诺贝尔经济学奖得主保罗·米尔格罗姆教授在港中大（深圳）2021年本科生毕业典礼上的讲话
2021年5月22日，深圳高等金融研究院特聘教授、2020年诺贝尔经济学奖得主保罗·米尔格罗姆教授在香港中文大学（深圳）2021年本科生毕业典礼上与大家分享了他人生中“抓住机会实现蜕变”的三个故事。
他告诉同学们：“人的一生总会遇到改变和成长的机会，但大多时候，我们退缩了，畏手畏脚，失去了抓住伟大机会的最佳时期。因此，要时刻保持头脑清醒，不畏艰险，果断行事。在机会出现时，牢牢地抓住它。”
*点击视频观看诺贝尔经济学奖得主保罗·米尔格罗姆教授在香港中文大学（深圳）2021年本科生毕业典礼上的讲话
*Click to Watch Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom's Commencement Speech at CUHK-Shenzhen Graduation Ceremony for Bachelor Degree Graduates 2021
诺贝尔经济学奖得主
保罗·米尔格罗姆教授
在港中大（深圳）2021年本科生毕业典礼上的讲话
在此，我向香港中文大学（深圳）2021届的毕业生们送上由衷的祝贺！祝贺各位在这所优良学府的栽培下，顺利走向人生另一个令人激动的里程碑。在这一纸毕业证书背后，体现的是诸位的勤勉和奉献。在过去一年里，诸位无法像往常一样坐在教室里跟同学一起学习，没有线下的同辈互动，也没有积极的教室氛围。在这样的背景下，你们的勤勉和奉献显得尤为珍贵。我们都很怀念线上学习之前的日子，无论是那些与朋友分享的快乐时光，还是向朋友寻求慰藉的难过时光。而作为创造性的思想者，线上学习所缺失的不止如此。比如，还有没有人能够向你提供灵感和建议，帮助你更好地融合自己的想法呢？困惑时，你能向谁请教呢？
因此，我想再次祝贺各位，祝贺各位在如此具有挑战性的情况下顺利完成学业。
作为毕业典礼的演讲嘉宾，我今天本应和诸位分享如何获得成功，如何成为优秀的领导者，以及如何成为幸福的全人。但这些问题都很复杂，每个人对“成功”、“领导力”甚至是“幸福”的定义都不尽相同，更没有永远适用的固定答案。但我今天之所以被邀请发表演讲，正是因为别人在我身上看到这三个问题的答案。2020年，我获得了诺贝尔奖，这代表了我事业的成功，也代表了我在知识领域的领导才华；我在公共和私营部门带领过许多杰出的咨询团队，为客户节省了数十亿美元的支出；此外，我还培养了许多非常成功的学生。至于最后一个问题，我已经在个人生活中找到了巨大的快乐。
我不会把自己的成功归功于任何单一因素。诚然，运气和巧合对我的成功起到了巨大的作用，但他人给我的诸多支持同样功不可没。与在座的众多学子一样，对我而言，这份支持最初来自于养育我们，送我们上大学的父母和家人。如果你的父母今天也在现场，那么此刻是为他们鼓掌的最佳时机。
老师和其他帮助我们的人，也是我们成功路上的重要支持者，是他们给予了我们机会去展示自己的能力与才华。这样的机会不是每个人都能遇到的，但在座的各位都遇到了，请勿浪费如此良机。
