Wharton '14 MBA Commencement - David Rubinstein Speech
Hey monkeys, yesterday I watched the speech of David Rubinstein in the Wharton '14 MBA graduation ceremony. Here's the video:
Great speech overall. Inside the post I created a summary of some parts of the speech that I found quite interesting.
About making money:
Here's what you need to know in 5 minutes or so in order to make a great deal of money:
- Perseverance is infinitely more important than brilliance or even a reasonably high degree of intelligence. Not taking no for an answer will yield far more financial rewards than will acquiescence to conventional wisdom. Do not give up your own beliefs and passion easily or quickly.
- Hard work will yield greater financial rewards than a 9-5 work style. If you really want to get ahead financially, long hours are unfortunately a prerequisite....
- Focusing on one subject or one area where you can truly make yourself an expert, your organization’s indispensable resource, will lead to further responsibilities and related benefits. Avoid spreading yourself thin by trying to do too much before you do one thing extremely well. Once you are established as the expert or go to person in one area, other opportunities will inevitably come to you and your responsibilities and rewards will inevitably increase.
- Learning how to persuade others to do what you want is the essence of a successful business career and the essence of life in many respects. To do that well you need to learn how to communicate effectively by writing and speaking well, but more importantly you need to learn how to communicate well by the most effective means of persuading - by the example you set in your own actions...
- Place your energies into providing the best service or the best product possible. Do not focus on how much money you will make. The obsession with the making of money rarely leads to the actual making of money. The obsession with achieving excellence and with doing the best job possible, doing something no one else can do as well is usually what leads to making a fortune. Money needs to be the happy by-product, not the principal goal.
- Whatever financial success you might have at the outset, that success can be multiplied many times as people observe how you handle your initial success. Humility, rather than arrogance, will lead to far greater eventual success. There are exceptions to this rule unfortunately, but you should not honestly want to be one of these exceptions. You should want to be someone who recognizes that luck likely played a real role in your success and bad luck could come along at any point. So stay humble.
About his philanthropic endeavors and about giving back:
I wanted to let you know that I have achieved, as a result of these acts of giving away my wealth, far greater happiness than I achieved making the wealth.
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My only regret is that I did not learn the lesson of giving away money to help others, to help one’s community, to help one’s country a bit earlier in life. Had I done so, perhaps I would have enjoyed the enormous happiness that I now enjoy a bit earlier.
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Do not make my mistake. Do not wait until the last third of your presumed actuarial life to give back. Do not wait until your opportunities to make a real difference in the world may have passed you by. And most importantly, do not assume that the money you are now poised and certain to make in whatever amount will buy you real happiness. It honestly will not. And therefore, I urge you to learn from my lesson and the lesson of so many others like me: do more than make money. Give back to your community, your society, your country. And do so even when you may not have large sums of money. By doing so, you will surely achieve happiness much earlier in your life.
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Focus on how your presence on the face of the earth, as fleeting as it is, is justified by what you have done trying to make society and the world a slightly better place than you inherited. Do not get to the end of your life and regret what you did not do during the earlier part of your life. Try to make the world a better place.
