The Size of Ideas (Stella Adler transcript)

Are Your Choices Feeding Into The Theme?

Good morning, sir,

I think you’ve got a handle on the difficult mine fields of Nathan. I always worry that an opening line like “Do we have to wake up to murder every morning?” is a writer’s cleverness and could be a missed opportunity for both the character and the relationship to the wife. I think “Shouldn’t we be playing Mozart?” could come from rubbing her pregnant stomach. Apparently it’s better for an unborn baby to listen to classical music than a murder podcast.

However, that’s not why I’m disturbing your Monday morning. I’m really just wandering around with this idea at the moment, but …

Many years ago I attended a lecture that Arthur Miller was giving to some playwrighting students. He said something that stuck with me in my work with actors: “You may not know what your theme is when you start, but once you figure it out, type it on a piece of paper, tape it to your typewriter and make sure everything you write feeds into it.” I loved that mostly because it encouraged the process of discovery. You don’t have to know everything when you start.

Last night I was watching a documentary on Robert Caro and he was talking about his four-volume [hopefully, soon to be five volume] biography of LBJ. As part of his research he and his wife moved to the hill country of Texas for three years to soak in LBJ’s childhood. He made a startling discovery about Lyndon Johnson and once he finally sat down to write, he put a card on the lamp by his typewriter, which read, “Is there desperation on this page?”

I really liked that. I’m not quite sure how we use it as actors, but I think it’s a really good idea; once we’ve figured out what’s going on with our guy … to make sure all of our choices feed into this. In one of his diaries, Kazan mentions that all actor work has to be translated into behavior. Forgive the paraphrasing of what you talked about, but I think that Nathan’s holding on for dear life explains his behavior.

This is what woke me up this morning, so I thought I’d send it on to you.

We’ll speak,

Milton

Commencement Speeches

Exercise: Choose a Commencement Speech here, and talk it out in your own words.

The purpose of this exercise is to understand the sequence of thoughts, to have a different relationship with each thought and perhaps most importantly, to embody the BIG IDEA of the speech.

1. Anna Quindlen • Writer • Grinnell College

Your parents, proudly here today, and their parents before them, perhaps proudly here today, understood

a simple equation for success: your children would do better than you had. Ditch digger to cop to

lawyer to judge.

We’re now supposed to apologize to you because it seems that that’s no longer how it works, that you

won’t inherit the S.U.V., which was way too big, or the McMansion that was way too big, or the corner

office that was way too big.

But I suggest that this is a moment to consider what “doing better” really means. If you are part of the

first generation of Americans who genuinely see race and ethnicity as attributes, not stereotypes, will

you not have done better than we did? If you are part of the first generation of Americans with a clear

understanding that gay men and lesbians are entitled to be full citizens of this country with all its rights,

will you not have done better than we did? If you are part of the first generation of Americans who

assume women merit full equality instead of grudging acceptance, will you not have done better than

we did?

2. Joseph J. Plumeri • Chief executive, Willis Group Holdings • College of William & Mary

There’s this big building in Chicago called the Sears Tower. You heard of it? It’s the tallest building in

the Western Hemisphere.

I told people I’m going to rename it the Willis Tower. They said to me: “You can’t do that. It’s

impossible. That name has been on there since 1973. Who are you to come along and change the

name?” I said that Sears hadn’t been in the building since 1993; why not? I met with the owner of the

building, which was 20 percent vacant, and I said I need 2 percent of the space. I negotiated $14.50 a

square foot. And he says to me, “Do we have deal?” I said, “Not exactly.” He said, “What do you want

now?”

I said that the problem with the Sears Tower is the name. It’s a jinx. I said you need a new name, a

vibrant name, a name that signifies the future, not the past. … When we dedicated that building, I was

on the evening news with Brian Williams and he said to me, “How, Joe, after so many years it was

called the Sears Tower, how did you get them to change the name to Willis?” And I looked into the

camera and I said, “I asked.”

3. Samantha Power • National Security Council • Occidental College

You’ve got to be all in. This means leaving your technology behind occasionally and listening to a

friend without half of your brain being preoccupied by its inner longing for the red light on the

BlackBerry.

