A Graduation Speech To Princeton Graduates

This is an excerpt from an address by one Princeton graduate to the current graduates.  Michael Lewis graduated from Princeton and he realizes how lucky and entitled he has been.  He describes a psychology experiment at Berkeley in which randomly assigned leaders determined that they deserved an larger share of the reward provided in the experiment.  They believed that their randomly assigned leadership position entitled them to a larger reward.  His experience on Wall Street after his graduation from Princeton made him realize the role that luck played in determining his extraordinary compensation.  He wrote  Liar's Poker  to describe the entitlement that he and his colleagues derived from luck.  He was unable to understand why the clients of his firm would pay large sums of money for his financial advice.  He did not believe that he was qualified to deliver that advice soon after graduation from Princeton.