The last lecture (13 page)

A
POLOGIES ARE
not pass/fail. I always told my students: When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn’t cut it.

Halfhearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting. If you’ve done something wrong in your dealings with another person, it’s as if there’s an infection in your relationship. A good apology is like an antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.

Working in groups was crucial in my classes, and friction between students was unavoidable. Some students wouldn’t pull their load. Others were so full of themselves that they’d belittle their partners. By mid-semester, apologies were
always
in order. When students wouldn’t do it, everything would spin out of control. So I’d often give classes my little routine about apologies.

I’d start by describing the two classic bad apologies:

• 1) “I’m sorry you feel hurt by what I’ve done.” (This is an attempt at an emotional salve, but it’s obvious you don’t want to put any medicine in the wound.)
  
• 2) “I apologize for what I did, but you also need to apologize to me for what you’ve done.” (That’s not giving an apology. That’s asking for one.)
  

Proper apologies have three parts:

• 1) What I did was wrong.
  
• 2) I feel badly that I hurt you.
  
• 3) How do I make this better?
  

Yes, some people may take advantage of you when answering question three. But most people will be genuinely appreciative of your make-good efforts. They may tell you how to make it better in some small, easy way. And often, they’ll work harder to help make things better themselves.

Students would say to me: “What if I apologize and the other person doesn’t apologize back?” I’d tell them: “That’s not something you can control, so don’t let it eat at you.”

If other people owe you an apology, and your words of apology to them are proper and heartfelt, you still may not hear from them for a while. After all, what are the odds that they get to the right emotional place to apologize at the exact moment you do? So just be patient. Many times in my career, I saw students apologize, and then several days later, their teammates came around. Your patience will be both appreciated and rewarded.

I
F I
could only give three words of advice, they would be “tell the truth.” If I got three more words, I’d add: “All the time.” My parents taught me that “you’re only as good as your word,” and there’s no better way to say it.

Honesty is not only morally right, it’s also efficient. In a culture where everyone tells the truth, you can save a lot of time double-checking. When I taught at the University of Virginia, I
loved
the honor code. If a student was sick and needed a makeup exam, I didn’t need to create a new one. The student just “pledged” that he hadn’t talked to anybody about the exam, and I gave the old one.

People lie for lots of reasons, often because it seems like a way to get what they want with less effort. But like many short-term strategies, it’s ineffective long-term. You run into people again later, and they remember you lied to them. And they tell lots of other people about it. That’s what amazes me about lying. Most people who have told a lie think they got away with it…when in fact, they didn’t.

P
EOPLE WHO
know me sometimes complain that I see things in black or white.

In fact, one of my colleagues would tell people: “Go to Randy if you want black-and-white advice. But if you want gray advice, he’s not the guy.”

OK. I stand guilty as charged, especially when I was younger. I used to say that my crayon box had only two colors in it: black and white. I guess that’s why I love computer science, because most everything is true or false.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve learned to appreciate that a good crayon box might have more than two colors. But I still think that if you run your life the right way, you’ll wear out the black and the white before the more nuanced colors.

In any case, whatever the color, I love crayons.

At my last lecture, I had brought along several hundred of them. I wanted everyone to get one when they walked into the lecture hall, but in the confusion, I forgot to have the folks at the door pass them out. Too bad. My plan was this: As I spoke about childhood dreams, I’d ask everyone to close their eyes and rub their crayons in their fingers—to feel the texture, the paper, the wax. Then I’d have them bring their crayons up to their noses and take a good long whiff. Smelling a crayon takes you right back to childhood, doesn’t it?

I once saw a colleague do a similar crayon routine with a group of people, and it had inspired me. In fact, since then, I’ve often carried a crayon in my shirt pocket. When I need to go back in time, I put it under my nose and I take another hit.

I’m partial to the black crayon and the white crayon, but that’s just me. Any color has the same potency. Breathe it in. You’ll see.

W
HEN I
was twelve years old and my sister was fourteen, our family went to Disney World in Orlando. Our parents figured we were just old enough to roam a bit around the park without being monitored. In those days before cell phones, Mom and Dad told us to be careful, picked a spot where we would meet ninety minutes later, and then they let us take off.

Think of the thrill that was! We were in the coolest place imaginable and we had the freedom to explore it on our own. We were also extremely grateful to our parents for taking us there, and for recognizing we were mature enough to be by ourselves. So we decided to thank them by pooling our allowances and getting them a present.