In many college classes, laptops depict split screens — notes from a class, and then a range of parallel

stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on

Facebook. I know how good you all are at multitasking. And I know of what I speak, because I, too, am

a culprit. You have never seen a U.S. government official and new mother so dexterous in her ability

simultaneously to BlackBerry and breastfeed.

But I promise you that over time this doesn’t cut it. Something or someone loses out. No more than a

surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You

actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do. We should all become, as Henry

James prescribed, a person “on whom nothing is lost.”

4. Steve Blank • Technology entrepreneur • Philadelphia University

I reached what I then thought was the pinnacle of my career when I raised tens of millions of dollars

and became C.E.O. of my seventh start-up, a hot new video game company. My picture was in all the

business magazines, and I had made it onto the cover of Wired magazine. Life was perfect.

And then one day it wasn’t. It all came tumbling down. We believed our own press, inhaled our own

fumes and headed up a company that made lousy games. Customers voted with their wallets and didn’t

buy our products. The company went out of business. In the end it was due to my own hubris — the

evil twin of entrepreneurial passion and drive. I thought my career and life were over.

But I learned that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience. All of you will fail at some

time in your career, or in love or in life. No one ever sets out to fail. But being afraid to fail means

you’ll be afraid to try.

5. Sheryl Sandberg • Chief operating officer, Facebook • Barnard College

Women almost never make one decision to leave the work force. It doesn’t happen that way. They

make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of

med school when they say, “I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want

more balance one day.” Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, “I’m not even sure I

should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.” These women don’t even

have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have.

And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back.

So, my heartfelt message to all of you is, and start thinking about this now, do not leave before you

leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have

to make a decision, and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even

have a decision to make.

6. Toni Morrison • Nobel Prize-winning novelist • Rutgers University

I have often wished that Jefferson had not used that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as the third right

— although I understand in the first draft it was “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Of course, I

would have been one of those properties one had the right to pursue, so I suppose happiness is an

ethical improvement over a life devoted to the acquisition of land, acquisition of resources, acquisition

of slaves.

Still, I would rather he had written “life, liberty and the pursuit of meaningfulness” or “integrity” or

“truth.” I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, goal of your labors here. I know that it

informs your choice of companions, the profession you will enter. But I urge you, please don’t settle for

happiness. It’s not good enough.

Personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice, that’s more

than a barren life; it is a trivial one. It’s looking good instead of doing good.

7. Chris Waddell • Champion paralympic skier • Middlebury College

A couple of years ago, I spent a bunch of time in Tibet and I came home. And I went to go get my mail.

My mailbox is at the end of my street, so I parked my car and started pulling my chair out. And this

little girl rode by, probably like 6 years old, on her little pink bike, streamers coming off her handlebars,

and she said, “What happened to your legs?”

I said: “I was a ski racer here at Middlebury, and it was my first day of Christmas vacation. I went to

the mountain with my brother, met up with a bunch of friends, took a couple of runs preparing to train,

and my ski popped off in the middle of the turn. And I fell in the middle of the trail, and I broke two

vertebrae.”

She said, “So you’ll never walk again?” And I said, “No, probably not.” As she rode away, she said,

“That’s too bad.”

I wish that I had stopped her because if I’d never had my accident I never would have been the best in

the world at anything. I wouldn’t have turned a hobby into a profession. I don’t think I would have had

the guts to get up in front of you and talk. Wouldn’t have acted in a soap opera. I wouldn’t have met

presidents and heads of state.

But that little girl saw the tragedy; she didn’t see the potential gift.

8. Richard Costolo • CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF TWITTER • of Michigan

“None of us at Twitter thought during the earthquake and ensuing tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, that

our service would be a great alternative communication platform if the mobile networks in Japan were

spotty in the aftermath. And certainly none of us even hoped, let alone considered, that our platform

would be one of those used to organize protests across the Middle East, in Tunisia and Egypt during the

Arab Spring.

Here’s the amazing thing about what I’ve observed when I’ve witnessed all those things. Not only can

you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it even while you’re having it.

…

From here on out, you have to switch gears. You’re no longer meeting and exceeding expectations.

