The art and science of creating chance

This post was originally published on Medium in 2015.

In 2014 I was lucky enough to speak at Morning Prayers, a secular Harvard tradition that has existed since its founding in 1636. Below is a copy of my remarks.

Good morning. My name is Zachary Hamed, and I am a senior in Leverett House studying computer science. I’d like to begin with a reading from Ecclesiastes:

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

Chance—and its sister, serendipity—are the under-appreciated forces that drive the twists and turns in life. Serendipity is defined as the “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” It was first penned by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann in 1754, who said he was inspired by an old Persian fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.”

As the story goes, the King of Serendip had three sons, whom he had educated with the best tutors in the land. After several years, the king felt his sons had mastered all the knowledge of the arts and sciences, but feared they had been too sheltered and privileged in their education. He sent his sons to the desert, where they wandered for days.

Late in their trip, they met a farmer who asked if they had seen his missing camel. The princes asked the farmer if his camel was blind in one eye, had a gap in its teeth, and was injured in one leg. When the farmer heard this, he accused the princes of stealing his camel and took them to the king.

When the king asked how his sons knew such intimate details of a stranger’s camel, they explained that their days of wandering had led them to notice small details in the environment. An animal had eaten the tougher and browner grass on the left side of the road, leading them to believe the animal was blind in one eye. There were lumps of chewed grass along the road that were the size of a camel’s tooth. And there were only 3 camel footprints on the road with the fourth being dragged, leading them to believe the camel was disabled in one leg. As soon as they finished, a traveller entered and reported he had found a lost camel in the desert. The princes were rewarded handsomely and their intuition trusted for years to come.

The story hits close to home because Cambridge resembles Serendip all too often. It is easy for us to be so ensconced in our research, our work, our meetings and our routine that we don’t make time for productive and creative wandering.

In the 1950s, a pair of medical researchers—one at NYU and one at Cornell—accidentally injected rabbits with a certain enzyme and noticed that the rabbits’ ears folded over. Neither had the time or funding to pursue the anomaly, so they buried it away in their lab notebooks. Several years later, only one of the professors decided to review his research notes when he realized the flopping ears were actually more important than his initial research was. His work led to a Nobel Prize, and a subsequent sociology paper on the topic coined the terms serendipity gained (for example, reviewing your notes and deciding to pursue a question further) and serendipity lost—making the same discovery but never following up.

In short, serendipity enters our lives several times a day. We can gain it or lose it. But the best part is—we can engineer it. MIT Professor Ethan Zuckerman covers this phenomenon of creating luck. “Engineering serendipity,” he says, “is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it’s based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky — to think of serendipitous as smart.”

Harvard engineers serendipity at every point it can. You’re placed with a random group of your classmates when you enter as a freshman. Even when you’re allowed to choose your roommates in sophomore year, you’re placed randomly into houses and a lottery randomly places you into rooms. The lectures in your general education class could help you on a completely unrelated assignment in a different class. And have you noticed how many walking paths there are outside this very church? Walking through Harvard Yard is a case study in serendipity—it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing someone you know.

We meet best friends at events in Ticknor Lounge, significant others in early morning sections in Sever, mentors over lunch in Leverett dining hall, and overhear job opportunities in Lamont Cafe. Every minute on Harvard’s campus is a chance encounter waiting to happen.

Harvard’s secret is it takes a diverse group of people and squeezes them into a small, confined space. But the real world is a big place. And the scariest part is that serendipity will no longer be engineered for us. In fact, New York City, where I’ve been living for the past 4 months, seems to be engineered against serendipity. Have you ever tried meeting someone new on a New York City subway train? In a city of 8 million people, how do you find your new best friend? Your new job opportunity?

As always, Ralph Waldo Emerson provides the answer. “Shallow men,” he says, “believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” It is up to us to engineer serendipity once we leave Harvard’s gates. So talk to the person behind you in line at the coffee shop. Knock on your neighbor’s door in the otherwise anonymous apartment building you live in. Ask your friends to introduce you to someone new and go to lunch with them.