We went into a store and found what we considered the perfect gift: a ceramic salt and pepper shaker featuring two bears hanging off a tree, each one holding a shaker. We paid ten dollars for the gift, headed out of the store, and skipped up Main Street in search of the next attraction.

I was holding the gift, and in a horrible instant, it slipped out of my hands. The thing broke on impact. My sister and I were both in tears.

An adult guest in the park saw what happened and came over to us. “Take it back to the store,” she suggested. “I’m sure they’ll give you a new one.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “It was my fault. I dropped it. Why would the store give us another one?”

“Try anyway,” the adult said. “You never know.”

So we went back to the store…and we didn’t lie. We explained what happened. The employees in the store listened to our sad story, smiled at us…and told us we could have a new salt and pepper shaker. They even said it was
their
fault because they hadn’t wrapped the original salt and pepper shaker well enough! Their message was, “Our packaging should have been able to withstand a fall due to a twelve-year-old’s overexcitement.”

I was in shock. Not just gratitude, but disbelief. My sister and I left the store completely giddy.

When my parents learned of the incident, it
really
increased their appreciation of Disney World. In fact, that one customer-service decision over a ten-dollar salt and pepper shaker would end up earning Disney more than $100,000.

Let me explain.

Years later, as a Disney Imagineering consultant, I would sometimes end up chatting with executives pretty high up the Disney chain of command, and wherever I could I would tell them the story of the salt and pepper shaker.

I would explain how the people in that gift shop made my sister and me feel so good about Disney, and how that led my parents to appreciate the institution on a whole other level.

My parents made visits to Disney World an integral part of their volunteer work. They had a twenty-two-passenger bus they would use to drive English-as-a-second-language students from Maryland down to see the park. For more than twenty years, my dad bought tickets for dozens of kids to go to Disney World. I went on most of those trips.

All in all, since that day, my family has spent more than $100,000 at Disney World on tickets, food and souvenirs for ourselves and others.

When I tell this story to today’s Disney executives, I always end it by asking them: “If I sent a child into one of your stores with a broken salt and pepper shaker today, would your policies allow your workers to be kind enough to replace it?”

The executives squirm at the question. They know the answer: Probably not.

That’s because nowhere in their accounting system are they able to measure how a ten-dollar salt and pepper shaker might yield $100,000. And so it’s easy to envision that a child today would be out of luck, sent out of a store with empty hands.

My message is this: There is more than one way to measure profits and losses. On every level, institutions can and should have a heart.

My mom still has that $100,000 salt and pepper shaker. The day the folks at Disney World replaced it was a great day for us…and not a bad one for Disney!

I
T’S BEEN
well-documented that there is a growing sense of entitlement among young people today. I have certainly seen that in my classrooms.

So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should be hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom.

My advice has always been: “You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here’s what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.”

No one wants to hear someone say: “I’m not good at sorting mail because the job is beneath me.” No job should be beneath us. And if you can’t (or won’t) sort mail, where is the proof that you can do anything?

After our ETC students were hired by companies for internships or first jobs, we’d often ask the firms to give us feedback on how they were doing. Their bosses almost never had anything negative to say about their abilities or their technical chops. But when we did get negative feedback, it was almost always about how the new employees were too big for their britches. Or that they were already eyeing the corner offices.

When I was fifteen, I worked at an orchard hoeing strawberries, and most of my coworkers were day laborers. A couple of teachers worked there, too, earning a little extra cash for the summer. I made a comment to my dad about the job being beneath those teachers. (I guess I was implying that the job was beneath me, too.) My dad gave me the tongue-lashing of a lifetime. He believed manual labor was beneath no one. He said he’d prefer that I worked hard and became the best ditch-digger in the world rather than coasting along as a self-impressed elitist behind a desk.

I went back into that strawberry field and I still didn’t like the job. But I had heard my dad’s words. I watched my attitude and I hoed a little harder.

O
K, PROFESSOR
Boy, what can you do for us?”

That was the greeting I received from Mk Haley, a twenty-seven-year-old Imagineer who was given the job of babysitting me during my sabbatical at Disney.

I had arrived in a place where my academic credentials meant nothing. I became a traveler in a foreign land who had to find a way to come up with the local currency—fast!

For years, I’ve told my students about this experience because it’s a crucial lesson.

Although I had achieved my childhood dream of being an Imagineer, I had gone from being the top dog in my academic research lab to an odd duck in a rough-and-tumble pond. I had to figure out how my wonky ways could fit in this make-or-break creative culture.

I worked on the Aladdin virtual reality attraction then being tested at Epcot. I joined Imagineers interviewing guests about how they liked the ride. Did they get dizzy, disoriented, nauseated?

