"Your parents."
"Your clothes."
"Your race."
"Your gender."
"Your age."
"Your job title."
"Your first mistake."
"Sometimes they will be wrong."
"Sometimes painfully wrong."
She looked toward the mathematics faculty.
"Your task is not to spend your whole life proving strangers wrong."
"That gives strangers too much power."
The students listened.
"Your task is to become accurate about yourself."
"Know what you can do."
"Know what you cannot do yet."
"Learn the difference."
"Then work."
A breeze moved across the stage.
She continued:
"When I was twenty-two, someone offered fifty thousand dollars to anyone who could solve a problem."
A murmur.
They knew.
She smiled.
"I told them we weren't discussing this."
Laughter.
She continued anyway.
"I solved it."
"People remember that."
"What they forget is that I had worked on the problem for eighteen months before anyone applauded."
"That is what most expertise looks like."
"No audience."
"No dramatic soundtrack."
"Just repeated contact with something difficult."
She paused.
"And one more thing."
"If you become powerful, remember how easy it is to confuse being respected with being right."
The faculty grew still.
"Listen especially carefully when the person disagreeing with you has less power than you do."
"Not because they are automatically correct."
"Because the cost of speaking is higher for them."
That line became the one students remembered.
Not the fifty thousand.
Not the Professor.
Not the mop.
After commencement, she walked through campus alone.
Eventually she reached Lecture Hall One.
The building had been renovated.
New seats.
Digital boards added beside the old chalkboards.
But much remained recognizable.
She entered.
Empty.
No security.
No crowd.
She walked down the central aisle.
At the front, she touched the chalk tray.
No chalk.
Of course.
Digital age.