Don't Count on It!

Part Six

IDEALISM AND THE NEW GENERATION

One of the great treats of my long life has been the opportunity to express my values to young men and women, almost always in an educational setting. My goal is to encourage our next generation of national leaders to understand the blessings, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship, and the foundation of idealism that undergirds a worthy life. During this recent era of decadence among so many leaders of our business, commercial, and financial enterprises, this message is especially important. Most of all, I want to assure the new generation not only that idealism still lives, but that it must play an important role in their own careers.

In one of my previous books, John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years, published in 2001, there were five chapters based on my commencement speeches. I’ve enjoyed rereading those talks that I delivered at colleges—including Princeton University, University of Delaware, and Vanderbilt University—all those years ago. But my favorite is the short talk I gave to the graduating class at Pennsylvania’s Haverford School, entitled “The Things by Which One Measures One’s Life.” (Don’t be misled by the title. My message emphasized that “things” are the wrong way to measure one’s life.)

The seven short chapters that follow continue that theme of idealism in many of the speeches that I’ve delivered during the past decade to members of the coming generation from which America’s next leaders will emerge. Chapter 25, “Business as a Calling,” was delivered to graduates of the William E. Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester in 2000. There, citing the great economists Adam Smith, Joseph Schumpeter, and John Maynard Keynes, I call on these newly minted MBAs to, among other things, “put the grandeur and dignity of our own characters first, and only then consider our own self-interest.”

The same themes resonate in Chapter 26, a talk given in May 2004 to graduates of the Smeal College of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University. Here, I focus on the many meanings of “success,” pointing out flaws in today’s system of capitalism, and urging the new graduates to focus, not on conventional measures of success, defined by wealth, fame, and power, but on the right kind of success—success that contributes value to our society. These themes reemerge in Chapter 27, “ ‘This Above All: To Thine Own Self Be True,’ ” delivered in December 2004 to a younger audience, the upper school of Episcopal Academy in Pennsylvania, where my grandson, Christopher Bogle Webb St. John, introduced me to his schoolmates.

“ ‘Enough,’ ” the title of Chapter 28, was really fun to deliver, and includes (as you’ll see) a wonderful story about what is enough in our lives. This 2007 talk was so well received by the audience of Georgetown MBAs that I decided to expand it into a short book, Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life. In its first printing in 2008, Enough made the New York Times bestseller list. In June 2010, it was republished in paperback form with some updated material, a wonderful prologue by Tom Peters (of In Search of Excellence fame), and a generous foreword by former president William Jefferson Clinton.

Chapter 29 was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem, “If.” Delivering “If You Can Trust Yourself . . .” was a special delight. Another grandson and my namesake, John C. Bogle, III, was listening as I urged an attentive audience at Roxbury Latin School in Massachusetts to “fill the unforgiving minute . . . with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.” In Chapter 30, in a 2010 commencement speech at Trinity (CT) College, I turn from Kipling to Churchill, stressing “The Fifth ‘Never’ ” in Sir Winston Churchill’s famous (if perhaps apocryphal) injunction, “Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.”

In my concluding chapter of Part Six I focus on an American giant, U.S. (and Princeton University) president Woodrow Wilson. Inspired by his essay, “When a Man Comes to Himself,” I salute the 2009 graduates of Pennsylvania’s Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades. These young men, about to enter the world of work, will have careers that render services to our society in ways that the world of trade and the world of finance do not and cannot accomplish. The old English saying on pages 551 to 552 makes this point with crystal clarity. In the final words of this chapter, I wish these promising young tradesmen “the power, the stamina, the determination, the wisdom, the spirit of sharing and building, and the passion to leave everything that you touch better than you found it, the sheer pride in a job well done.” That’s good advice, I think, for all of us.