There are no expectations. There’s no script. When you’re doing what you love to do, you become

resilient, because that’s the habit you create for yourself. You create a habit of taking chances on

yourself and making bold choices in service to doing what you love.

If, on the other hand, you do what’s expected of you, or what you’re supposed to do, and things go poor

or chaos ensues — as it surely will — you will look to external sources for what to do next, because

that will be the habit you’ve created for yourself. You’ll be standing there, frozen, on the stage of your

own life.”

9. Terrence McNally • PLAYWRIGHT • Columbia College

“My parents were aghast. They had been told Columbia was a hotbed of communism. To me, that was a

selling point. It was 1956, and I was in full James Dean rebellion mode in Corpus Christi, Tex. …

Freshman orientation week, my adviser told me that he expected my time at Columbia to be brief. He

thought my Texas public schools background had ill prepared me for the rigors of a Columbia

education and that I had only been given a scholarship in a, he thought, misguided effort on the

college’s part to attract a more diverse student body and mitigate Columbia’s reputation as the Jewish

commuter college in the Ivy League. …

We here today are so overprivileged it hurts. If we don’t take advantage of the opportunity we have

been given, we are true fools — and callous ones at that. Columbia is a gift. It’s so easy to matter, to

make a difference. It’s even easier not to do either. But then we have failed ourselves and this

institution.”

10. Oprah Winfrey • ENTREPRENEUR • Harvard University

“If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher, higher, the law of averages — not to mention the myth of

Icarus — predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to know this,

remember this: There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another

direction.

Now, when you’re down there in the hole, it looks like failure. So this past year I had to spoon-feed

those words to myself. And when you’re down in the hole, when that moment comes, it’s really O.K. to

feel bad for a little while. Give yourself time to mourn what you think you may have lost, but then

here’s the key: Learn from every mistake because every experience, encounter and particularly your

mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are. And then figure out what is

the next right move. And the key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional GPS that can tell you

which way to go.”

11. Cory A. Booker • MAYOR OF NEWARK • Yale University

“There was a group of kids that used to hang in the lobby of my building. … One in particular, he

reminded me of my dad. He had that quick wit, that great swagger. …

One month into my time as mayor, I got another call for a shooting. It was on Court Street in our city,

and I go down there and I do the same thing. I’m going to people, telling them about our plans, telling

them that we had to pull together, that we were going to fight through this crime, that we were going to

drive down the violence. I barely paid attention to the dead body on the sidewalk and another one being

rolled into an ambulance.

After that night of being important, of being mayor of New Jersey’s biggest city, I went back to my

home in the high-rises of Brick Towers. I sat there with my BlackBerry reviewing the incident reports

of the day, and then it came to that shooting on Court Street. And I looked at that BlackBerry, and I saw

the name of the murder victim. It was the kid from my lobby. It was the young man who was my father.

It was this smart and charismatic young man who God had put in front of me every single day.

I looked at my BlackBerry praying that the name would somehow change, praying that it was a mistake

or maybe not the same young man, but it was him. … How could we all crowd a funeral home for his

death? Where were we for his life? God had put him right in front of my face, but I was charging off, to

do important things. I could not see what was right in front of me.”

12. Chris Hughes • CO-FOUNDER OF FACEBOOK AND OWNER OF THE NEW

REPUBLIC • Georgia State University

“All too often, those big ideas run up against the challenge of the everyday: in particular, how to find

work that pays the bills. A lot of the time, meaningful work becomes necessary work, and passions are

forced to fade. The easy part is knowing that you should follow your heart and do something important;

the hard part is coping with the world as it is today at the same time as you invent how it should be in

the future.

But inventing the future — in spite of the greatest recession since the Great Depression — is exactly

what our generation does. If there’s any core attribute that connects you to me to everyone else of our

age, it’s this conviction that we do not have to take the world as it is; in fact, it’s up to us to make it

what it should be. …

If there’s one thing you do after graduating today, create some habit that makes it easier for you to get

out of your bubble. Follow someone you disagree with on Twitter. Buy a subscription to a newspaper or

a magazine that will tell you the most important news of the day. Install an app on your phone that

doesn’t just filter the news by your social network, but by what you need to read. Not only will these

habits make you a better citizen, they’ll make you a more interesting husband or wife, and certainly a

more informed job applicant.”

