Much of Prof. Schwarz’s talk struck me as good advice not only for college, but in for our lives in general. His three Rs, in particular, stood out to me. Resilience is essential to moving forward – without it every failure could be the one to keep us down and could cut us off from a whole line of future successes. Resolve is likewise a crucial ingredient of success – without the commitment to see our goals through to completion, success will be, unsurprisingly, elusive. But the R that I’d like to talk most about is resourcefulness. In any environment this is an important trait to have, but this is especially true at a university like Cornell, where an inexhaustible amount of resources are packed into what in the grand scheme of things amounts to a pinhead (the campus is actually 745 acres, I googled it).

I once listened to a motivational speaker give a talk on public radio as part of a series they were broadcasting about success. The station had on lots of speakers and entertained questions about the definition of success and the best ways to achieve it. This speaker suggested that one of the greatest factors that keeps us from success is a lack of resourcefulness masquerading as a lack of resources. Often times, he noted, people will blame their inability to achieve a goal on their circumstances – the environment isn’t right, the timing is off, they don’t have the resources to get it done. He argued that this kind of thinking limits us – it diminishes our potential to succeed. It makes sense. When we ascribe our lack of success to outside factors, we are taking power directly out of our own hands. According to this kind of thinking, if the right resources for success don’t exist, that’s it. We can’t be expected to succeed without having the things we need to succeed, and they are simply not there. What this thinking overlooks is our own abilities to make or make do – that is, to obtain the resources we need or to figure out a solution given the ones we have. This is the kind of resourcefulness that paves the path to success, and it is a quality we need to remember and foster in ourselves moving forward. For the time being, however, we are lucky – we won’t be faced with a lack of resources. What we, as students here at Cornell, must do is remember the many resources that are available to us and make good use of them in our time here.