What Life Asks of Us

This article by David Brooks resonates very strongly with me (it also has the added benefit of quoting Ryne Sandberg, my favorite baseball player when I was a kid). The article juxtaposes Harvard's definition of the purpose of education (which encourages independent and skeptical thinking, and a personal entrepreneurship that focuses on individual growth) to a more institutional view (in which individuals find meaning from being part of causes, communities, or any entity "larger than one self").

An important part of my journey over the past two years has been a shift from the Harvard paradigm to the institutional paradigm. Now, I fully admit that I constantly strive to improve myself; this has forever been my nature and I assume it will continue. However, being part of certain institutions over the past two years has greatly rekindled my belief that my life's "meaning" derives in large part to my community.

At Rhodes College, I did feel like part of a bigger cause. In particular, my classes on Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Post-Colonial Literature inspired me to no end, and I saw myself following in the footsteps of these powerful movements. I also found a lot of satisfaction in my fraternity (I didn't miss ANY fraternity meeting in my four years at Rhodes) and intramural team sports (I still have great memories of our fraternity's frisbee team beating the Rhodes club team in the finals). After two years of post-college wandering and trying to find one of those organizations/causes for which I could work, I came to the Corporate Executive Board. At CEB, I drank the kook aid more than most. I was proud to be part of an organization that claimed "spirit of generosity" and "force of ideas" as their guiding principles. However, serving this mission did not speak to me as powerfully as I would have liked.

At Fuqua, I've been very lucky to have found institutions to which I want to commit:

• COLE (Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics). I am a COLE Fellow, and we are a fellowship which, in its ideal form, will continue at Fuqua for years to come.
• Education Pioneers. In a similar vein as COLE, this summer in the Bay Area we were a team committed to a cause (education reform) that's daunting and complex. Yet, the idea of working for a cause bigger than myself was a gamechanger - it motivated me, and gave me a great amount of personal satisfaction.
• Fuqua itself. Working on the student government on behalf of my classmates simply feels good to me. Like the other examples, the psychic reward I get outweighs (at least in most cases) the effort expended.

As I move forward with my career, I hope to build and sustain such institutions that give meaning to many other people. Actively striving to be part of something "bigger than myself" has been a revelation to me, and one that I hope to encourage others to do.