Written IB task - Improved Speech

Good morning alumni's, it’s an honor to speak to you today here in Harvard. May i introduce myself, my name is Alonso Jander and today i want to talk about of how money and ambition may affect in your value of friendship.

First of all it’s important to define what is ambition, the ambition defined by the oxford dictionary means “an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment” but how far can this desire take us, how much things are you willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals, your friends, your family, the ones you LOVE?, think about it. I’m not saying that you must quit every time you have problems with your objectives, I’m talking about the precaution you must have in this journey of life and how it may affect it, in this case in the relations with the ones that are beside you such as family but more important your friends, because everyone it’s part of a family, but not everybody has “real” friends, as the old expression says, the real friends can be counted with the fingers of a hand.

Since that the human being is dependent to exchanges of products to survive, the human being has adopted ways to acquire this products first exchanging objects for objects (barter), but nowadays we exchange this products for "money”. Since this invention of money the world and the society completely changed on how it functions. Nowadays it’s possible to say that the world is ruled by money, if you don’t have money you can’t do the things you like or even live a decent life the actual society has the pattern of: study, get a good job, and try to have the biggest amount of profit as you can so you can live a decent life in this world. The problems of this money-ruled society is that the money most of the times brings more problems than solutions such as envy and difference, but I just want to talk about two of the thousands problems that brings money; the corruption and ambition.

Ambition can be good sometimes to achieve your personal goals in your life, but as I have seen in the present society’s most of the time ambition consumes the human and corrupt his values which lead to the social crisis of this individual, loose of friendships and even the family for the sake of money, sacrificing all just for money stained with the loss of your relations.

A great example of this, is in the recently story of the millionaire Mark Zuckerberg. This story begins in this exact university Mark was one of you in the past a imperturbable and brilliant student of this prestigious university and now he is the CEO of one of the most popular websites in the world, Facebook. But like all the big industries he first started with nothing but a purpose, in this case the purpose was to create a webpage in the beginning only accessible to the students of the university´s but it quickly became worldwide, but in the very beginning it all started in a apartment with 3 friends and a computer. In the beginning Mark and his best friend Eduardo started with the website here in Harvard as I said, and then expanding it to other universities around the country. In less than a year Facebook was already very famous and started getting bigger which means that more people joined the website. Now is here where the earnings started to grow to enormous numbers, so mark decided to hire Sean Parker the cofounder of Napstera wicked character which his only motivation in his life is making money no matter what, this individual started to play with Mark´s head and  convinced him that Eduardo CFO of the webpage and his best friend was a burden to the company and finally made Mark  to cut a gigantic part of the earnings of his CFO Eduardo his best friend. Cutting his 35% of the earnings to a 0.35% of the company. And later clearly out of Mark expectations Eduardo sued him, and after the long and exhausting trial all that Mark won was a destroyed friendship and millions lost in payments.

There’s a clear message in this story, in how extreme ambition can destroy your relation with the people you love, family and friends. So i ask you the following question is it worth to lose a life lasting relationship for some dirty money?

The reason i tell you this story is because you are the future of the world, my generation is already lost in greed and ambition, but you ladies and gentleman will be the future generation of professionals in the world, and i personally ask you to always be careful and balance the ambitious life goals that you have with your relation with your close ones, always analogies what is the correct thing because it is something you will encounter day a day in the present, the XXI century.

Please remember the words i just told you if the moment comes.

Thanks for listening