Brian Wilson AO

Ladies and gentlemen, UTS colleagues, my family, new graduates. I’m very grateful to the UTS Council for awarding me an honorary doctorate of the university. In many ways, this seems like a bonus, because the real honour has been having the opportunity to make a contribution to this wonderful institution. Everything I’ve done with UTS has given me satisfaction and job. I’ve been privileged to work with a collegiate and visionary council, and a dedicated and talented executive team.

Now, I could easily spend the time allotted to me today talking about the enormous progress that UTS has made, and the enviable position in which it now finds itself and its glittering future. But I’m not going to do that. Today is not about me. It’s not even about the university. It’s about you, our new graduates. So I’d like to talk to you about your careers and your futures. You’ve all graduated with good degrees from a fine university. In order to do that, you’ve had to demonstrate intelligence, hard work, the capacity to collaborate, the capacity to focus, and lots of other wonderful attributes. But it’s not enough. I’m sure you all know people with good qualifications who’ve never quite managed to turn them into anything. There are other aspects that are required for success, and many of these are obvious. People who are successful invariably work hard and are focused. People who are successful are resilient. No matter how successful and lucky they may be, from time to time, plans go awry and things go wrong, and successful people pick themselves up, recognise that they can’t change history, and move forward undaunted but perhaps a little wiser. And of course, people who are successful over the long term show and exhibit integrity in their dealings with others and their dealings with the world. It’s critical to have a real moral compass, and to follow it relentlessly, regardless of the temptations that may exist to sometimes deviate, and regardless of the fact that perhaps the prospect of being caught is not even all that high.

In my long career as an investment banker, I was fortunate to spend time with many of Australia’s largest companies, and some of the largest companies in the world, in their boardrooms, with their chairmen, with their chief executives, and more recently, at senior levels of government. And over that time, I have recognised that sometimes there is great success and from time to time, great failure. And I’ve observed, as well as those characteristics of success, which are obvious, that I’ve already mentioned, three other characteristics which are not so obvious. So I’m going to call those three secrets of success.

The first secret is to know yourself – really know yourself. When we deal with the world, we all adopt a persona. We present ourselves as we think others might like to see us. So we tend to emphasise our strengths, emphasise our good points, and we hide or minimise our weaknesses and our fears. And that’s perfectly acceptable. But when you deal with yourself, don’t adopt a persona. You really should understand exactly what makes you tick. What excites you. What interests you. What drives you forward. And equally importantly, what are your fears, and what are your insecurities? I can absolutely promise you that most successful people have far more than their fair share of fears and insecurities. It’s usually these things that drive them forward, but by really analysing themselves, and understanding themselves, they’ve managed to harness those fears and insecurities to drive them forward, rather than hold them back. So as I say, really look into your hearts. Constantly analyse what it is that you want, what it is you need, and ensure that for the rest of your lives, you operate from the really stable, strong platform that you have by really working from truth.

The second secret of success is to be brave. I should say that’s not the same as being reckless. As we go through our lives every day, we’ll make decisions and we’ll make choices. And most of them don’t much matter, but over your lifetime, there will be a handful of decisions that have a really fundamental impact on your direction and your trajectory. And if you get those big decisions right, you build on them, one after the other, and you end up in a very wonderful place. And if you get those big decisions wrong, too many, you end up going in the opposite direction, or you spend a lot of time digging yourself out of somewhere where you perhaps wouldn’t have gone in the first place had you made the right decision. When you come to those big decisions, the best outcome is not always the most obvious. And it’s rarely the easiest.  You’re all business graduates – I think what you should be looking for is a risk-weighted, probability-adjusted outcome. Don’t be afraid to take the brave decision with the best risk-weighted, probability-weighted outcome, even if it might be more difficult than just going along with the flow.

The third secret – I should say, by the way, the second secret, making good decisions, is much easier if you’ve adopted the first one, which is really understanding yourself, because it’s much better to make a decision from a proper basis, rather than somewhere where you’ve fooled yourself as to what you are. The third secret, a very important one for new graduates in your early careers, but one that will serve you well, not just in your careers but through life, is to nurture your reputation for delivering on your promises. Making promises is quite easy, and if you just keep making promises but don’t deliver on them, sooner or later you get to a position which is very difficult. Some of you will have studied behavioural economics, and while there are a number of principles underlying behavioural economics, the most fundamental one is that as humans, we feel the pain of a loss with about three times the intensity we feel the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Just think about that for a moment. We feel the pain of a loss with about three times the intensity we feel the pleasure of an equivalent gain. So when you make a promise, you get some brownie points. If you don’t deliver on that promise, the damage you do to your reputation is a multiple of the benefit you got of making the promise in the first place. So if you mean maybe, don’t say yes. If you mean no, don’t say maybe. Ensure that when you make a promise, you deliver on it, on time, in full, every time, and you’ll be very quickly the go-to person; the person that everyone wants to have on their team; the person that everyone wants to work with. Now, some of you may be saying ‘These things don’t sound much like secrets. they’re self-evident.’ You’re the lucky ones. The reason I call them secrets is that in my long career, very many people don’t act in this way. They either don’t know about these things, or if they do, they don’t do anything about it. And those that do are inevitably successful. So there you have it. Go out there, secure in the knowledge of who you really are, make sure that you surprise and delight others with your actions, not your promises, and be brave when it counts. If you do that, you will not but help but be successful. My best wishes go with each and every one of you.