrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from the outside. Someone is going to pay you to do something. Someone is going to give you an award. Someone is going to tell you that you are a good boy or a good girl if you accomplish this. External, extrinsic motivation, contrasted with Internal or Intrinsic motivation – the joy of doing something for its own sake. The kind of satisfaction you get making beautiful music when no one’s watching. The satisfaction you get planting a garden because you like the feel of the dirt and the worms and sunshine.

Love and joy inspire works of surprising beauty. No one ever produced a masterpiece with a gun to his head. But if we rely on extrinsic motivation, it’s like a hit of speed – an addiction that requires more and more and more.

We’ve studied people acting from different sources of motivation. In one famous study, a group of psychologists in Israel went into a grade school class where kids were drawing beautiful, idiosyncratic pictures, and they started paying these kids with candy to draw more of these pictures. And as you might expect the assembly line began cranking out pictures faster, but the originality dropped off. They started looking fake and flat. And here’s the most surprising thing. When the candy was taken away, the kids stopped drawing all together.

We organize much of our life around the bargain, “Do this, and you’ll get that.” But this attitude leads us to value that and devalue this until we can’t help but see our work as some boring necessary evil. And those rewards that we worked so hard to get: Money, Praise, Awards, Grades; those things create antagonism among us because there’s only so much of them to go around and somebody’s always got more than us, and we become envious and alienated and disaffected.

The key to a very happy and productive life is never lose the capacity to know your passion – what it is that you truly love, because that is the only source of direction for you as you plan your career and make decisions. It’s the only reliable source of motivation - the only thing that is going to get you out of bed morning after morning after morning to fight a good fight or create things of beauty. It is a reliable source of inspiration.

Next: The world’s deep need. How do you discern the place in the world where you need to connect? How do you discern the work that is uniquely yours?

Well, one of my mentors growing up asked me, when I was about your age, to start keeping a journal of the things that made me mad. Injustice I observed. The things that touched me and moved me. I remember being troubled by beggars on the street. Do I give them money or not?

So I go ask my mentor. “You tell me what to do, and I will obey you.”

He looks back and says, “You are really worked up about this, aren’t you?”

I said, “Yes. I don’t know. Am I abetting a destructive lifestyle or am I becoming coldhearted if I don’t give them anything?”

He said, “You’ll do whatever I tell you?”

I said, “Absolutely.”

He said, “It doesn’t matter if you give them money or not. You must look into their eyes, because that’s where the answer is. That’s the only place from which God can speak to you.”

I said, “That’s a very troubling proposition. “

He said, “Well you said you’d do whatever I said, so go do it.”

So I started looking beggars in the eyes. And what happened was unpredictable. Sometimes I would give someone money. Sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d sit on a step and talk with them. Sometimes I’d take them and buy them a hamburger or a bus ticket. But it was always completely unpredictable because it became human. There was no automatic response, no formula. I had to deal with real people. Look in their eyes and that will connect you with the rest of humanity.

After a while I came up with this idea: I would carry canned tuna around in my car and whenever I saw those people who “will work for food” at the intersections; I would whip out a pop-top and give it to them. This was astounding – the result of this. The people always appreciated it. Probably whether they liked tuna or not, because what happened in this moment was a respectful, creative human connection instead of the typical and undignified transaction where I give them two bucks to relieve a little of my guilt. Meanwhile, the practice engaged some of my friends, so now I’m part of this tuna club. We all carry around tuna with us in our cars. And who would ever have thought of something so crazy if we hadn’t engaged a reliable source of inspiration?

I am convicted that we can do monstrous things only when we will ourselves not to see what our actions cost others. If you want to be human, if you want to be great, if you want to live a life that’s satisfying, keep looking in the eyes of the people who are affected by the choices you make.

We say, on Ozone Action day, “You shouldn’t drive your car because it exacerbates the asthma of people with respiratory conditions.” But, you know, we gotta get to work, right? So we ignore the suggestion, we ignore the consequences. An economist would say, “Let’s charge people more to drive on Ozone Action Day. Let’s put a meter in their car that runs when the air is smoggy.” But what if we put a screen on your dashboard and every time you turned the key of your car, you saw the face of the next child that who would begin to suffer because of what came out of your tailpipe. Would that change your behavior?

