CARLY FIORINA
STANFORD UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 17, 2001
"THE PROCESS OF DISTILLATION: GETTING TO THE ESSENCE OF THINGS"

© Copyright 2001 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P
All rights reserved. Do not use without written permission from HP.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
I'd like to echo President Hennessy in welcoming the parents and family and friends with us today and in extending Happy Father's Day wishes to the fathers and father figures among us, in person and in spirit. My own dad is in the audience this morning - Dad, Happy Father's Day.

But much as we love you, dads, today is not about you. Today we gather to celebrate the accomplishments of this starry-eyed - OK, maybe it's dazed-looking - crowd of people sitting before us, adorned in black gowns and various other accoutrements...

To the Stanford class of 2001 - the graduate students and the undergraduates - I'm honored to be among the first to congratulate you on completing your years at Stanford. I can guarantee your parents are extremely proud at this moment, proud of your accomplishments, if not your "wacky walk." Today they're literally beaming, with a little bit of relief and lots of tenderness.

From the looks of it, one of you is wearing the same rented cap and gown I wore 25 years ago in Frost Amphitheater, where they used to hold the graduation ceremony. This one I'm wearing today is decidedly heavier, but it's giving me flashbacks nevertheless.

These past few weeks, I've been wondering what wisdom I might impart from this podium after 25 post-Stanford years. The most earnest advice I received came from the undergraduate senior class presidents a couple of weeks ago: from Delphine and Brandon and Michael and Lauren. They said, "Make it personal. Tell us what it was like for you to leave this place. Tell us it'll be OK."

I took their request to heart. And I let my guidance for this speech come from memories of how I felt graduating from Stanford as a 21 year old and how those early years of seeking and stumbling shaped the experiences I've had these past 25 years.

So, one day after work a few weeks ago, I drove around campus, to rekindle memories. When I was in school, campus life was quite different from what you've experienced - to say nothing of the world beyond the Farm.


I drove by the old "Theta Xi" house. In the 70s, that was the frat for the band guys. I was made an honorary member because I had a man's name, and could survive an initiation ceremony that involved a stein of vodka and an iron stomach … but we won't go into that.

The parents out there might remember this: In the mid-70s, our men's basketball team was less than championship material - we ranked somewhere in the middle of the Pac-Eight, and the women's team had just been formed …

Musically speaking, Tower of Power was big. Peter Frampton had just "come alive." And the "techies" were the ones using their Marantz stereos to copy their albums onto cassette tapes.

While I was here, the Stanford Indians were renamed the Stanford Cardinal … although my buddies in the band were campaigning for the "Robber Barons" as a mascot. The administration was not amused.

While I was here, Patty Hearst was kidnapped, right across the Bay in Berkeley.

And while much was different about my time here, some things are similar: We were in the throes of an energy crisis. In fact, the speaker at my commencement spoke on energy conservation. "Stagflation" confounded the market. Employment prospects for graduating seniors were, let's face it, rather grim.
While you are not faced with stagflation exactly, your expectations of the job market have no doubt been flattened since you entered Stanford.

After all, Palm Drive was paved with job offers for the classes before yours. If you were a floundering Medieval History major, and you were interested in participating in what you thought might be the latest California Gold Rush, you might have shocked your parents by landing a dot-com job with a VP title and stock options.

But here you are, the Class of 2001. And times have changed.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to presume, but if Spring Quarter had you feeling anything like I did at the prospect of graduating, underneath that cap and gown (and everything else you have on your heads), your fear is as great or greater than your excitement today.

I was afraid. The truth is, I was afraid the day I walked into Stanford. And I was afraid the day I walked out.

I was scared of leaving the protective bubble of this place for places unknown, during uncertain economic times. And I was scared of squandering the incredible gift of my Stanford experience on pursuits that weren't commensurate with expectations I, and others, had of me. I was scared of not doing it all, of making irrevocable mistakes.

If you're scared today, let me ask you this: What will you do with your fear? Will you let it become a motivator, or an inhibitor?

You are the only one who can answer that. But what I can offer as guidance, and reassurance, is a story: the story of one Stanford grad's process of stumbling and searching to find a place in the world, oftentimes in the face of her fears.

I'd like to begin my story at the History Corner.

The most valuable class I took at Stanford was not Econ 51. It was a graduate seminar called, believe it or not, "Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages."

Each week, we had to read one of the great works of medieval philosophy: by Aquinas, Bacon, Abelard. These were huge texts - it seemed like we were reading 1,000 pages every week. And by the end of the week, we had to distill their philosophical discourse into two pages.

The process went something like this: First you'd shoot for 20 pages. Then you'd edit to 10. Then five. Then finally, two - a two-page, single-spaced paper that didn't merely summarize. It rendered all the fat out of a body of ideas, boiling it down to the very essence of its meaning.

And then you'd start all over again the next week, with a different massive text.

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 confident in 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 I was 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 thought I 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.