除此之外，你所做的决定，也会对你的成功起到关键作用。因此，我今天也会分享一下，我所做的决定如何塑造了现在的我。
如果说我能给大家分享什么成功的建议的话，我想第一条便是：时刻保持头脑清醒，不畏艰险，果断行事。在机会出现时，牢牢地抓住它。我一生中遇到了许多让我改变和成长的机遇，这些机遇似乎是为我量身定制的，或者说，这些机遇让我成为了想要成为的那种人。是的，我很幸运能够拥有许多好的机会。但你们也拥有这些机会，而且未来还会拥有更多。人一生总会遇到改变和成长的机会。但太多时候，我们退缩了，畏手畏脚，失去了抓住伟大机会的最佳时期。因此，请时刻注意，随时做好抓住机会的准备。
2021年本科生毕业典礼现场
接下来，我将分享三个“我抓住了机会实现蜕变”的故事，主题分别为“我如何成为一名学术研究者”，“我如何设计出让我开创事业、获得诺贝尔奖的拍卖理论”，以及“我如何遇到我的妻子”。
当然，接下来我讲的故事是精心挑选过的。我也有“赌一把赌输了”或“错失良机”的故事。但无论如何，故事的主旨是不变的：改变和成长的机会既不常见也不罕见。是的，这些机会并非稀松平常，因此我们不能对此视而不见；但这些机会也非绝无仅有，不能对此放弃希望。失败不一定是毁灭性的；生活还要继续。
今天我想分享的第一个出乎意料的故事，是关于我如何一步步成为一名教授。现在大家都知道我是一名教授。但从我的家庭历史来看，这其实并不符合任何一个人对我的“期待”。20世纪30年代大萧条时期，我的父亲为了帮补家计从高中辍学。我的母亲是高中毕业生，但我的哥哥，就像我父亲一样，高中就辍学了。除了母亲外，我是家里第一个高中毕业的人，后来还获得了数学本科学位。但除了数学之外，我的成绩并不特别好，也没有获得任何荣誉。后来，我被一家保险公司聘为精算师，负责保险和养老金的计算。这是非常枯燥的事情。为了使它更有趣，我写了两篇关于如何改进和深入了解行业工作的论文。这两篇论文都获得了精算协会的奖项，但我仍然感到十分无聊。因此，我入读了斯坦福大学的MBA课程，计划追求更广阔的事业。
但MBA课程同样非常枯燥。整个项目是以实践导向的，针对的是水平较低的学生，并不适合我这种数学专业。因此，我开始思考一些新的方法，尝试更好地理解和实践计算。当我向一位教授解释某项计算的收敛率取决于马尔科夫矩阵的次支配特征值时，他告诉我：“你报错了专业！”斯坦福大学为我提供了一笔奖学金，让我从MBA项目转入他们的研究型博士项目。这是件多么让人摸不着头脑的事情！我从来没有申请过任何博士项目，也没有参加过任何规定的考试。转专业的话，我赚的钱会少很多。再者，这个专业我真的能行吗？
我再三权衡，思考了一下那个发表精算师论文的我，到底是个怎样的人。我想，如果我能研究我为自己挑选的挑战性难题，至少我不会感到无聊呀！甚至还挺有趣的呢。两天后，我便转了专业。事实证明，研究对我来说真的很有趣，所以我继续了下去，后来成为一名教授。请注意这个转变背后的要素：
1. 运气！来斯坦福读书之前，我根本不知道自己会遇到什么。
2. 他人的帮助--我的老师在重要的关头推动我，我对他感激不尽。
3. 果断--衡量了短短两天后，我便做出了改变人生的选择!