In time you would be unable to ignore the consequences of your action. Or else you’d pay a lot of money to have that screen removed.

I am convicted that the essence of sin is the willful expenditure of our energy and resources to block awareness of the human consequences of our actions. If you look peoples’ eyes, if you see how your choices affect others, that becomes for you a reliable source of inspiration and guidance.

“So,” you ask, “How do I make choices in this world when I’m good at so many things and there are so many things that cry out for attention”. “How do I choose?” says the college student sitting across my desk. And my answer is, “You do not choose. You lay out all of the cards that Life has dealt you. You lay out all of the passions and all of the needs. And what will come into focus for you is a life that is uniquely yours. Listen to it.”

So finally: Don’t Discard. You must make time for each gift you have, even if you think you must do something else to put bread on the table. Cultivate a small patch in your garden for each of the things you love – your writing, your music, your carpentry, your ministry – because it is from the interaction among these gifts that a life will emerge that is uniquely yours. Each time you discard a gift, you flatten your life by one dimension. Don’t discard.

When I was 28 years old at the University of Texas, it became very clear to me that I was a fraud. I was not going to be able to do any more academic research and publish in journals. I was finished with mathematical models. My passions were other places, and the cost of staying with that particular course of work was too high. And I went to my mentor and asked, “What do I do? Quit my job and join the Peace Corp? Maybe I go to seminary. Maybe I start writing plays and move to New York.”

He said, “Steven. There are so many things that you love, you must do all of them. If you cut off teaching, if you cut off business because this particular part of the path is hard, you will miss it. And if you don’t do the things that you love you will become sick and bored, and you will lose power. Don’t discard.”

So I went to a coffee house on Thursday night and made up plays and performed them for the people who showed up. I taught classes on business and interjected discussion on ethics and what it means to be human in the world. And I kept going to the seminary taking courses about theology and the nature and destiny of human beings. And before too long, these three completely different courses of action began to blend into something that nobody had ever seen before.

I believe that idolatry is forcing the world to become less complicated than it is. Idolatry is when we take one thing that seems valuable to us and sweep away everything else so we can serve only that one piece. But it leaves us empty and hollowed out and unsatisfied.

The opposite of idolatry is integrity – insisting that everything God has given you is part of the answer, and laying it out on the table like some glorious garden that you get to cultivate. And you will make something that nobody else has ever seen before.

Don’t force your life into a dichotomy where you have to choose one course or another. Keep doing all the things that you love. You need to express and invest these gifts, the world needs them all. Your life is not a problem to solve. It is a wonder to create. And don’t expect you have to do it alone – for as you show your gifts, the people around you will begin to offer advice, make suggestions, create opportunities for you and a life that you could never have picked off the rack, will create itself out of that intention.

Here’s the real question: Are you up for that? Are you up for a path that involves so much uncertainty, so much initiative, that discounts the expectations of people who’ve told you that grades and praise and money matter? What you are going to make is uniquely you, we’ve never seen it before, we can’t tell you exactly how to do it. We can take you only so far as we try to guide you in the creation of your life. And at some point you reach the real graduation – where you transcend our expectations and begin to create real value as you apply your passions to the world’s deep needs.

The motto of the summer is, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and whether you heard it from Winston Churchill or Spiderman, you know it’s right. You have just a little while longer to hold us responsible – your teachers, your parents, those people who have cleared and prepared a path for you. But we are eager for you to take the responsibility yourself – to take the initiative, and to begin making those lives that are uniquely yours. We’re ready for you to leave the orbit of our expectations and begin to create lovingly and love creatively. For that is truly the meaning of life.

And then you can help us, because we need your help. We need your help to manage our economy. We need your help to make our cities safe. We need your help to make peace in the world.

Do what you love. Look into the eyes of need. Don’t discard. And from these reliable sources of inspiration, create the life that is uniquely yours. We will watch you, and marvel.