Graduation Speech
by
Philip Huang

Dear Graduates, Parents, Colleagues, Ladies, and Gentlemen:

Good evening. It is my great honor to represent the faculty of HSBC Business School at Peking University to speak to you in this important ceremony. Ever since I accepted the kind invitation to speak, one question I had on my mind for quite a few days was, “what have I learned in my not‐so‐short a life that are significant
enough to share with you?” After some serious soul searching, I have summarized what I’ve learned in the following four points. The first three are quite well known so I consider them as my “literature review,” using your langrage of thesis research. The last one, as you can imagine, will by my innovation, or, my “analytical model.” So, let’s begin:

Point 1 ‐
Life is never fair: you will always find someone who gets more than you do but makes less effort than you do. However, I’ve learned that we will be much better off not just feeling upset about it but accepting it as a fact of life and moving on.

Point 2 ‐
Life is full of unexpected events. In that hit movie Forrest Gump, Forrest told the old lady sitting next to him, “My momma always said, life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you gonna get.” So, what can we do? My recommendation is simply “expect the unexpected” and try not to be overpowered by those unexpected events.

Point 3 ‐
Life can never be represented by a uniform function, a sine wave, may be. There are always ups and downs in our life. If you think about Steven Jobs, his entire life, from birth till his regrettable passing away, is composed of huge ups and downs. The more recent Cinderella style MBA basketball player, Jeremy Lin, is another example. How can we deal with our life’s ups and downs? Well, do not easily give up when everything in your life seems going against you. But, prepare yourself so when the opportunity comes, you can take full advantage of it, just like what Jeremy Lin did when he had to sleep on the sofa in his brother’s apartment in New York.

Point 4 ‐
The art of living a good life is an act of “balancing.” To show you how serious I have been about this speech, I have built an OLS model, like many of you did in your master thesis. In my regression model of “Life,” the dependent variable is the degree of happiness in our life. The right‐hand side of the equation includes, but not limited, to the following independent variables:

Variable 1 ‐
The degree of balance between work and play, I am sure you know that one well

Variable 2 ‐
The degree of balance between exercise and sleep, here exercise includes all kinds, you know what I mean

Variable 3 ‐
The degree of balance between the attention you give to your parents and the attention you give to your spouse (or future spouse, or close friend of the opposite‐sex, or close friend of the same‐sex)

After you get married, you may want to include the following two variables.

Variable 4 ‐
The degree of balance between the attention you give to your spouse and the attention you give to your friends, disregard gender

Variable 5 ‐
The degree of balance between the attention you give to your parents and the attention you give to your in‐laws (I figured this one out while watching Chinese soap opera with me wife)

Variable 6 ‐
The last but not the least serious one, is the degree of balance between receiving and giving that includes resources, helps, attentions, and love given to you by
your family, friends, colleagues, and society and those received by them from you

If we actually collect reliable data and run the regression, I am sure many, if not all, of those explanatory variables will be significant at the .0001 level and the R2 should be at least 0.92. Although those variables might not be all orthogonal and thus giving us the problem of Multicollinearity. But I leave that problem to our young but brilliant professors sitting over there to tackle.

My father once said to me when I was a little kid, “Son, you got to listen to me, because I’ve eaten more salt than you have eaten rice; and I’ve walked cross more bridges than you’ve walked on roads.” Since I did not literarily believe him, sorry Dad, I won’t say the same to you. However, I do hope you can move beyond my recommended OLS model and construct a math programming model that will maximize the degree of happiness in your life by finding the right balances. By the end, you should gladly agree with the title of that award winning Italian film and shout out, “Life is Beautiful!” With that, I congratulate each one of you and wish you “鵬程萬里!” or “soaring high in the sky like an eagle and flying 10,000 miles!” Thank you and god bless.