“Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie” by Michael Lewis

Speech Review

“Success” is a universally desired state, even though its definition might vary from
person to person. As life grows more competitive and fast-faced because of the Internet,
however, success grows harder and harder to achieve for the average person. In this ruthless
environment, it seems that exceptional ability and talent are the only guarantees to securing any
form of financial security and satisfaction from life. But Michael Lewis’s speech “Don’t Eat
Fortune’s Cookie”, delivered at Princeton University’s 2012 Commencement Ceremony,
challenges this notion. In this humorous yet sobering address, Lewis successfully urges
Princeton’s Class of 2012 to consider the significance that luck plays in accomplishment by
employing short, casual sentence structure, parallelism, and repetition.
Perhaps the most intrinsic aspect of Lewis’s speech is his light-hearted, casual diction.
Aware that eloquent and complicated language tends to be forgotten and dismissed, Lewis
instead uses humorous, colloquial language to ensure that his message will resonate with his
audience and engage them, too. While recounting the discovery of his “literary ambition,” Lewis
says of his senior thesis, “God knows what professor Childs actually thought of it.” After he
received his job at Salomon brothers by sheer chance, he remarked that “Wall Street had
become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about
money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money.” To illustrate the entitlement that
arbitrary success can evoke in others, Lewis recounted a psychology study in which the
randomly assigned leaders in each group helped themselves to an extra cookie. Though it
would have been easy to slip into a boring retelling, he employed evocative language to draw
his audience’s attention to the ridiculousness of the situation: “It should have been awkward [to
eat the cookie.] But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader
of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips
smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths.” The aforementioned examples are
a testament to how well Lewis used relatable words and phrases to establish a rapport with his
listeners, soundly conveying the idea that luck and success are intertwined.
Aside from his masterful language use, Lewis also incorporates parallel structure and
repetition to help tie his ideas together and highlight the central themes of his speech. After
explaining the circumstances that led to his current career as an accomplished writer, he
stresses, “What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to the Salomon Brothers
lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? . . . Of
having parents who didn’t disinherit me but instead sighed and said ‘do it if you must?’ . . . Of
having been let into Princeton in the first place?” Listing all the ways everything had to align for
him to have reached his current point draws the audience’s attention early on to the vital role of
luck in success. Towards the end of the speech, Lewis incorporates another such sequence:
“Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can
take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of
becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a
time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.” By repeating the
word lucky over and over again, Lewis embeds the idea into the minds of his audience that luck
is an omnipresent factor whenever someone achieves anything.
 The difficulty of dissecting an address like that of Michael Lewis at the Commencement
of the Princeton Class of 2012 is itself a final example of the persuasiveness of Lewis’s rhetoric.
The power of his address can be seen most clearly in the interwoven nature of all its elements.
Through the marriage of clear, casual diction and repetition, Lewis’s speech encourages, calms,
and inspires.