Be open to the unexpected today. Relish the uncertain. And embrace serendipity.

The evolution of UI/UX in enterprise companies, illustrated with GIFs.

This post was originally published on Medium in 2015.

The value of design in a consumer app is fairly well appreciated today— design, branding, and user experience have a meaningful impact on customer happiness and retention.

For enterprise companies, however, it would be easy to underestimate the power of design. Many of these tools operate behind the scenes or on a server farm, so visual design isn’t a priority.

Yet some of the best enterprise companies took design to heart. Their websites are an extension of their brand, and they use design to personify an otherwise faceless product. Stalwarts like Oracle and SAP might not have the most attractive sites, but new players leverage design to connect with their customers and differentiate themselves from their older and slower competitors:

Some takeaways for enterprise companies:

1. Plan an annual redesign. Most of the sites above completely overhauled their websites at least once a year. While some of the changes are visual, the general UX of the page also improves. A lot changes in the design world in a year’s time, and a lot also changes in enterprise. Redesign your site to reflect that.

2. Photos of people help humanize your brand. Some of the above use stock photos (e.g. VMware), others use custom photos (e.g. Rackspace), and others use illustrated people (e.g. Joyent). In every case though, it seems like the company is trying to put a human touch on an otherwise amorphous product offering.

3. Today, whitespace, color, and photos are preferred over dense text. This is partly a broader web design trend, but even enterprise companies that have complex offerings are putting documentation and features on separate pages, leaving the homepage free for calls-to-action, customer testimonials, and eye-catching photos. Consider Salesforce’s site in 2010, VMware’s site in 2010, or Heroku’s site in 2012 versus their sites today.

If you found this post interesting, take a look at Bowery. We’re reinventing the local development environment, and it’s free.

Last spring, I took a class on social psychology. It was one of the most useful classes I’ve ever taken, so I figured I’d share some of the more interesting findings. Each paragraph has a citation to its right so you can get more information or read the original study.

1. Reciprocity has a strong effect on us.

20% of people send Christmas cards back to people they’ve never met, just because they received one from them. For the same reason, tips to waiters go up 3.3% when an after-dinner mint is provided with the receipt. And when the server looked the diner in the eye and gave them a second mint? Tips went up 20%.

2. You attribute a higher value to things you already own—this is known as the endowment effect.

Willingness to sell was twice as high as willingness to pay in one study. In other words, participants were willing to buy a mug for $5, but once they owned it, they wouldn’t sell for less than $10.

3. Heat makes us angry, and sadness physically makes us colder.

When you feel rejected, you report the room as being colder and you prefer warmer foods over colder foods. Crime rates are higher in hotter regions, and crime is more likely on warmer days. Baseball pitchers are more likely to hit batters when it’s hot. This occurs because heat causes arousal, but people misattribute that arousal to situations around them and not to the heat.

Duchenne smiles (example B) that are exhibited in high school yearbook photos are correlated with better life outcomes 30 years later. Here, Paul Ekman—an expert in facial psychology—exhibits both non-Duchenne (exhibit A) and Duchenne smiles.

4. Smiling is contagious—and can predict your happiness, professional success, and lifespan.

Humans laugh more at movies when other people laugh. Additionally, many people smile at getting a strike in bowling only after they turn around to their friends—you smile for the social approval, not for doing something successfully. In another study, students who exhibited “Duchenne smiles”—a more authentic type of smile that engages the eye and mouth muscles—in their high school yearbook were more likely to get married and were more likely to self-describe as “happy” 30 years later. Students with less intense smiles were more likely to be divorced. And in any given year, people who exhibited Duchenne smiles in their high school yearbook were half as likely to die.

5. How we’re approached and our desire to be consistent affect our decisions.

If I asked you to volunteer for an “Experiment at 7AM,” would you do it? What about a “7AM experiment”? 56% of people asked to volunteer for the first did so, but only 24% volunteered for a “7AM experiment”—fewer people want to wake up early, so the ordering of the words matters. In another experiment, some participants were called and asked if they would hypothetically volunteer for the American Cancer Society. When they were contacted a few days later and asked to volunteer, 31% agreed—versus 4% of people who were cold-called and asked to volunteer for the first time.

