（中英稿）迈克·刘易斯：Don'tEatFortune'sCookie.doc

2012美国普林斯顿大学毕业典礼迈克·刘易斯的演讲 Eat Fortune's Cookie"-- Michael LewisJune 3, 2012 — As Prepared I've never been up there.Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012, wherever they put you. Members of the Class of 2012. Why don't you give yourself a round of applause. So the next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black, it'll be awkward to do that.But enjoy the moment, Enjoy the moment. Thirty years ago, I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experiences. But I don't remember a word. I couldn't even tell you who spoke. And you won't be able to, either. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, maybe even a little relieved that you are getting out of here. And maybe all of you are. I was not. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they rewarded me by throwing me out. At that moment I was sure really of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a start. Even then majoring in art history was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less well prepared than you are for the marketplace. Yet somehow I've wound up rich and famous. sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one for yourself. So I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt really the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while I was working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a really gifted man, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis I wrote for him tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatelloused Greek and Roman sources, which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. Actually more than engrossed: totally obsessed. When I handed it in, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: I want to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, over in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to tellhow well written my thesis was. He didn't. So after about 45 minutes I finally said, "So. What did you think of the writing?" "Put it this way" he said. "Never try to make a living at it." And I didn't — not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a big Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the Wall Street we have all come to know and love today. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in the place to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the in-house derivatives expert. A year and a half later, Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors. Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend they were experts about money. I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis. At that point, I called up my father. I told him I was gonna quit this job that promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was this long pause on the other end of the line. "You might just want to think about that one," he said. "Why?" I asked. "You can stay at Salomon Brothers for 10 years, make your fortune, and then write your books," he said. But I didn't need to think about it. I knew what intellectual passion felt like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling. I would have felt it too risky. The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker". It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative.All of a sudden people were telling me I was a born writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, more true narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner 。