Jimmy Stewart, as Elwood P. Dowd in the movie Harvey got it exactly right. He said, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be… ’ she always used to call me Elwood … ‘in this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’” Well, for years I was smart... I rmend pleasant. You may quote me on that.
My third piece of advice is as follows: As you begin this new stage of your lives, follow your passion. If you don’t have a passion, don’t be satisfied until you find one. Life is too short to go through it without caring deeply about something. When I was your age, I was incredibly single-minded in my goal to be a physicist. After college, I spent eight years as a graduate student and postdoc at Berkeley, and then nine years at Bell Labs. During that my time, my central focus and professional joy was physics.