Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks has advice in his New York Times column today
for this year’s college graduates.  Essentially it comes down to:
it is not what you do but who you are and how you do it.  He provides
examples of graduates from elite colleges who want to make a good
deal of money on Wall Street as well as the altruistic graduates who
want to work in service to others.  He suggests that we seek excellence in
whatever it is we do.  His conclusion is a doozy:

“It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and
be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero.
Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets,  more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job”.

Tony