Commence

Earlier in the year, as is the tradition at Carnegie Mellon, there was an open contest to be the class speaker at commencement. As someone who never identified strongly as a student qua student, I knew my submission would be a long shot. It was. But how much better to have tried and failed.

So for what it’s worth, here’s my parting message to all of you (us) graduating seniors.

Fellow members of the Class of 2009, I stand here before you to talk about a very important subject: hot dogs.

Well, not hot dogs, per se, but a story about hot dogs, which, as you might expect from a graduation speech, has very little to do with hot dogs.

This story takes place at the Vienna Sausage Company’s factory on the North Side of Chicago. In 1970, the company completed construction on this building, to replace the original plant on the South Side: a sprawling mass of inter-connected properties covering an entire city block. It had been built up incrementally over the company’s 70-year history. This new plant was designed from the ground-up to streamline the manufacturing process into a single, state-of-the-art facility.

When the plant finally opened, the first batches of the company’s signature product—their “natural-casing, old-world, hickory-smoked sausages” weren’t coming out right. They tasted fine, but they didn’t have the right snap when you bit into them. Even worse, the color was wrong. Rather than a distinctive bright red that had defined the brand for so long, these new batches were pink.

So, over the next 2 years, the Vienna Sausage Company did everything they could to figure out what was wrong. The ingredients were all the same. The process was all the same. Maybe the ovens were cooking differently? Maybe the water on the North Side of Chicago wasn’t the same as the South Side? After all this time, no one had any idea what could possibly be missing.

Then, one night, a few workers were out reminiscing on their days in the old plant, when someone mentioned Irving. Irving was the kind of guy that had been there forever. He knew everyone there; had nicknames for everyone. Listen to what he did: his job was to take racks of sausages from refrigeration to the ovens. Though this could take as long as 30 minutes, as he had to wind through the maze of hallways and buildings of the old plant to get there. He would go through the warm hanging benches for the pastrami, through the boiler-room, next to the tanks where they cooked the corned beef, sometimes even up an elevator, until he finally got to the smokehouse.

In this new plant, there was no Irving—he didn’t want to commute from the South Side to the new plant. And his long journey to the smokehouse was missing too—in this new facility, there just wasn’t any need for it. As it turns out, Irving’s trip, which gradually warmed the hot dogs before being cooked in the smokehouse: that was the secret ingredient. So secret, that not even the company itself knew it.

I originally heard this story from Ira Glass, on an old episode of a radio program called This American Life. And the reason I found it so compelling was his take on it:

“What I like about the story is the fact that these guys at the factory had done everything right. Finally built their dream factory, with the best equipment and expertise that money could buy. But you can’t think of everything”

“Sometimes, you have no idea why you were a success in the first place.”

That’s something you don’t really hear enough. All too often, we try to simplify things into easy-to-remember formulas, that either equate success as a function of how hard you work, or conversely, as a matter of blind luck.

Graduation is a big milestone in life, certainly. It’s one among many that you use to fold up your personal story into neat little episodes.

It’s that interface where one chapter wraps-up and another begins. Where our only choice is whether to reflect back or plan ahead.

I ask you today, to consider your own messy factory that you’ve unwittingly built-up over the last 20-some years. At milestones such as this, there is a tendency to want to reinvent yourself; to move across town, into a brand-new facility with everything meticulously designed to absolute perfection. And there’s no way to stop this—it’s human nature. Really, there’s no reason to either: sometimes it’s worth thinking about starting fresh with a clean slate. In fact, probably most of us will do just this to varying degrees, as we move across this country, and around the world, where our new identities await us. But as you stand there, with your clean slate in hand, ready to build “the perfect you”, remember this:

“Sometimes, you have no idea why you were a success in the first place.”

Look deep inside yourself, and you might begin to see where Irving is. He might be in that random elective you took on a whim that turned you onto something completely new and different. He might be in your renewed sense of hygiene after you transferred out of Computer Science. He might be in a very special person you met when you least expected it, who completely changed your life.

I ask you today, to look deep inside yourself, on every level, with the resolve to know yourself as well as you possibly can.

With luck, you may meet a fellow named Irving, who just so happens to be the very reason why you’re here today, graduating from Carnegie Mellon University.