6. We act differently when reminded of who we are.

When participants were told that men and women scored differently on a particular test, female participants’ performance dropped dramatically. Male participants’ performance on a task dropped after interacting with an attractive female participant. When children are in a group on Halloween, they take more candy on average—but when children were singled out and asked their names, they took far less candy.

7. Being watched sometimes helps—except when eating.

Having an audience of people watching you complete a task improves performance on simple tasks but hinders performance on more complex tasks or when learning a new skill (they showed this with both humans and cockroaches—don’t ask). The mere presence of someone in the room causes this effect; even a repairman working on something in the corner slowed people down. Yet when it comes to eating, a full chicken will overeat in the presence of another chicken, and animals eat more in pairs than when alone.

8. Comparing people to their friends is the most effective way to make them do something.

When an electric company tried to encourage people to save energy at home, telling them “your neighbors are reducing their energy use” led to a 2% reduction in household usage. Telling people “save energy to save money” or “save energy to save the environment” did not decrease, and in some cases increased, energy usage.

9. Context—where we do something—has a substantive effect on what we do.

56% of actual voters voted for a pro-school budget when voting in a school vs. 53% otherwise. While that effect may not seem huge, it’s statistically significant and was reproduced in a lab environment (64% of people voted for a fake pro-school budget when shown pictures of a school vs. 56% who voted for it otherwise).

10. The more you’re exposed to something, the more you like it—this is called the mere exposure effect, and it works in milliseconds.

Participants shown a foreign word frequently were more likely to say the word had a positive connotation. The most immediate application of this effect is advertising; the more often you’re exposed to a commercial or ad, the more positively you will rate the company. Flashing images that elicit positive or negative emotions for only a few milliseconds subliminally conditions your attitude.

People liked familiar objects more than abstract patterns, but in both cases participants overwhelmingly preferred curved objects over objects with sharp edges. Objects in category C (featuring both curves and edges) fell in between.

11. Curves > Edges.

Humans overwhelmingly prefer curved visual objects over objects with jagged lines.

12. Don’t get hurt when there are a lot of people around you.

Bystanders are less likely to intervene in a crime or help in an emergency as the number of observers increases, as each individual feels that someone else will help and responsibility is diffused. When a victim is bloody, people help less often—likely because there is a chance they would be exposed to pathogens. But victims who scream receive more help than those who don’t—clear and unambiguous danger is helped far more often than not.

13. We really want to be happy, but being too happy can negatively affect our work.

In a study of 10,000 participants from 48 different countries, happiness is rated as more important than any other personal outcome—more than finding meaning in life, becoming rich, or getting into heaven. Happy people more often label themselves as “curious,” and depressed people are more likely to notice small changes in facial expressions. Yet extremely happy people (9/10 or 10/10 on a happy scale) got worse grades and had lower salaries than moderately happy people (6/10, 7/10, or 8/10 on a happy scale).

14. We do stupid things because we want to conform.

In one study, a participant was placed in a group and asked to answer a seemingly simple question. The rest of the people in the group were all told to respond with the same incorrect answer to the question, after which the participant was asked to answer in front of the group. 37 of 50 participants gave the same incorrect answer as the rest of the group (even though it was very clearly wrong), either because they wanted to be “liked” by the group or because they thought the rest of the group was more informed than they. This effect was dampened by having just one other person in the group agree with the participant.

15. We have trouble separating out traits in a person.

Globally positive or negative reactions on a person (“he’s a nice guy”) affect our judgment of a person’s specific traits (“he’s attractive”). This is called the halo effect, and is particularly noticeable in celebrities; their attractiveness or fame also leads us to believe they’re intelligent, happy, or honest.