13. Melinda Gates • PHILANTHROPIST • Duke University

“Of course, all the hype about how connected you are has contributed to a counternarrative — that, in

fact, your generation is increasingly disconnected from the things that matter. The arguments go

something like this: Instead of spending time with friends, you spend it alone, collecting friend

requests. Rather than savoring your food, you take pictures of it and post them on Facebook.

I want to encourage you to reject the cynics who say technology is flattening your experience of the

world. …

Technology is just a tool. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s just a tool. Deep human connection is very

different. It’s not a tool. It’s not a means to an end. It is the end — the purpose and the result of a

meaningful life — and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity and humanity. …

I want you to connect because I believe it will inspire you to do something, to make a difference in the

world. Humanity in the abstract will never inspire you in the same way as the human beings you meet.

Poverty is not going to motivate you. But people will motivate you.”

14. David Gergen • POLITICAL COMMENTATOR • Gettysburg College

“We need your leadership in transforming a public school system where less than half acquire a college

or vocational degree and the rest are left behind. We need your help in rebuilding a middle class in this

country so that people can find jobs, feed their families and look after themselves without asking for

outside help.

We need your help in closing the yawning gaps in inequality so that your lot in life is not determined by

what you inherit but by what you earn. We need you to change our culture so that we no longer accept

so many men and women having children out of wedlock — dads as well as moms must step up and

end this epidemic.

In the Civil War, the sons of affluent merchants fought alongside field hands who had left their plows.

Together, they became brothers. We must restore that sense that we are all one family — that we are in

this together. And yours is the generation that can get us there.”

15. Laura Linney • ACTRESS • Juilliard

“All of you are moving into a world ever ready to remind that you aren’t in school anymore, a world

that demands results quickly and cares very little about how you produce them. It’s true, you are not in

school anymore. But now, the school is in you. …

I wish you perspective when situations or people seem more important than they really are, and the

ability to detect those people or events who have much to offer but don’t inherently draw your

attention. In other words, charisma is not character. This is also very good dating advice.

I hope you never give anyone the power to tell anyone how to feel about your own work. That is your

responsibility alone. Critics are in a different profession than we are. Don’t look to them for your

truth.”

16. HARVARD COLLEGE • Michael R. Bloomberg, former New York City mayor and

majority owner of Bloomberg L.P.

“Intolerance of ideas, whether liberal or conservative, is antithetical to individual rights and free

societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship. There is an idea

floating around college campuses, including here at Harvard, that scholars should be funded only if

their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is

just a modern-day form of McCarthyism. Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was

attempting to repress left-wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress

conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered

species. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than here in the Ivy League. …

“Requiring scholars — and commencement speakers, for that matter — to conform to certain political

standards undermines the whole purpose of a university.”

17. SMITH COLLEGE • Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College and Brown

University

“I felt it important to answer the request to stand in for the announced speaker, Madame Christine

Lagarde. …

“One’s voice grows stronger in encounters with opposing views. My first year after leaving Smith, I

had to insist that Brown permit a speaker whose every assertion was dangerous and deeply offensive to

me on a personal level. Indeed, he maintained that blacks were better off having been enslaved.

Attending his talk and hearing his perspective was personally challenging, but not in the least

challenging to my convictions about the absolute necessity of permitting others to hear him say these

heinous things. I could have avoided the talk, as his ideas were known to me, but to have done so

would have been to choose personal comfort over a freedom whose value is so great that hearing his

unwelcome message could hardly be assessed as too great a cost. Universities have a special obligation

to protect free speech, open discourse and the value of protest. The collision of views and ideologies is

in the DNA of the academic enterprise.”

18. THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY • Steven L. Isenberg, writer,

professor and former publisher

“Some of you and your parents may have in mind a question as to the world of work and English

majors: ‘Do they need us?’ I was reading again, recently, the autobiography of one of my favorite

novelists, Graham Greene, and was struck by this sentence: ‘Perhaps, until one starts at the age of 70 to

live on borrowed time, no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education

ends and the moment arrives to find employment and bear personal responsibility for the whole future.’

