There's an important message in Michael Lewis' address to new Princeton graduates, that success is somewhat arbitrary and it would be easy for those that achieve it, like many members of his audience will, to assume they deserve it.
For all I know, you may.He says
But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.Lewis was lucky. He had supportive parents, an inspiring professor, he drifted into a job as an investment banker that give him the material for his first book Liar's Poker and one of the main theme's of his writing career; that even the 'experts', in finance or baseball (he wrote Moneyball), can't distinguish skill from luck. Back to that professor though, who inspired Lewis to write books...
...at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs... God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.That story concerns me because I wrote a dissertation at university. I even know what my tutor thought of it because it won a prize. It absorbed me. And I knew I wanted to write. But haven't written books despite a number of attempts. I find it very hard to make the kind of commitment I made then, when I was young, and had few other commitments.
Perhaps Lewis was lucky because he found his passion young, when he had time to make a career of it. Or perhaps I just haven't yet found what it is that I really want to write books about.