16. We’re influenced by very particular types of rewards.

Expected rewards reduce motivation on a task. Surprise rewards increase motivation on the same task. Fixed rewards are less powerful than performance-based rewards, even with creative tasks.

17. Authority can fundamentally change our emotions and behavior.

In the Stanford Prison experiment, participants were split into prisoners and guards and placed into a mock prison. In just six days (of a planned two weeks), the experiment had to be shut down because guards were harassing and abusing prisoners, and prisoners began showing signs of emotional breakdown.

65% of participants knowingly delivered a lethal dose of electricity to a participant (who they later learned was fake) simply because the instructor in the room told them to.

18. Authority can also make us be obedient and do things to other people we could never imagine.

In the famous Milgram experiment, participants were told to administer a shock of increasing strength when a participant in another room gave incorrect answers to a series of questions. About halfway through, the shocks were labeled “danger: severe shock” and a recording was played begging the experimenter to stop the experiment. Yet in 63% of cases, the participant administered the maximum shock, even when the person they thought they were administering a lethal dose of electric shock to another human being.

A recreation of the original Stanford Marshmallow experiment is predictably adorable. Longitudinal studies have shown that students who can resist eating the marshmallow are better behaved and get better grades later in life.

19. Self-control at an early age might be indicative of success later in life.

In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, a group of children participants were asked to wait in a room with a table full of marshmallows and cookies. If they wanted, they could have one treat now and the experiment would be over. Otherwise, if they could wait for the experimenter to return in a few minutes, they could have two treats. The children who couldn’t delay their urges—either they asked for the treat right away, or tried to sneakily eat a treat when the experimenter left—had more behavior problems, lower SAT scores, more trouble paying attention in school, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. In fact, a child who could wait 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on the SAT than children who could wait only 30 seconds.

20. People aspire to round number goals.

I tried to make this list 20 bullet points long instead of 19, and you do the same thing when trying to run 2.0 miles instead of 1.9. In Major League Baseball, players were four times as likely to end the season with a 0.300 batting average than 0.299. And when looking at over 4 million SAT scores, students who scored a 1290 were more likely to retake the test than students who scored a 1300—even though admissions offices did not statistically favor one score over the other.

Rhetoric and Speech in the Clinton Administration.

This post was originally published on Medium in 2013.

Below is an abbreviated version of an essay I wrote on Bill Clinton, his administration, and how rhetoric saved his presidency. Before the essay though, I wanted to include some choice quotes I found in my research that didn’t make it into the paper (bolding is my addition).

Any president would rather receive and reply as Clinton did at a town hall meeting:

Q: Hello, Mr. President—President Clinton. My question is, my birthday is tomorrow and I’m twelve years old tomorrow, and my question is, what kind of future am I going to have in store for me and the country?

The President: That’s a neat question, isn’t it? (Laughter) I think you’ve got a very bright future. The world you will live in will be freer of the threat of total destruction than any world we’ve ever known.

The hottest moment of the town meeting came when the president abandoned his usual empathic style and directly confronted a questioner.

Questioner: Mr. President, in 1993 when interest rates were declining, your administration took credit for that. But now both long- and short-term rates are higher than when you took office. Will your administration now take responsibility for higher rates?

The President: Why do you think they went up?

Questioner: Well, I’m asking you.

The President: I’m asking you. You asked me to take responsibility, so I ask you why. They plainly went down after we declared our deficit reduction package. That’s why they went down. They have gone up, I think, for two reasons, maybe three.

Oral history interviews confirm that Clinton often did work on speeches up to the very moment of their delivery—and indeed would often extemporize while speaking. The story of the teleprompter and the healthcare speech is recounted in George Stephanopoulos, “All Too Human: A Political Education”. The wrong speech was initially loaded into the teleprompter], an accident brought on by the fact that the text was being worked on so late that no time was left to check the process. For several minutes, Clinton was forced to speak before a national television audience while an alphabet soup of verbiage spooled past his eyes on the teleprompter screens.

