Catching Up With Campus Celebrities
Or, honoring those who came in second place
Recently, I attended the Booth School of Business’s annual management conference, which coincides with class reunions. Because I live in Chicago, it’s easy to get to and always inspiring. But I also felt wistful this year, talking to CFOs and entrepreneurs and investment bankers about my Substack project.
At the post-conference reception, I had a conversation with someone who graduated just last year. He asked me what advice I had. I told him that his life would not be at all like he thought, but it would probably be really good anyway.
He asked me what I meant.
“Am I the CEO of Morgan Stanley?” I replied. “Have I ever been the CEO of Morgan Stanley?”
And we laughed. I haven’t had the kind of success that gets written up in alumni magazines, but I’ve met some amazing people and gotten to work on cool, important projects with them. I’ve learned a ton of things, traveled to interesting places, and have a great family.
Success is a combination of talent, hard work, and luck. I have not been in the right place at the right time, but I’ve done okay. The most prominent member of my business school class went to work for his daddy’s company and took up his daddy’s political activities. That’s not a recipe that most people can follow, or even want to. For example, my father’s politics were very different from mine.
The two most prominent members of my undergraduate class at Northwestern are Joe Girardi and Stephen Colbert. My father was a big baseball fan and was never so heartbroken as when he read a profile of Girardi in the New Yorker and realized how near his eldest child had been to baseball greatness.
I didn’t know Joe Girardi, although anyone who followed Wildcat sports knew that he was a singular talent. Stephen Colbert’s story is different. He wasn’t a campus celebrity. He was a theatre geek, and those folks are a dime a dozen on the Northwestern campus. I didn’t know him, although we have some friends in common (and they think the world of him). And now, after decades of hard work, that theatre dude who waited tables with my sorority sister is a bona fide celebrity. Good for him!
But there’s the thing: Only one person whose name you might possibly recognize emerged from a business school class of 600. Two people whose names you probably do know came out of an undergraduate class of 1,500. That leaves a whole bunch of people who are running families, volunteering for non-profits, piecing together a Broadway career, and generally living their life out of the limelight. And probably a lot of us feel bad at times because we aren’t winning Oscars, running Fortune 500 companies, or getting elected to high office.
One of the hard parts about getting older is realizing that certain things will not happen. No amount of grit or drive or manifestation, talent or hard work or luck, is going to make me CEO of Morgan Stanley. But I am coming to peace with where I am in life and looking forward to what’s next.
How about you?
Getting out of college, many properly motivated always have goals and visions of grandeur. And that's a wonderful thing. You think you will change the world! And if they keep their act together, they WILL change the world. Probably not in the way they think. Psychologically, they need to be flexible. Maybe not "satisfied" or "content", but appreciative of the lives they live and the path that emerges. You meet some amazing people along the way and have great experiences no matter what.
I remember having a argument with a co-worker from a family with a very successful business. He had visions of being much bigger than just leading his family business. I was telling him that their was nothing wrong with his family business. But he was enamored with being a big wheel in corporate America. To his credit, he is now the president of Verizon. But meh, big deal.
As for Stephen Colbert, yes - if you asked any of his classmates if Stephen would be a star - they would have said no. He was an oddball. At the time, there where much more talented performers. But Stephen found his voice, found a path, and kept improving. And lucky him, that path made him a star.
Nobody from my college class got famous (though I do have a family member who went to high school with Jim Thome, the famous Cleveland Indians slugger. They dated once but did not hit it off. Such is fate).