The philosophies and ideologies themselves certainly left an impression on me. But the rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement that’s where the real learning happened. It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I‘ve used it again and again-the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.
The intellectual process I learned in that class is also life’s process. Because every life is a Great Work, with all the richness of its gifts, and the wealth of its possibilities.
When you graduate from here, you exit with thousands of pages of personal text, on which are inscribed beliefs and values shaped by years of education, family interactions, relationships, experiences.
And buried within those thousands of pages is your personal truth, your essence.
So, how do you distill your life down to its essence? You can begin by confronting your fears.
I understand now, 25 years after that class: it is through a similar, personal distillation process that I have encountered my own fears, and mastered them.
Each time I encountered fear, each time I had another moment of“ah- hah”, I was getting closer to identifying my essence, my true heart, my true self.
The first epiphany came in a moment of realization that I really did measure up. It was about conquering the fear of inadequacy.
Remember when you entered Stanford, as a 17 or 18 year old kid, or an eager grad student? You were at the top of the heap. You felt pretty confidentin your abilities, right? And then you arrived at your dorm, or attended your first department meeting, and after two or three conversations with your peers, you probably felt undeserving and totally inadequate.
If you‘re anything like me, your internal monologue went something like,“Oh my God: The Admissions Office messed up. They must have mistaken me for some other Carly. These people are in a completely different league! They’re wondering what I‘m doing here! What will I tell them?”
Let me warn you, my fellow type A’s: you‘ll probably have this feeling of inadequacy many times during your life. President Hennessy mentioned that I spent several years at AT&T. When I showed up there, once again, everyone seemed smarter. They seemed more confident, better prepared, better equipped to do their jobs than I was.
But slowly, you win some battles. You prove yourself with your work. You fail, and you survive. You learn. Maybe you even lead. And that fear diminishes a little bit. Lo and behold, you’ve knocked a couple hundred pages off your personal Great Work. You‘ve begun the distillation process. You’re beginning to define your life.
But once you realize that you do have a place among your peers, a new fear starts to creep in. You wake up one morning and think: Wait a second: Am I living my own life, or someone else‘s? Are the pages left in my story, mine to write?
For those of you choosing paths that are well-defined, paths that very neatly match others’ expectations of you , my gut tells me that you are probably among the most fearful today.
Why do I say that? Because that was me on graduation day. I was on my way to law school, and quaking in my boots.
I was going, not because it was a lifelong dream, or because I imagined I could change the world, but because I thought it was expected of me. I thoughtI owed it to my family, especially my father a Stanford law professor, a Duke law school dean, a 9th circuit Federal judge , not because he‘d ever said so, but because I’d assumed it to be true.
So off I went to law school in the fall. And from the start, it left me cold. I barely slept those first three months. I had a blinding headache every day. And I can tell you exactly which shower tile I was staring at in my parent‘s bathroom when I came home for a weekend and it hit me like a bolt of lightning: It’s my life. I can do what I want.
It was an epiphany for me. In that instant, the headaches literally disappeared. I got out of the shower. And I walked downstairs and said,“I quit.”It was tough. But with that one decision, I cleared out about 500 extraneous pages of my personal Great Work.
The French writer Camus once said,“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”And yet, we often are. I had convinced myself that my parents‘ pride and my analytic mind and my Stanford humanities degree were enough to quell the fear. But they were not enough to make me happy.
It’s true that after law school I never looked back, but I still didn‘t know where to look, either. The important thing was, I was now in control. The only expectations I had to live up to were my own.
So I went and got a job. It was with Marcus & Millichap, a real estate investment brokerage on Hanover Street, across Page Mill Road from Hewlett- Packard’s headquarters. It‘s still there.
I had a title: it was not“VP”, it was“Receptionist”. I answered the phones. I typed. I filed. My parents were, understandably, quite concerned. This wasn’t exactly what they‘d hoped for, for their Stanford graduate.
But I paid the rent. And I learned from that work: I learned how people at the lowest levels of an organization can get treated and how much of a difference they can make. I discovered that there are lessons to be learned ineverything-if you choose to learn them.
One day, a couple of brokers there decided not to be put off by my receptionist title or the obvious stereotypes that might accompany it and asked if I wanted to try something else. I was given the opportunity to contribute at a new level by writing up deals. Because of that gesture, because someone believed I could do more, I was able to trim a few more pages out of my personal discourse.
But after a year of this I was still seeking and stumbling and restless, I felt like I needed to stretch, that I needed to change my surroundings and explore a bit. So I moved to Italy to teach English. Surprisingly, it was there that I decided business school was the next thing for me.
