10 years of Wharton

Speech: ‘We have a Standard’

Alfonso Aguilar-Alvarez Castro

If in “living better than just surviving”, I find more of a guide than a dilemma, and if as I seize the day (carpe diem) I see myself as a character in the written history of mankind, the subjects of my dreams will pave the way of a future of heaven on earth… stimulated by the Wharton experience.

Friends:

I remember the first clash between my limitations and the written cumulus of 2 or 3 thousand years of human knowledge. I called it Zeus in my subconscious, and it resembled the biggest dam I had ever seen.

Having gone through the cultural and language shock of living in another country, I was preparing for finals in Microeconomics and Management of People at work that were held on the same day. For the first time in my life the amount of papers I had to read clearly exceeded my capacity to assimilate information…

So many pre-conceived ideas were shaken! So many certainties were being questioned! So many of my limitations emerged! It was definitely a time of anguish and humbleness, but also time for a challenge and change in all the parameters that had governed my life up to then… I would now have to measure myself to the standards of something impossible to reconstruct or re-invent and yet so big that I knew that it was always going to be there to keep me from losing perspective.

For the exam the only things I could trust were my limited thinking capacity, my instinct to determine what was important, my educated guesses…and the goodwill of the professor.

Comfort was found as in the saying “ the anguish of many, relief of the fool” and in that the satisfaction of primary needs reminded me that I was alive…

Contrary to Harvard and Stanford, where the anguish is mitigated in the certainty of group processes, our experience sometimes induced responses centered in a better knowledge of oneself that fostered the artist in each one of us to be more than a simple leader. It dared us to be more Goethe or Galileo, Copernicus or Da Vinci than Jack Welch or Bill Gates, even though we gave the latter formal recognition…

The first sweatshirt I bought reflected it perfectly: ‘Wharton, the fine art of business’

Today, when I questioned myself why had I come to this reunion, and I doubted…many answers came to my head:

Maybe only to break the political correctness of Rich Pirrotta in this ceremony, or to prove that life treats singles better.

Probably I was searching for the feeling of acceptance and comfort that the live memories of people and places can give…

Or to look for the support and help of others who understand me, to overcome the frustrations that going through the hazards of others’ fears (namely the establishment or certain groups) present when they erect barriers to accept me or to let me accomplish my next goal.

Or the need of a job and money…

Or to regain a sense of only ideological belonging to a group that once made me feel successful, a winner and that made me believe that triumph’s elements were and could be handy always… and that privilege and power were a given…

Or to look for truly, everyday good friends or partners in business and work that will motivate each other to build a world close to what I want it to be.

Or maybe to prove others’ standards have also decreased, and shared projects and dreams were, and, after 10 years will continue to be sterile…

Or only to brag that I’ve succeeded with the rules of the establishment and I’ve fulfilled my parents’ expectations, even though I sometimes use pretexts such as this reunion, to escape from the unbearable roles a spouse sets.

Or to renew my confidence to live up to what I once pursued…

All these totally legitimate answers to search for when in the context of feeling part of a real community… and yet only doubts…

Today, Zeus’s shadow is not over my head everyday, but it gazes every time arrogance shows up …

Today, when I realize life is something given: recognition, pleasure, satisfying needs such as hunger, thirst, comfort and fun, are everyday and everybody’s. When I realize that it is only in relationships with others and with nature that something transcendent, outstanding and creative can be accomplished, and that in the challenge to be certain that history will remember me as somebody who left this world a better place I can only trust my instincts, my mind, my hierarchy of values …and God instead of the teacher.

I remember classes in Wharton where, with the pressure of participating, nobody spoke unless they had something important, creative and interesting to say that reflected the needed theoretical basis as a minimum and Zeus as a parameter…

Today, when I question myself if I should live and be the best I can or only survive; I remember those non-written rules of participation in class and conclude without any doubt: Wharton is not ‘the fine art of business’, but ‘the fine art of living’.

I hope that you do too.