Congratulations, graduates! I'm grateful for a few minutes to celebrate today's success and explore with you principles of long-term success and happiness. I've discovered these principles by personal trial and error. The errors can be summarized in three words that begin with the letter P: prestige, position, and pay.
As a young man, I thought a lot about prestige, position, and pay. I was self-conscious of my paternal grandfather, a prestigious scientist, and of my father's position as the president of Ricks College and then as a General Authority. I also admired the financial affluence of my maternal grandfather, on whose California estate I grew up, in the lap of luxury.
Fortunately for me, my parents traded that luxury for the cold winters and dusty farm summers of Rexburg. Later, as a soon-to-graduate college student, I was similarly blessed by the disappointment of being denied my lifelong dream of going to the Harvard Business School, as my father did. I was devastated.
However, by a series of subtle miracles, my first full-time job took me to Boston, home of Harvard. For a time, I enjoyed the pay, positions of power, and prestige to which I had aspired as a boy.
Yet after five successful years, heaven blessed me with apparent setbacks. My professional work changed. I made progressively less money while moving from one job to another. My hairstyle also changed, dramatically. It was a period of personal trial and humiliation.
Thankfully, along the way I developed a measure of genuine humility and faith, the kind that comes only through testing. Dear family members and friends lifted me. And I was blessed with new professional causes that engaged my mind and heart, notwithstanding job titles that were hard to explain.
Looking back on these experiences, I've gratefully seen how the Lord gave me three other Ps to guide my life in the path of lasting happiness: people, places, and puzzles. I began to discover the value of people, places, and puzzles, thanks to a rare decision made when I finished school. Blessed with two job offers, both from Boston-based companies, I uncharacteristically chose the less prestigious one. During interviews with both companies on the same day, I was drawn to the smaller, less formal group and their quirky offices, which reminded me of a friendly college dormitory. I felt at home with them.
This company offered a handsome salary, and it soon promoted me into leadership positions. However, later, after I had made a substantial financial investment as a partner in the company, it had to declare bankruptcy. Following only a moment's temptation to join in a lawsuit against the company's founders, I remembered my love for them and the lasting satisfaction of solving important puzzles together. By comparison, my financial loss seemed inconsequential.
Looking back, I now see that prestige, position, and pay are subject to diminishing returns-in other words, for each additional investment made to obtain these tantalizing rewards, the lasting value received in return is less. By contrast, my investments in people, places, and puzzles seem to yield greater satisfaction the more I put into them.
And heaven seems to multiply my productivity. During five years in Massachusetts, for example, I received five Church leadership callings and, largely through home teaching, participated in more convert baptisms than I did as a full-time missionary. The people I served and the puzzles we solved together give me inexpressible love for that place.
I briefly enjoyed both these rewards and also the professional trappings of prestige, position, and pay. But in hindsight I can see the price paid by my young family and particularly by Sister Eyring. Investments in prestige, position, and pay not only yield diminishing returns; they also tend to crowd out investments in people, places, and puzzles. Priorities must be established and choices made.
As the ghost of Jacob Marley told his former business partner Ebenezer Scrooge, "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" The Savior expressed the same principle more optimistically: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."[1]
I bear testimony of that, commending to you a life of people, places, and puzzles. I also add my blessing upon you, promising lasting happiness as you seek first the kingdom of God. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Matthew 6:33