I remembered when I graduated feeling a certain sense of loss at having to leave the coherence and

happiness I had built up in undergraduate life. I was unsettled by not knowing what I would do next.

The first in my family to go to college, I had small knowledge of the world’s possibilities and only

impulses of interests, rather than a settled direction. But I did know how to read and loved to do so, and

I liked to write, however much work I knew my writing needed, so I banked on those two elements for

confidence, feeling they must be a foundation for whatever was to be ahead.”

19. THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL • Atul Gawande,

doctor and writer

“Ultimately, it turns out we all have an intrinsic need to pursue purposes larger than ourselves, purposes

worth making sacrifices for. People often say, ‘Find your passion.’ But there’s more to it than that. Not

all passions are enough. Just existing for your desires feels empty and insufficient, because our desires

are fleeting and insatiable. You need a loyalty. The only way life is not meaningless is to see yourself as

part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. And that is the best part of what college has

allowed you to do. College made it easy. It gave you an automatic place in the world where you could

feel part of something greater. The supposedly ‘real world’ you are joining does not. …

“One thing I came to realize after college was that the search for purpose is really a search for a place,

not an idea. It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better

for others in your own small way. It could be a classroom where you teach, a business where you work,

a neighborhood where you live. The key is, if you find yourself in a place where you stop caring —

where your greatest concern becomes only you — get out of there.”

20. CORNELL UNIVERSITY • Ed Helms, actor and comedian

“I’m a guy whose primary connection to this venerable institution is having portrayed a rather hard-tolike

Cornell alum on the NBC television show ‘The Office.’ It’s interesting, Condoleezza Rice backed

out of speaking at Rutgers this year because students protested over her controversial role in the Iraq

war. Meanwhile, I directly embarrassed this school for eight years on national television, and no

protests. When I got the invitation to speak, I was scared to open the email because I thought it might

be a lawsuit. …

“Please, remember to be a fool. Sounds crazy — a fool is by definition a person who lacks good sense

or judgment. But I’m here to tell you that good sense and judgment are highly overrated. Wisdom is too

often just a fancy word for cynicism. And foolishness is a condescending word for joy, wonder and

curiosity. George Bernard Shaw said, ‘A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of

himself. Indeed, he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.’ I couldn’t agree

more. Turns out, the world provides us with virtually infinite opportunities to be a fool.”

21. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY • Dan Futterman, actor and writer

“I am a lucky person. Of the roughly 100 million babies born worldwide in 1967, I was lucky enough

to be born into the wealthiest country. Born to educated, healthy parents. To parents who had not only

gone to two of the great colleges in the world, but who intended, or at least hoped, for their children to

do the same. To parents who had books in their home. There’s a very good chance that many of you

come from similar backgrounds. You drew a lucky card in life. That’s not to embarrass you or to

diminish how hard you’ve worked or how much you’ve learned these past four years. That’s simply to

state a fact. Many of us — most of us — come from an exclusive club. That doesn’t mean we’re more

worthy. It means we’re more lucky. This exclusive club is only becoming more exclusive as incomes

and opportunity at the top of our society expand, and incomes and opportunity at the bottom contract.

For those of you who didn’t come from privileged backgrounds … let me tell you how much I admire

you. You have bested long odds to be here today, long odds which I never faced. But you, too, have

now entered an exclusive club, graduates of one of the great universities of the world. And with that

privilege, you have responsibility, all of you do. Do not shut the door behind you. Each of you has a

responsibility to turn around, give someone else a hand up, up the stairs and through the door.”

22. I am asking you to commit yourself today to choosing the fork of integrity… From this moment

on, commit yourself to that original vision, honor and cherish that original vision, and be faithful to it.

Yes, marry it. Get hitched. The old ball and chain… Those of you truly self-involved, singularly

brilliant artists, will have terrible trouble keeping relationships anyway, so you better marry

something…

You won't be hearing from me when they say, "If there is anyone here who knows why

these artists should not be joined to their futures, speak now or forever hold your

peace." When you receive that diploma, say "I do," and marry yourself to that original

vision… I now pronounce you artists and lives.

- B. D. Wong