Peggy Noonan takes us closer to the answer to the Clinton paradox:

“Never tongue-tied and never eloquent—six years into his presidency, his only candidates for Bartlett’s are ‘I didn’t inhale’ and ‘The era of big government is over’—his easy facility is a two-edged sword. While it suggests a certain command, it also highlights Clinton’s prime perceptual problem: that he is too fluid, too smooth, like a real estate salesman talking to a walk-in with a Rolex.

Now, onto the essay.

President Bill Clinton is a case study in the power of the rhetorical presidency.

Richard Neustadt, in his Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, describes presidents as formidable leaders who use their power to persuade. Yet Bill Clinton was not a towering, unopposed president. He served at a crossroads—the Cold War had just ended; the Internet, cable news, and consequent shorter news cycles were just becoming mainstream; and during his tenure Congressional opposition threatened the presidency in unprecedented ways.

Compounding these larger trends, Clinton suffered what most pundits believed would be a debilitating scandal, yet left the office with one of the highest approval ratings of any president in modern times.

“How can a man lie multiple times, cheat on his wife, commit perjury, and become one of the most popular presidents of recent history?”

Clinton surmounted these challenges through his extraordinary use of presidential rhetorical power. To his supporters, Clinton seemed to have the magical ability to relate to anyone; to his opponents, Clinton’s magic was the seduction of the American people. The Clinton presidency demonstrates the importance of the Presidential bully pulpit—while his rhetoric shifted from at first attempting to directly reach citizens to eventually acknowledging the press' role in spreading his message, Clinton’s legacy survived because he converted his rhetorical talent into political capital.

Clinton’s rhetoric was unusually powerful because of its conversational style. As Clinton’s head speechwriter Michael Waldman remembers, “his strength was never soaring rhetoric”—thirty minute speeches were reduced into half the time, and new speechwriters were warned he took “Hemingway [and turned it] into Faulkner. Rather, Clinton’s powerful gift at communicating grew from the intensity of his connection to the audience before him….He might dutifully read along with the prepared draft. Then, when he sensed the listeners were with him, or were resisting, he would leave the text, start dropping his consonants, and loop around and around the subject, trying to persuade the audience until he had won the point.” After winning the presidency largely based on his rhetorical gifts in town halls and conversations with voters, Clinton was poised to benefit from and depend on rhetoric once in office.

President Clinton’s first 100 days in office aimed to leverage this strength. Under Clinton, “speechwriters were once again privy to policymaking and political strategy,” reversing a pattern by previous presidents of pushing speechwriters out of the decision-making process. Speechwriters reported directly to the Chief of Staff and the President himself. Clinton gave 550 speeches in a typical year—nearly double the 320 President Reagan gave per year. In the two years between his inauguration and the first midterm elections, Clinton traveled to almost two hundred town halls across the country.

These events were meant to sell the President’s healthcare bill, his vision for the country, and the Democratic Party. Clinton thrived in the town hall environment—the “relaxed questions he received” there allowed his enthusiasm for “spontaneous give-and take” to shine through. Clinton’s rhetorical strategy was to “bypass traditional journalist mediation between leaders and citizens” because he believed “journalists were gaining more influence over political and campaign agendas.” Given Clinton’s rhetorical talent, his administration’s strategy hoped to forge connections with voters and circumvent conventional media.

Even after news organizations helped spread Clinton’s campaign message, the new administration failed to appreciate how conventional media helps presidents communicate once elected. President Clinton, like Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan before him, held the press at arm’s length and mainly spoke to press at more formal, controlled events. In a stunning rebuke of conventional media, Clinton held a question and answer session with schoolchildren visiting the White House before he ever appeared before the White House press corps. Within three weeks of taking office, Clinton had spoken with live studio audiences in four separate cities via satellite, but had still not held a formal press conference.

When asked by the Radio and Television Correspondents Association why he shied away from press conferences, Clinton answered, “Because Larry King has liberated me from you by giving me to the American people directly.”

The President opted for more intimate events, like one-on-one interviews with Larry King or town hall meetings, that allowed his unique talent for casual rhetoric to dominate.

