Former Sen. Mitt Romney said two things at Harvard Business School’s Class Day this week that seem to belong to different speeches. He told some 4,500 graduates and their families that “the true measure of wealth in life is the people you love and your friends.” Then he told them that success in a career is “subject to serendipity, to chance.” The first sounds like a benediction; the second sounds like a warning. In reality, they are the same teaching.
The benediction came wrapped in a sentence Romney’s Latter-day Saint tradition has treasured for generations: the late President David O. McKay’s teaching that no success can compensate for failure in the home. It is easy to file that under commencement uplift. Take it seriously, though, and it is no platitude. It is a claim about what a life is for, and it cuts against everything the room had spent two years learning to want. These were graduates trained to optimize and to win. McKay’s line tells them the scoreboard they studied in business school is not the one that finally counts.
This matches the Jewish idea that a life is measured by what it hands down. The Shema does not command success; it commands teaching — “v’shinantam l’vanecha,” you shall teach these things to your children. A tradition lives or dies at the table, not in the market. McKay’s scoreboard and Sinai’s turn out to be the same one: not what you build, but what you pass on.
Then Romney did the less expected thing. He opened by granting that the class was graduating into “one of the most tumultuous times in American history” — a line that landed hard on a campus that had spent the year in its own fight with Washington. A Republican who broke with his own party, he carried that humility into the room where it is least welcome. Harvard Business School is one of the great temples of meritocratic faith. It exists to certify that the people who pass through it earned their rewards by brains and effort. Hard work and solid analysis matter, Romney granted. But the diploma in their hands, he told them, was partly a gift they did not earn: Don’t overestimate your brilliance when you succeed, and don’t underestimate it when you fall.
This is where his faith offered a word the modern meritocracy lacks. Secular critics have long warned that meritocratic pride corrodes a society. When the successful believe they earned everything, they decide the struggling earned their lot too, and contempt runs both ways. It is a true diagnosis, but it stops short of the deepest word. In the boardroom, they call the unearned good “serendipity.” Romney did not quite call it grace; he left that step to the listener. But in the pew, the word is older and truer. It is grace.
That last step is the heart of it. The believer who knows his best gifts were never fully his own responds with gratitude. The man who credits only his own brilliance responds with entitlement. Romney’s Latter-day Saint tradition does not preach passivity; it teaches grace “after all we can do,” and it holds that effort and agency are real. But the crediting of those efforts is not the whole story. He was asking a room of brilliant young people to read their good fortune as a blessing rather than a wage.
The stakes are not only personal. A class convinced it earned everything comes to see those with less as having earned that too. A country sorted into the deserving and the undeserving is primed for exactly the fracture Romney has spent his post-Senate years warning against. The humility to admit you did not earn it all is not just good for the soul. It is the beginning of seeing a fellow citizen as more than a rival you happened to outscore.
There is a reason this landed as counsel and not scolding. Romney has lived both halves of what he described. He built his fortune in the buyout business, which his opponents never let him forget. There lies the easy retort: The financier who banked the returns is a convenient man to say money is no measure. But that is the source of his standing, not a strike against it. A poor man saying it is waved off as envy. The man who got rich and then refuses to worship it cannot be. He reached his party’s summit, lost before the whole country, and stepped quietly out of the arena. He tells these graduates that a fall is no measure of their worth from inside the experience, not above it. Few could say this in this room and be believed. He can, because he has nothing left to prove.
He closed by widening the lens from household to nation, and the symmetry was deliberate. McKay taught that no worldly success can redeem a failure in the home. Romney applied the same principle to the country. To be a great nation, America must first be a good one: a shining city, or nothing much at all. There is no national success, he warned, that can compensate for a failure to be a good and noble people.
It is one moral logic, carried from hearth to commonwealth. What is true of the family is true of the republic. No worldly success can compensate for failure in the home, and no national success can compensate for a failure of character. Romney’s message to Harvard’s “winners” was not that ambition is wrong. It was that ambition has to be disciplined; by gratitude, humility, duty and responsibility, and by people who know how much of what they hold was given to them, and how much, still, is theirs to do.