(Editor’s note: This was a commencement speech delivered on May 19, 2014 to the first graduating class of the University of the Philippines’ College of Medicine that signed an agreement to give 3 years in service to the government.)

What an honor to speak to you at this moment. To be in a room full of idealistic people who are giving 3 years of their lives for our nation. Thank you. Congratulations to the Class of 2014!

I wondered why doctors would want a journalist to speak to them, and I thought well, maybe you knew I was pre-med, except I never made it to where you are now. Or maybe it’s because we have a shared societal mission – to help our people.

How I wish I were you. Really. Because you will live through times we can’t even imagine. Because you are coming of age in a time of massive disruption. 

A doctor out to heal the world: “doctors for the people.”

At a time when technology is giving man god-like powers, blurring boundaries between the moral, ethical and the religious.

We are digitizing people, living in an age where we can change the genetic, biochemical and structural building blocks of life – leading to the emergence of new forms of microbes, plants, animals and humans.

Welcome to our science fiction world – where knowledge grows by the second but wisdom is often in short supply.

The technology you take for granted has put a mobile phone in your pocket that’s got more computing power than the first supercomputer that took up a whole city block when I was a child.

Social media takes away boundaries of time and space to connect you real-time with more than one billion people on Facebook alone. 

Technology is giving new solutions to age-old problems, fundamentally changing each of us, our societies, businesses, and governments.

I know this first-hand because the company I helped create, Rappler, couldn’t have existed 5 years ago. In just a year and a half, we became the 3^rd top online news site in the Philippines, according to international ranking firm Alexa’s rankings, which are publicly available.

Chances are that you will be working for a hospital or organization, which will know less about social media than you do, and that’s important. Because you intuitively know things those of us older than you don’t.

But how will you navigate this brave new world? How will you make your choices in life? 

Those are the thoughts I’d like to share with you as you think about your future.

The power of emotions

Studies show that up to 80% of how people make decisions in their lives is not based on what they think but on how they feel. People are emotional. Filipinos more than others. A Gallup poll in November 2012 said that Filipinos are the most emotional people in the world! (The least emotional are Singaporeans). 

Emotions are very important. But have you taken any classes on how to deal with your emotions? 

In news, people pretend to separate reason from emotion, but we never really can. This is the reason why Rappler is built around a patented user engagement model that centers around our mood meter. Every story asks you how you feel, and when you vote, every vote is aggregated into our mood navigator, which crowdsources the mood of the day. Emotions are very important to us.

Why? Because our world is moved by social movements. And the spark to create a movement comes from emotions.

Emotions are very tricky. Because they form the secret sauce in every great human endeavor and in every human failure. 

Love. Hate. Anger. Fear. Hope. Emotions drive our lives.

Emotions spread. In 2007, 2 Harvard professors – one a medical doctor – articulated the 3 degrees of influence rule in a book titled, “Connected.” They said our individual emotions and ideas spread through 3 degrees of influence.  Meaning – and I’ll use an example they use – if I’m lonely, my friend has a 54% chance of feeling lonely because I do. That’s the 1^st degree. My friend’s friend has a 25% chance of feeling lonely because I do (2^nd degree), and my friend’s friend’s friend has a 15% chance of feeling lonely because I do.

There’s a ripple.

The question I had was how can you best control and harness your own emotions? How do you balance powerful emotions with intellect, with reason?

Think about it.  If you’re too emotional, you’ll make the wrong decisions. If you’re not emotional enough, you’ll make the wrong decisions.

I’ve spent my entire life trying to find that balance – what I think is the sweet spot for success: the balance between reason – book learning, logic – and emotions, the intuitive signals we pick up that drive our actions.

I’ve always said I wanted to combine Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

I have 3 points to share:

The first has to do with how to handle fear – which is connected to courage.  You have to face your fear.

The second is about making decisions about who you are and what you stand for. This is about ideals and ethics.

And finally, as I led teams – whether it was my newsgathering team in a warzone or a crisis team or a news group, I had to learn to empathize. That before I judge or make a decision that affects other people, I try to walk a mile in their shoes.

Confront your fear

Let me start with #1.

Confront and conquer what you’re most afraid of – your worst fear.  Many of us make bad decisions because we hide from our fears. What I found worked for me is to identify what I’m most afraid of. 

Name it. Face it. Conquer it. And move on.

I was afraid of science and math. So I became pre-med. I took the hardest courses I could find, including the most notorious – organic chemistry – a class we in my school nicknamed “orgo.” 

I was afraid of conflict reporting so I studied it. I threw myself into it and became the go-to frontline reporter for CNN in Southeast Asia. I learned to control my fear, even when the bullets were flying. 

