igures as real individuals rather than as symbols, and form a more balanced view of issues facing today’s world.
Lesson Two: Find the Good in Everything
This may sound like a bowl of “chicken soup for the soul”, but this is sometimes the most effective way out of confusion.
Many of you will be going abroad to pursue a master’s or PhD degree. Some of you will also be grappling with the questions of whether to return to China afterwards. Should I stay abroad or should I return to China? Which side is better?
Since finishing my PhD in the US, life has propelled me back and forth between China and the US, with 2 years working for McKinsey in the US, followed by 6 years in Beijing, another 3 years in the US, and now returning to China once again. I have often been asked “which side is better”? And my answer has always been: both.
Beware those rose-tinted glasses and the grass that looks greener over the fence. The human brain has a natural tendency to romanticize things or places that are farther away, while taking a bleak view of its immediate surroundings. But the reality is, there is no heaven or hell on earth, there is only the real world, no matter where you are.
Today’s China has no shortage of problems: pollution, inequality, left-behind children, the healthcare burden, anxiety in education, you name it.
The US has its problems too, including terrorism and huge social and political divides, just to name a few.
There is nothing “good” to be found in these issues per se (nobody likes pollution or terrorism), but there is plenty of “good” to be found in people who have been working tirelessly to solve these problems.
Do not be that person who points out the problems and makes smart comments. The problems are equally obvious to everyone else, and mean-spirited comments serve few beyond yourself. Be the kind of person who works to find solutions. And what’s more, pick the hard problems; the easy ones don’t need a Tsinghua graduate to solve.
This will be a journey. You won’t run into a huge, very serious problem to solve tomorrow. But keep your minds and eyes open for it, focus on where your passion lies, and find a meaningful problem to engage with. You are bound to fail sometimes, just like the rest of us. But it’s only through failure that we truly learn and improve, and you will get closer to success every time you try it.
It won’t be easy, but there’s no escaping it; at the end of the day, engaging in solutions is the only way out of confusion.
清華大學(xué)生命科學(xué)學(xué)院顏寧教授（左）、清華大學(xué)生命科學(xué)學(xué)院院長王宏偉教授（中）、李一諾（右）
Lesson Three: Be Courageous
Standing here, I recall one night in 1998, when Hongwei, your dear dean, I and a few other students left campus to watch a play. On our way back we took a minibus. Knowing this was the last one that night, after all the passengers came onboard the bus, the driver said he decided to raise the bus fare from 2 RMB to 5 RMB. The bus had about 20 passengers. This was small money, and it was late. But your dear Dean Hongwei felt it was wrong, and I happened to agree with him. So we called for passengers to boycott - that we should all refuse to pay extra. If the driver disagreed, then we shall all get off the bus.
We were hoping we could win like heroes, creating the kind of scene you see in movies. But we didn’t. Most of the passengers agreed to pay the extra and save themselves the trouble. only we, and one more person, got off the bus, and were left stranded in the middle of the night, very from campus.
So we walked, walked and walked the very long way home.
It was about as far from a heroic win as you can get, but after all these years, looking back, that night’s walk back to campus is one of the few moments from my 4 years at Tsinghua that I remember vividly, and in a way that experience has profoundly shaped who I am.
Take courage, stand up for the right thing, even when it’s very small. Yes, you’ll probably fail most of the time, but you are winning every time you make these choices.
In saying this I’m not encouraging you to simply take risks. Risk has no value for its own sake. I encourage you to have the courage to do the righ
