Thank you Presiding Pro-Chancellor Catchlove and Professor Lim for the opportunity to speak at this graduation today. I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, who have been teaching, making, and learning on this land for thousands of years, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
Thank you, fellow alumni, your family, and your friends, for sharing this special day with me. When I was sitting in this hall twenty-seven or so years ago, I had no idea that one day I’d be standing on this side of the lectern, offering some thoughts about the journey ahead of you. At that time, I had many ideas about how my career would unfold, many of which turned out to be wildly incorrect.
For example, my bio states that I’ve worked in “cloud engineering” – this is a role that didn’t exist in the mid 90s – AWS was launched a decade later in 2006. Unfortunately a functioning crystal ball is not something I’ve acquired, and so I don’t know the jobs of the future that some of you will have a quarter of a century from now, but I’m moderately confident some will be novel – jobs that do not exist today.
You might also find yourself in a different career as you uncover new interests and skills. In my case, I’ve spent time over the last decade contributing to improvements in interviewing processes and training – something that I doubt my mid 90s self would have guessed.
So I’d like to share with you three guiding principles that I use to help me in life – Learn, Make, Teach – which I’ve found my journey has returned to and remixed again and again.
You’ve just finished a degree, or for some of you a second degree, but the learning doesn’t stop there. Strive to become a lifelong learner. Your time at university has equipped you with specific set of detailed skills – skills that will allow you to create value, and share in the value that you create. More importantly, I believe that your studies have equipped you with a facility for learning. As you learn more, you will learn how to learn more effectively. This kind of positive feedback is at the heart of all exponential growth.
Yes, this takes time, and the time you have for it will ebb and flow over your career, as different aspects of life demand your time. However, I exhort you to return to it over time, and think about what you are learning, in all areas of your life. Reflecting on my journey, I’d say about once every five years I find myself in the deep end of something new, learning, and integrating what I am learning with my knowledge base to find new ways to make and, new things to teach.
This brings me to my next theme – make. Go and make things that did not exist in the world before. Making comes in many forms. For example, a graduate of this university was instrumental in the development of cochlear implants, which have changed many lives. Many more have followed, working on those devices to make improvements. Others have made the tools that allow knowledge workers to organise their information, improving the efficiency with which teams can create. It’s not just science and engineering – others make art and literature that enriches our lives. It is not always direct: great leaders make change in the people that they are working with, enabling their achievements.
If you look at the great revolutions – the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and the current nascent revolution coming from technologies collectively known as AI – the feedback loop of making things that enable us to make new things is central.
Over time, what you can make won’t be limited by your skills, but by your available time and energy – and you will have to make choices. Choose wisely. This is one important place where your values can help you create the legacy that you want for those that follow you. An important facet of my time at Atlassian was working for a company whose culture aligned with my values – I understood why I was making what I was making, and what observable positive differences I could see in the world as a result of my efforts. You are responsible for what you make, so make things that are worthy of your effort, and that you can proudly point to and say “I made that!”.
One thing that we all will make are mistakes. Learn from the mistakes you make. This is a feedback loop available to you, and you can harness it for positive feedback. Be honest about what went wrong, be diligent in finding causes, take notes, write checklists – there are many well trodden paths to extract future value from present failure. You can also learn from the mistakes of others. For a technically minded audience like yourselves, I recommend the AWS and CloudFlare post incident blogs as good public examples of in depth incident analysis at scale.
Standing here before you – I’m not learning right now – although I hope to learn some things talking with you at refreshments after the ceremony. I’m not directly making anything – maybe indirect small changes in how you think about value that will help you in life.
What I hope I am doing here today, is teaching – the third strand of my braid. It is the responsibility of all of you to teach those around you, wherever you find yourself. I’m sure you can point to specific great teachers in this institution who have created a phase change in your understanding.
Not just at university – but in life – I have great mentors outside formal education who have enormously impacted my ways of thinking. As your career progresses, you will find more and more opportunities to teach, formally or informally. Making things with teams will earn you respect, and building on this respect to teach people is one of the greatest multiplier effects you can have on organisations. It is another example of powerful feedback – aspects of what I am trying to teach you today I learned from the teachers in my career.
These three strands – learning, making, and teaching – have been woven together over most of my career, helping me to understand what can be done, to make change, and to bring others on that journey. At different times different threads dominate, but like a braid each re-emerges to play its role in knitting the path together.
I first crystallised my thinking like this through conversations with an excellent people leader from my time at Atlassian, as we dug into what motivated me in my work. What I learnt from him was not the above way of thinking (that was a framework I made during those discussions) – but rather he helped me understand the value of deliberate reflection on your career – and indeed life. So in closing, as well as sharing some insight into what I feel has helped me with the successes I have had in my career, I encourage you to continuously and deliberately reflect on what you are doing and why. This will, I believe, help you to make valuable change in the world, so that a quarter century from now you can look back happily at what you have created.