Some of my new colleagues complained that I was applying academic values that wouldn’t work in the real world. They said I was too focused on poring over data, too insistent on approaching things scientifically rather than emotionally. It was hard-core academia (me) versus hard-core entertainment (them). Finally, though, after I figured out a way to save twenty seconds per guest by loading the ride differently, I gained some street cred with those Imagineers who had their doubts about me.

The reason I tell this story is to emphasize how sensitive you need to be when crossing from one culture to another—in my students’ cases, from school to their first job.

As it turned out, at the end of my sabbatical, Imagineering offered me a full-time job. After much agonizing, I turned it down. The call of teaching was too strong. But because I’d figured out how to navigate in both academia and the entertainment industry, Disney found a way to keep me involved. I became a once-a-week consultant to Imagineering, which I did happily for ten years.

If you can find your footing between two cultures, sometimes you can have the best of both worlds.

W
HEN I
was a senior in high school, I applied to Brown University and didn’t get in. I was on the wait list. I called the admissions office until they eventually decided they might as well accept me. They saw how badly I wanted in. Tenacity got me over the brick wall.

When it was time to graduate from Brown, it never occurred to me in a million years to go to graduate school. People in my family got an education and then got jobs. They didn’t keep getting an education.

But Andy van Dam, my “Dutch uncle” and mentor at Brown, advised me, “Get yourself a PhD. Be a professor.”

“Why should I do that?” I asked him.

And he said: “Because you’re such a good salesman, and if you go work for a company, they’re going to use you as a salesman. If you’re going to be a salesman, you might as well be selling something worthwhile, like education.”

I am forever grateful for that advice.

Andy told me to apply to Carnegie Mellon, where he had sent a long string of his best students. “You’ll get in, no problem,” he said. He wrote me a letter of recommendation.

The Carnegie Mellon faculty read his glowing letter. They saw my reasonable grades and my lackluster graduate-exam scores. They reviewed my application.

And they rejected me.

I was accepted into other PhD programs, but Carnegie Mellon didn’t want me. So I went into Andy’s office and dropped the rejection letter on his desk. “I want you to know how much Carnegie Mellon values your recommendations,” I said.

Within seconds of the letter hitting his desk, he picked up the phone. “I’ll fix this. I’ll get you in,” he said.

But I stopped him. “I don’t want to do it that way,” I told him.

So we made a deal. I would check out the schools that accepted me. If I didn’t feel comfortable at any of them, I’d come back to him and we’d talk.

The other schools ended up being such a bad fit that I soon found myself returning to Andy. I told him I had decided to skip graduate school and get a job.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You’ve got to get your PhD, and you’ve got to go to Carnegie Mellon.”

He picked up the phone and called Nico Habermann, the head of Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, who also happened to be Dutch. They talked about me in Dutch for a while, and then Andy hung up and told me: “Be in his office at 8 a.m. tomorrow.”

Nico was a presence: an old-school, European-style academic. It was clear our meeting was only happening as a favor to his friend Andy. He asked me why he should be reconsidering my application, given that the department had already evaluated me. Speaking carefully, I said, “Since the time that I was reviewed, I won a full fellowship from the Office of Naval Research.” Nico replied gravely, “Having money isn’t part of our admissions criteria; we fund our students out of research grants.” And then he stared at me. More precisely, he stared
through
me.

There are a few key moments in anyone’s life. A person is fortunate if he can tell in hindsight when they happened. I knew in the moment that I was in one. With all the deference my young, arrogant self could muster, I said “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply it was about the money. It’s just that they only awarded fifteen of these fellowships nationwide, so I thought it an honor that would be relevant, and I apologize if that was presumptuous of me.”

It was the only answer I had, but it was the truth. Very, very slowly, Nico’s frozen visage thawed and we talked for a few minutes more.

After meeting with several other faculty, I ended up being accepted by Carnegie Mellon, and I got my PhD. It was a brick wall surmounted with a huge boost from a mentor and some sincere groveling.

Until I got on stage at my last lecture, I had never told students or colleagues at Carnegie Mellon that I had been rejected when I applied there. What was I afraid of? That they’d all think I wasn’t smart enough to be in their company? That they’d take me less seriously?

It’s interesting, the secrets you decide to reveal at the end of your life.

I should have been telling that story for years, because the moral is: If you want something bad enough, never give up (and take a boost when offered).

Brick walls are there for a reason. And once you get over them—even if someone has practically had to throw you over—it can be helpful to others to tell them how you did it.