I learned stifling emotions in warzones gives an unparalleled clarity of thought, an adrenalin rush that could be so addictive.

After nearly 20 years with CNN, I was afraid of not having the clout of a multinational to get things done. So I left CNN, joined ABS-CBN, and in 2012, formed Rappler. I left the comfort of groups and learned to define myself.

You just do it. Define your fear and conquer it. If you do that, then nothing can stop you. 

Draw the line

My second point is about ethics, but that is such an academic word. I have a simpler definition. 

Draw the line. On this side of the line, you’re good, but if you cross the line to this side, you’re evil. It has to be that clear so you can hold onto your ideals until the day you die.

Draw the line when you’re young, when the lines between good and evil are clear. It only gets blurrier as you get older.

As a reporter, the fight is against corruption. A recent Media Nation summit estimated up to 90% of our media today in the Philippines is corrupt.

It’s been my battle my entire career – when Probe put up the first public statement by a media group in the late 80s supporting the fight against envelopmental journalism, to a zero-tolerance approach to corruption when I headed ABS-CBN News.

My ultimate test was when the fiancé of one of my best friends offered me $150,000 to do a story. This was in the late 80s, early 90s, so it was a far larger sum than now.  He asked me to think about it overnight, and I did. But when I got up the next morning, I looked in the mirror, and I knew that if I took the money – even if no one knew – I would fundamentally be different.

My lines are clear – and they’re many of the same lines I set coming out of college. I was lucky. I had good mentors and worked with good people.

Empathize

Finally, the 3^rd point is about empathy – knowing and understanding how another person feels. It’s a reminder that despite the lines, not everything is black and white in our complex world.

As a manager, I learned to define another line for myself between efficiency – of our work, of our organization – and managing the feelings, the hopes and dreams of the people I work with.

If you isolate yourself away from your team, you will make top-down decisions that will not fit your organization. If you wallow in the feelings of your team – if you only want to be liked, you will not be able to make logical decisions for the overall good of your organization. That is always a delicate balance.

I’ve had to lead a re-organization that let go of more than 120 people at one time. And as a reporter, made life and death decisions that I still think about today.

A good test for any decision is if you have the courage to communicate it with the people who will be most negatively affected. Then you understand it emotionally.

Empathy needs to be second nature for doctors – who have to have the courage and the sensitivity to deliver bad news in order to make it better.

Purpose

We’ve gone from the personal to organizational. Now let’s go to affairs of nations. We’ve seen how emotions drive conflicts – from Rwanda to Indonesia to Crimea.

I recently visited Japan, the only country in the world that’s felt the impact of the atomic bomb.

While I was in Hiroshima, I spoke with Hibakushas – survivors of the atomic bomb. You have to understand what the single most devastating man-made weapon really did. Scientists in America decided that the bomb would have maximum destructive effect if it exploded 600 meters above the city.

The force of impact moved at 440 meters per second. It sucked the air out and created a vacuum that made people’s eyeballs pop out. Survivors said victims were carbonized. One woman said she fainted, and when she woke up, she looked around, and these were her words: “There are people covered in blood. Like ghosts, their skins peeling off.”

Seventy thousand people died immediately. The peace shrine marks their unidentified remains. At least another 70,000 died of the radiation in the days and months after.

I reported the 50^th anniversary of Hiroshima for CNN, and I was horrified. Next year is the 70^th anniversary. Then and now, I see little anger in Hiroshima against the nation that dropped the bomb and caused such devastation – the United States. 

In fact, Japan is one of America’s closest allies.

Hiroshima is now a city that is leading the fight for peace, for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. That is how it made the horror it lived through have meaning and value for the world.

And that is how I want to end: meaning plus value equals purpose.

Emotions are extremely powerful and drive something you won’t find in books and schools, something you’ll have to find in your own life – your own meaning and purpose.

I told you 3 ways that helped me in finding my meaning and purpose:

1. Face your fear.
2. Draw the line.
3. Empathize.

As you walk out of school, I wish you all learn to harness the power of your emotions. 

As doctors, you will be making life and death decisions daily. 

You’ll need clarity of thought – to combine what you know with how you feel.

You’ve already made a choice that’s brought you here today – isang lagda.  You are the first class to sign the return service agreement, pledging 3 years of your lives to your country. 

You are living your commitment to service: “to serve the underserved” – and we are all the better for it.

I wish you lives full of meaning, purpose and much love.

It’s because of you that I have hope for a better Philippines.

Congratulations, UP College of Medicine’s Class of 2014. 

Go out and make our world better. – Rappler.com