This strategy unexpectedly backfired for the Clinton administration. His signature healthcare bill failed in Congress, his poll numbers dropped, and Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections. Clinton’s favored town hall format was quickly abandoned as “the format increasingly became a forum for negative and confrontational interactions between citizens and the president, providing fodder for negative national news.” Yet despite these defeats, “Clinton never gave up on the idea that all he needed was a few more speeches, or a slightly better message. ‘I’ve got to…spend more time communicating with the American people,’ the President said in a 1994 interview….It seems never to have occurred to him or his staff that his basic strategy may have been inherently flawed.”

Clinton initially blamed his waning support on the negative press he had been receiving, not on his rhetorical strategy. When asked by Rolling Stone how he would respond to a disappointed supporter, Clinton responded angrily, “that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not my fault.” In June of 1993, Clinton realized “the level of acrimony” between his administration and the press was self-defeating—“clearly harm was being done.” With the public losing faith in his leadership, he brought in David Gergen—who had helped Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan with their communications strategies—to forge a new path.

If Clinton’s first 100 days are the story of his rhetorical strategy failing to understand political and media realities, the Monica Lewinsky scandal is the story of the media failing to understand the power of Clinton’s rhetoric. Just days before the State of the Union, news of the affair broke in the press. According to Clinton’s head speechwriter at the time, the President and his administration decided he would not address the scandal at all in his speech; they wanted Clinton to use his rhetoric to put the administration back on message. And indeed, “Clinton went on to save his presidency with a rousing State of the Union address in which he secured public favor by sternly demanding that Congress ‘save Social Security’.”

The resulting post-speech approval boost—by some measures, as much as 16%—carried him through the scandal to the end of his administration. In fact, Clinton’s approval rating never fell below 60% during the scandal and hit a high of 73% twice—once on the day the House voted to impeach Clinton, and again when the Senate voted to acquit. Despite the fact that nearly half of all stories about the Clinton administration in the three months after the scandal broke focused on the affair, the scandal provided a reason for additional coverage of the administration, which often included other positive coverage of Clinton’s policies and agenda. By staying on message, the Clinton White House leveraged the negative press to more frequently present their issues.

With the scandal’s spotlight on him, Clinton used the media frenzy to showcase his rhetorical power, this time in conjunction with the press instead of in opposition to it. The day before the State of the Union, Hillary Clinton and Vice President Al Gore hosted a press conference on afterschool education programs. At the last minute, speechwriters were told the President would deliver remarks on education at the gathering, with the unstated goal of making a statement about the Lewinsky scandal as well. They hurriedly “spliced the entire education section straight out of the State of the Union address and turned it into a statement.” Those remarks—containing the President’s education vision for the next year—were presented to a live audience “larger than for the State of the Union itself.” The President used the scandal as a soapbox to elevate issues that affected the American people, and they in turn rewarded him with unwavering approval ratings above 60%.

Despite initially miscalculating how to deliver his rhetoric to the American people, Clinton’s rhetoric successfully elevated the office of the president and inspired the American public. He successfully used his rhetorical talent to craft a rhetorical presidency that furthered his administrative and legislative goals, a success reflected in unwaveringly high approval ratings throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Once he applied rhetoric through existing media channels, rhetoric proved to be one of his most powerful assets.

“It was a new kind of presidency, less dependent on legislation, more rooted in a president’s unique power to act and to speak. With his stream of speeches and announcements, he was trying, bit by bit, to restore public confidence in government, to show that it could get things done… This will most likely be his lasting legacy: redefining the role of government and then successfully convincing the public to share that vision.”

To President Clinton, the rhetorical presidency was the presidency.

Works Cited

Denton, Robert E., and Rachel L. Holloway. Images, Scandal, and Communication Strategies of the Clinton Presidency. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Print.

Dorsey, Leroy G. The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2002. Print.