我的第二个故事是“我如何开始自己的拍卖事业”，包括为何会设计新的拍卖市场，为何会开始为数十亿美元的竞拍品提供咨询服务。其实，我并没有主动寻找这些机会，我只是在日常生活中偶然遇见了它。
故事开始于1993年。当时，美国国会正在决定该采用何种拍卖方式向移动电话公司出售无线电频谱权。当时有数百个甚至上千个相关联的许可证要分配给竞争公司，而没有人知道该如何进行分配。到底是如小公司所愿，一次一个地依次出售许可证；还是像当时一些大公司所愿，组合捆绑式出售呢？
美国联邦通信委员会（FCC）对此发布了一份报告，试图将不同的解决方案混合在一起。这，应该是政治妥协的结果。但这份报告非常糟糕！非常糟糕！FCC为了证明自己的结论，在报告中引用了各种关于拍卖的学术论文，其中也有我的论文，仿佛我那篇关于“如何出售一幅画”这样的简单拍卖品的论文，对这种复杂的大规模多产品拍卖有什么借鉴作用似的。我自认对这个问题“一窍不通”，却没想到它后来成为了我的一大突破。
应现已倒闭的太平洋贝尔公司要求，我开始研究起这份报告。我心想：“反正他们也不知道该怎么办！ 我也许无法做到最好，但我起码能比这糟糕的报告要好！”
我得到了太平洋贝尔公司的支持。但不久后，有人批评我的解决方案过于复杂，不切实际。于是，我决定要花自己的钱大力宣传一番。我聘请了一位研究助理帮我用Excel电子表格对拍卖规则进行编码，并将其带到华盛顿特区，说服FCC的工作人员这个方案是实际可行的。从此以后，我和威尔逊的设计（the Milgrom-Wilson design）成为了数以千亿美元计的频谱拍卖的基础。在不断研发新设计，不断为困惑的竞标者提供咨询服务的过程中，我闯出了一番收益颇丰的事业。
这个故事同样包含了所有重要的元素。
1. 有运气：没有经验的理论家抓住了意外的机会，为实际问题做出贡献。
2. 有帮助：我的博士导师罗伯特·威尔逊，他和我一起工作，鼓励我把主要的想法开发出来。
3. 有决断：我们从无到有研发和推广了一个全新的拍卖设计；被最初的赞助商放弃时，我决定花自己的钱来推进，并最终说服了质疑者，开拓出新的市场设计领域，创建了我的公司Auctionomics。
我的最后一个故事，也是最有趣的一个故事。它是关于我如何邂逅和追求到我的妻子伊娃。要成功获取她的芳心，我不仅需要用脑，还要用心。
伊娃和我的初次相遇发生于1996年的诺贝尔奖晚宴。按理说，我俩原本都不会参加这场晚宴。在获奖者威廉·维克瑞突然去世后，我被临时邀请到斯德哥尔摩代表发言。伊娃呢，则是因为她的前任丈夫——诺贝尔经济学委员会主席——和现任女朋友吵架了，临时找回她陪同出席晚宴！你说这巧不巧！
在这个瑞典国王也出席了的晚宴上，我和伊娃相聊甚欢，随后还在正式舞会上共舞。但我住在加利福尼亚，她住在斯德哥尔摩，这能擦出什么火花呢？回到家时，我还是对伊娃念念不忘。我要有所表示吗？
我担心如果我追求她，伊娃的朋友会劝告这种关系不会有什么结果。我必须做一些足够大胆的事情来克服她朋友的反对意见。于是，我给她写了一封信，告诉她那天晚上我和她在一起有多开心，并写道：“既然你住在瑞典，我住在加利福尼亚，要不我给你寄一张飞机票。我们在世界某个地方见上一面吧，哪里都行。”很果断吧？嘿！
我也用了其它重要的象征，向她表明她对我来说有多么特别。最后，她搬来了加利福尼亚，并在2000年和我完成了婚礼。
我想向诸位传达的是，如果你们的生活和我有任何相似之处，那么那些重要的成长机会会陆续到来。机会出现时，请各位务必大胆地抓住。在彼此的帮助和鼓励下，抓住这些机会，你们的生活将更加快乐，更加成功，更贴合你真实的自我。
你们当中，不少人已经抓住了那个将决定你们未来几年生活的机会。我相信，诸位必将遇到更多机会，去做出更大的贡献，成长为快乐且事业有成的人。不要害怕那些能推动你向前、贴合你真实自我的变化。生活可以是一场精彩的冒险！
再次祝贺各位!
Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom delivers a keynote speech at CUHK-Shenzhen Graduation Ceremony for Bachelor Degree Graduates 2021
I am here today to celebrate you, the graduating class of 2021 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Congratulations on your achievement today of graduating from this fine University. Earning your undergraduate degree is an exciting milestone that takes hard work and dedication--more so than usual in a year during which you have had to learn remotely, without the in-person energy and dynamism that comes from being in a physical classroom with your peers. Like everyone, we miss sharing our joyous moments with friends and seeking comfort from them in sad moments. But as creative thinkers, there are other losses as well. Who will inspire you and offer suggestions to combine with your own ideas? Who do you ask when something is confusing?
