【正文】 age: moral courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone39。s not you39。s hard in a pletely different way than the hard things you39。s the Stanford or Harvard of social 39。t have to make it up yourself, you don39。sum233。s hard to get into, it39。s just bee another thing to get terms of its content, Teach for America is pletely different from Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Harvard Medical School or Berkeley Law, but in terms of its place within the structure of elite expectations, of elite choices, it is exactly the 39。re offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another can turn around and walk you walk into college, you are offered a choice among law and medicine and investment banking and consulting and a few other things, but again, you can also do something else, something that no one has thought of me give you another wrote an essay a couple of years ago that touched on some of these same said, among other things, that kids at places like Yale or Stanford tend to play it safe and go for the conventional one of the most mon criticisms I got went like this: What about Teach for America? Lots of kids from elite colleges go and do TFA after they graduate, so therefore I was , TFA—I heard that over and over Teach for America is undoubtedly a very good to cite TFA in response to my argument is precisely to miss the point, and to miss it in a way that actually confirms what I39。ve been simply accepting the choices you39。s about inventing your own following a path, but making your own kind of imagination I39。m here to talk about a different 39。s just successful, and successful according to a very narrow definition of innovation means using your imagination, exercising the capacity to envision new I39。t realize—and it was really quite a shock to her when I suggested it—is that there is a third selfesteem, I proposed, means not caring whether you get an A in the first selfesteem means recognizing, despite everything that your upbringing has trained you to believe about yourself, that the grades you get—and the awards, and the test scores, and the trophies, and the acceptance letters—are not what defines who you also claimed, this young woman, that Harvard students take their sense of selfefficacy out into the world and bee, as she put it, “innovative.” But when I asked her what she meant by innovative, the only example she could e up with was “being CEO of a Fortune 500.” That39。s nothing wrong with thinking that you got an A because you39。t occurred to couple of years ago, I participated in a panel discussion at Harvard that dealt with some of these same matters, and afterward I was contacted by one of the students who had e to the event, a young woman who was writing her senior thesis about Harvard itself, how it instills in its students what she called selfefficacy, the sense that you can do anything you , or, in more familiar terms, are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, “I got it because it was easy.” And there are other kids, the kind with selfefficacy or selfesteem, who get an A on a test and say, “I got it because I39。s called having a midlife crisis, and it happens to people all the is an alternative, however, and it may be one that hasn39。s all sounds like a clich233?！癵etting into” is , then Johns Hopkins medical school, then a residency at the University of San Francisco, and so Michigan Law School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or take it one step at a time, and the next step always seems to be maybe you did always want to be a cardiac dreamed about it from the time you were 10 years old, even though you had no idea what it really meant, and you stayed on course for the entire time you were in refused to be enticed from your path by that great experience you had in AP history, or that trip you took to Costa Rica the summer after your junior year in college, or that terrific feeling you got taking care of kids when you did your rotation in pediatrics during your fourth year in medical either way, either because you went with the flow or because you set your course very early, you wake up one day, maybe 20 years later, and you wonder what happened: how you got there, what it all what it means in the “big picture,” whatever that is, but what it means to you39。s do the things that reap the rewards, that make your parents proud, and your teachers pleased, and your friends the time you started high school and maybe even junior high, your whole goal was to get into the best college you could, and so now you naturally think about your life in terms of “getting into” whatever39。s what smart kids go to medical school because it39。s easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the don39。s a smart guy, but all he talks about is money and livers.” And there39。s just that, as you get deeper and deeper into the funnel, into the tunnel, it bees increasingly difficult to remember who you once start to wonder what happened to that person who played piano and lacrosse and sat around with her friends having intense conversations about life and politics and all the things she was learning in her 19yearold who could do so many things, and was interested in so many things, has bee a 40yearold who thinks about only one 39。re learning the piano, you should also be working on the is the nature of specialization, after all, to be , the problem with specialization is that it narrows your attention to the point where all you know about and all you want to know about, and, indeed, all you can know about, is your problem with specialization is that it makes you into a cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in of course, as college freshmen, your specialization is only just the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have pleted, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many more years of college, three or four or five years of law sc