Friedman, Jeffrey. “A “Weapon in the Hands of the People”: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical and Conceptual Context.” Critical Review. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2013. www.criticalreview.com/crf/pdfs/Friedman_19_2_3.pdf

Klein, Ezra. “The Unpersuaded: Who Listens to a President?.” The New Yorker. N.p., 19 Mar. 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2013. [www.newyorker.com/reporting…

Renshon, Stanley Allen. The Clinton Presidency: Campaigning, Governing, and the Psychology of Leadership. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. Print.

Waldman, Michael. POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words that Defined the Clinton Presidency. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Print.

In a speech to the Democratic Nation Committee in 1999, he waxed poetic:

“And let me just close with this story. I want to tell you a story that I thought about that I told the folks at home when I went to dedicate my birthplace. Last year I had a 91-year-old great uncle who died. He was my grandmother’s brother. And I loved him very much, and he helped to raise me when my mother was widowed and went off to study so she could be a nurse anesthetist, and my grandparents were raising me.

And this old man and I were close from the time I was born. He and his wife were married for over 50 years, and she came down with Alzheimer’s. And they had one of these old-fashioned houses with gas stoves, so they had to take her to the local nursing facility that was tied to our nursing home in this little town because they were afraid she’d turn on the stove and forget about it and blow the house up. We can laugh—we all laughed about it. It’s okay to laugh. I’ve lost two relatives to Alzheimer’s. You have to laugh to keep from crying half the time…"

Two paragraphs, 224 words, and a lot of laughter later, Clinton was still at his story, with no end in sight. I cite the rest of the speech not for its significance but for its pointlessness:

“So I went to see him one night, about 10 years ago, after his wife went into this nursing home. And they’d been married over 50 years. And the first 20 or 30 minutes we talked, all he did was tell me jokes and tell me stories and think about the old days. And I was walking out and for the only time in our life, he grabbed me by the arm. And I looked around and he had big old tears in his eyes. And I said, ‘This is really hard on you, isn’t it.’ And he said this, he said, ‘Yes, it is. But,’ he said, ‘you know, I signed on for the whole load, and most of it was pretty good.'

When you were up there singing ‘Stand By Me’ tonight and I thought about how the American people have stood by me through thick and thin, I would just like to say to all of you, when I talk about community, that’s what I mean. [Applause] Now, wait a minute. You don’t have to sit down, because I’m nearly through. [Laughter] Don’t sit down. Don’t sit down. I’m nearly through. Here’s the point I want to make: The reason I wanted you to come here tonight, the reason I’m thankful for your contributions, the reason I’m thankful for what you do is, this country has got to get over believing that our political life is about beating each other up and hurting people, instead of lifting people up and bringing them together. That is what I’ve tried to do. That is what we stand for. And if we remember that, we’re going to do just fine in the 21st century.

Thank you, and God bless you."

Why you should spend your 3 college summers in New York, San Francisco, and Boston.

This post was originally published on Medium in 2013.

There’s something to be said about trying different industries or roles each summer while you’re in college. There’s also something to be said for living somewhere different each time.

The college summer is a sacred time. Yes, it’s prime time for relaxation before another stressful school year, but it’s also one of the biggest opportunities you have to explore new fields and develop yourself professionally.

Boston in the summer is a special place. With thousands of college students gone, an otherwise bustling city is made calm. A town full of academics and business leaders suddenly has more time for coffee meetings and advice.

Time spent in San Francisco is the best way to learn the ins and outs of technology, despite being unreasonably cold for the entire summer. Nowhere else can you walk down the street and see the offices and founders of companies you admire.

But there’s a special place in my heart for New York City summers. The cool nights, the sound of ice cream trucks, and the blisteringly hot subway tunnels give the city its character. You won’t find the same density of students in the same diversity of fields and industries as you will in New York.

After spending my freshman summer in Boston, my sophomore summer in New York, and my junior summer in San Francisco, I have a new appreciation for each city.

Don’t stick in the same city for your summers in college—travel and try living in a new city. Half of exploring during the summer is finding what you want to do after college. The other half is finding out where you want to do it.