 Campbell once said, everything begins with a story. So I thought I would start by telling you the story of my life. I was born one month early in the midst of a terrible winter snowstorm in Toronto, Canada, in November of 1969. My mother was all alone that night. She had just made her way from India to Toronto, and my father still had it made it over there. And I still think about what it must have been like for her that night, all alone in this far-off country with this new baby in her arms, and maybe she was staring outside the window and looking at snowflakes whirling around for the very first time in her life. Unbeknownst to her, the low visibility of that night and the absence of my father would prove important of things to come. So that is one story of my life. Now, let me tell you another story of my life. It's a jack-in-the-box world. You open it up carefully, one parcel at a time. But sometimes things just spring up and out. And so I did, spring out one month early, and my father wasn't even there to receive me. My mother, who had never intended to leave India, suddenly found that she was married and shipped off to Toronto to New York and then from there to New Jersey. My parents, who were Sikhs, lived amongst Sikhs wherever they went. So I lived within a country, in a country, and they had every intention to raise me as a good Sikh child. I was going to grow up and come back to India, and a whole bunch of Sikh men were going to line up and they were going to choose the right Sikh husband. So when I was a kid, at one point my parents started to wonder why they had to constantly shout, watch out. Surely even a klutz would notice a parking meter on occasion. Well, the mystery was solved by a vision specialist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, who told my parents that I had been born with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa and would be blind before I finished school. When I was 13, my father woke up one morning complaining of a leg pain. My mother told him to go to the doctor and even set up an appointment for him. He never went to see the doctor. Eventually, he was found collapsed outside a bar and by the time he made it to the hospital, he'd already suffered three heart attacks and was no more. This is not to say that our lives are made up of solely unpleasant and random events. How well can any of us plan for our future if we can only see so far? How well can you direct your future if the weather changes faster than you can say? Surprise. But wait, I have another story for you. My parents left India. They chose to leave India. They chose to go to Canada. They chose to go to the United States. And they chose this because they were in pursuit of a better life for themselves, for their children. In fact, my father would always talk about how he landed up in the United States with exactly one dollar in his pocket, but he had a lot of dreams. I was born into that dream and I grew up with that dream. And you might say that I understood that what shined so bright in that dream that you could see it even if you were blind like me was choice. Any one of you could tell the story of your life in terms of fate, chance, or choice. It's worth doing the mental exercise sometime. What are the circumstances of your birth that affected where you are today? What were those random events that happened to happen one day that affected who you are and where you got to? What were the choices that you made? No matter how you tell the story of your life, you will discover some interesting truths about yourself. But I think that there is something very special when you tell the story of your life in terms of choice. Choice in the end is the only one of these forces that puts control in your hands. It's the only thing that enables you to go from who you are today to whom you want to be tomorrow. And so it is the most powerful tool we have for shaping ourselves, our lives, our futures. And ultimately, regardless of what fate or chance may have in store for us, we are evaluated by the choices that we make. Okay, but for God's sake, how do I make choices? Now, this is a particularly perplexing question to an Indian American. They have a name for us, you know. They call us A-B-C-D. American born confused, they see. It's not just, as an Indian American, it's not just that you learn two different languages. Sure, as a Sikh girl with a heritage from Delhi, I learned some mix of Hindi and Punjabi, much like what they speak in the Hindi movies, versus English. But it's not just that you learn two different languages. You learn two different ways of life, two different ways of thinking, two different ways of choosing. I understood growing up that as a Sikh child, you had to be a good Sikh child, listen to what your parents said, respect your elders, respect the wishes of God, and that, sure, career choices were very much decided by your parents. Doctor or engineer, obviously, good. And that your marriage choice was, of course, influenced heavily by your parents. Choice was something that had consequences. And so, when you made a choice, you made it carefully. Because ultimately, choice had its limitations. That's what I learned from my Sikh culture. Well, what about the American point of view? You get to choose. You get to decide who you are, what you want, what you will be when you grow up, what you will wear, what you will eat, what you will do with your hair, what career you will pursue, whom you will marry, how you will marry, what sort of a life you will lead. Choice was all about possibilities. So here I am, an Indian American, and I've got to make some pretty big choices in my life, right? Who's going to decide my career? Who's going to decide my marriage? How is this going to be decided by the dictates of Indian culture, by the dictates of American culture? As a blind person, everyone's always asking, what will become of her when she grows up? That was asked by both Americans and Indians. At least they were in consensus on that one. So in school, remember, our teachers used to say, you can grow up and do whatever it is you want to be, as long as you put your mind and heart to it. So one day my teacher said and asked all of us in class, what do you guys want to be when you grow up? Well, I very confidently raised my hand and said, I want to be a pilot. That was exactly everybody's reaction. The poor teacher was so speechless, she's like, oh, that's interesting child. But I wasn't very good at that. So then they decided I could go to college, at which point the choice of what I was going to be when I grew up was so obvious. It just wasn't obvious to me. I was going to become a lawyer because justice was blind. Where I went, people just gave me roles to play, tried to stick me in a niche. It became imperative for me to learn how to separate my true limitations from my perceived ones. You know, I started to develop this keen awareness at some point when I was growing up, that so many of our hopes, dreams, and expectations struggle constantly against our limitations. And one of the big challenges that we all have in our lives is in figuring out how to overcome those challenges. Which ones can we overcome, and which ones we can't? I guess I want to convince you today that I was blessed. What I learned from my Indian heritage was that the question that you ask is not what do you want. The question that you ask is what can you be good at? What can you be excellent at? Pursue it with great discipline. That is the life of someone who has integrity. What I learned from the American culture was that you don't have to settle for those mere options put before you. People can say no to you, and they will. People can take choices away from you, and they will. But you can create choices for yourself. Choices that those other people may not have even imagined. I didn't have all the choices that decided have, but in a way that was easier. Any time I wanted to pursue a choice, it had to be something that I was willing to dedicate myself to. And because I had to push past doorkeepers and naysayers, I could never afford to choose on a whim. And that meant that you had to be choosy about choosing. So now let's take up these three criteria. The Indian view, the American view, the blindness view. How am I going to choose? What am I going to choose? Well, it was obvious, wasn't it? You choose the thing that you've been thinking about your whole life, the thing that you probably have thought about in ways that other people haven't thought about, the thing which you can contribute something new to. It became the most natural choice in the world to study choice. And so that's what I've been studying for the last 20 years. People ask me, why did you title your book The Art of Choosing? What is The Art of Choosing anyway? It's a great question. And I think the answer to that question, you above all else will understand what I mean when I say it. Indians taught me the value of choice and its limitations. And I've studied that in many ways in my research. Americans taught me the value of choice in terms of the possibilities that it offers. You might say that these are antithetical to one another, but they're not. They are two sides of the same coin. It is when we are able to balance our hopes, our dreams, and appreciation for the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations that we are best prepared to practice the art of choosing. Thank you very much.