An extra kudos to you all for graduating during such a difficult time.
So here I am, to talk to you all in a commencement speech--I am supposed to tell you how to be successful, how to be a good leader, how to be a well-rounded human being. Well, these are complicated questions, and the answers are different for every person. There is no “one size fits all” formula for success, being a great leader, or even being a happy person, but I have been asked here today because of what others see in me. My 2020 Nobel prize is one indicator of success in my career and of intellectual leadership. I have also led some extremely successful advisory teams in the public and private sectors, saving billions of dollars for my clients, and trained many very successful students. As for the last goal, I’ve found a large measure of happiness in my personal life.
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I do not attribute my successes to any single factor. Luck and happenstance played a huge role for me; and so did the unwavering support I received from so many people. For me, as for most of you, that support begins with the parents and family who raised us and sent us to college. If parents are there in the audience, now would be a good time to applaud for them!
Our supports include our teachers and others who gave us chances to show what we can do. Some never get that chance, but all of you have. Don’t waste it!
Be aware that your own decisions can also play a decisive role. Today, I will mostly reflect on how my own decisions contributed to making me who I have become.
If I can offer you any insights into how to be successful in life, the first one would be this: Be clear-minded, unafraid, and decisive -- ready to seize opportunities when they arise. In my own life, I have embraced some quite-unexpected opportunities for change and growth that seemed to fit who I am or want to be. Yes, I have been fortunate to have had a lot of good opportunities, but you guys are being given opportunities now, too, and this will not be the last time. Most of us stumble across chances for change and growth from time to time. Too often, we back off, feel stuck and fail to grasp what could be great opportunities. Be vigilant and ready to seize the opportunities that you encounter.
I will tell you three of my personal stories about big changes I made to grasp opportunities, including how I became an academic researcher, how I met my wife, and how I began designing real markets, which built my business and led to my Nobel prize.
Of course, this will be a highly selective account. There are other stories about gambles that failed and about opportunities I missed. The main lesson from the whole set is unchanged: chances for change and growth are neither common nor rare. Not so common that you can afford to ignore the good ones. Not so rare that you should give up hope. And failures need not be devastating; life goes on.
My first surprise story is about how I became a professor. You all see me that way now, but this was not at all a path that anyone expected for me in view of my family history. My father had dropped out of high school in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, to help support his family. My mother was a high-school graduate, but my older brother, like my father before him, had dropped out of high school. I was the first man in my family to graduate high school and I went on to get an undergraduate degree in mathematics. Apart from mathematics, I did not earn especially good grades nor did I earn any honors. I was hired by an insurance company to be an actuary, doing insurance and pension computations. It was boring as hell! To make it more interesting, I wrote two papers about ways to improve and gain insight into what we were doing. Both papers won awards from the actuarial society, but I was still bored. So, I enrolled in the Stanford MBA program, planning to pursue a broader business career.
My more technical MBA classes were boring, too, targeted at a lower level than suited a math student like me, so I began thinking about new ways to do or understand the computations. When I explained to one professor that the rate of convergence of a certain calculation depended on the subdominant eigenvalue of a Markov matrix, he told me: “You enrolled in the wrong program!” Stanford offered me a scholarship to switch from the MBA program into their research-oriented doctoral program. How strange! I had never applied to any doctoral program nor taken the requisite exams. If I switched, I would earn a lot less money. Would I even be good at this?
I thought about it and what my publications as an actuary said about who I was. At least I wouldn’t be bored! I might even have fun, study challenging issues that I picked for myself! Two days later, I switched. It turned out that research really was fun for me, so I continued and became a professor. Notice all the elements:
1. Luck! I had no idea what I would discover as a student at Stanford.
2. The essential nudge and encouragement from another person – my teacher – to whom I offer my undying gratitude.
3. My own decisive choice to change my life path, after just two days of reflection!
My second story is about how I began a high-stakes auction business, both designing new auction markets and advising bidders in auctions where the stakes were measured in billions of dollars. I did not search for this opportunity; I stumbled upon it in the course of living my regular life.
The story begins in 1993, when the US Congress decided to use auctions to sell radio spectrum rights to mobile phone companies. There were hundreds and later thousands of inter-related licenses to allocate to the competing companies, and nobody had a good idea of how to do that. Should the licenses be sold one at a time in sequence, as some smaller companies wanted? Or in large combinations, as some big companies then preferred?
The FCC issued a report in which it tried to mix those solutions in what was supposed to be a political compromise. It was ugly! Ugly! To justify its conclusions, the report cited various academic papers about auctions, including my own, as if my paper about how to sell a simple object like a painting could have something useful to say about a multi-product auction of this scale and complexity. I figured I knew next to nothing about this problem, but it nevertheless proved to be my big break.
At the request of a now-defunct telephone company – Pacific Bell, I read and reflected on the FCC report. I thought to myself, “They don’t know what to do either! I may not know what is best, but I can sure do better than that ugly mess!”
For awhile, I had Pacific Bell’s support, but when critics claimed that my solution was too complicated to be practical, I decided to spend my own money to advocate it more effectively. I hired a research assistant to code the rules to run in an Excel spreadsheet and carried that to Washington, DC, where it convinced the FCC staff that this was actually doable. In the years since, the Milgrom-Wilson design became the basis of auctions used for hundreds of billions of dollars of spectrum sales. By continuing to create new designs and to advise confused bidders, I was able to start a profitable business.
Again, this story has all the important elements.
1. There was luck: the unexpected opportunity for an inexperienced theorist to contribute to help solve a practical problem.
2. There was another person: my PhD adviser Robert Wilson who worked with me and encouraged the development of the main ideas.
3. There was also my own decisiveness. We created and advocated a completely new auction design and, when my initial sponsors abandoned me, I spent my own money to push ahead with my proposal, ultimately convincing the skeptics and helping to create what has become the new field of market design, and my company, Auctionomics.
My final story is the most fun one. It is about how I met and wooed my wife, Eva. It required both my heart and my brain to win the woman I wanted.
Neither Eva nor I were supposed to attend the event where we met, which was the 1996 Nobel prize dinner. When laureate William Vickrey died suddenly, I was asked to come to Stockholm to deliver the lecture on his behalf. Eva was not supposed to be there, either. Her ex-husband – the chairman of the Economics Nobel committee – had fought with his girlfriend and needed someone to accompany him to the dinner, so he invited his ex! How’s that for luck!
We had a lovely time talking at dinner with the King of Sweden in attendance and then dancing at the formal ball. But I lived in California and she lived in Stockholm. Surely, nothing could come of that. Still, when I got home, I had Eva on my mind. Could anything be done?
I worried that if I reached out, Eva’s friends would counsel her that nothing could come of such a relationship. I needed to do something bold enough to overcome her friend’s objections. So, I wrote her a letter, telling her how much fun I had with her that evening and saying this: “Since you live in Sweden and I live in California, I’ll send you a plane ticket and meet you anywhere in the world.” Pretty decisive, huh!!??
I used other important symbols, too, to show her how special she was for me. Then she moved to California, where we married in 2000.
So, my message to you is that if your lives are anything like mine, they will continue to present important growth opportunities that will require you to be bold. With help and encouragement from one another, you can seize those opportunities to make your lives happier and more successful and to fit better with your true selves.
At least a few among you have already seized an opportunity that will define the next years of your life. Most of you will have more chances to make big changes and grow into happier, more productive people. Don’t be afraid of change that moves you forward and fits who you are. Life can be a wonderful adventure!
Congratulations to all of you!
-END-
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摄影、直播/ 陈鸣、尹一智、李晨、张凌康
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