President Kauwe, faculty, distinguished guests, and dear friends and students, aloha!
It's a great joy to be back on this campus, and we’re very grateful for the invitation for us to share some of our thoughts with you today. When I was a student, devotional was always where I came to ask the big questions, and sometimes the small ones. Today I would like to talk about a concept that has shaped almost every big decision in my life: trade-offs.
A trade-off is what happens when we can't have everything at once. Our time, our money, and our energy are limited, so choosing one thing nearly always means giving up another. The world often tells us we can "have it all,". In reality, we are always weighing what feels good now against what lasts longer, and the right choices are often the most difficult ones to make: the one we know, though, deep down, is good.
In my work as a transportation policy analyst, I talk about trade-offs every day, at the level of countries and societies. I advise governments on how to use the resources and budget that they have. For example, in a country like Rwanda in Africa, they may have about 50 million dollars that they would like to invest in transportation development and a very straightforward way to think about this is to build a new highway to get more cars travelling between cities. But for the same amount of money, it could instead build around 500 small trail bridges—they’re like these foot bridges—that you can walk across the countryside to improve the livelihoods of rural communities. These bridges could make a broader societal impact on those who are really in need: the children getting to school safely, farmers reaching markets, pregnant women making it to the clinics in time.
But counting cars on a highway is much easier and cheaper. Counting the time savings of children going to school is much harder, and what is hard to measure is easy to dismiss in investment decisions and policy making. Good trade-offs would ask us to look past what's easy to count and see what really matters.
Now on an individual level, trade-offs appear even more frequently than you think. Supposingly, you have a quiz for your International Relations class tomorrow, and Dr. Blimes sets notoriously hard quizzes. Then you look out from the window, and the surf at Hukilau Beach is just perfect. You have got one hour. Textbooks or surfboards?
Surfing is a wonderful gift as we all know. But one choice gives you an opportunity and a moment of fun, and the other builds knowledge that you can carry with you. Small trade-offs like this, make every day, slowly shape into who we become.
Some trade-offs are much bigger in the long run. In our last semester here, Wilford, who was still my fiancé back then, he received an offer with a Fortune 500 company in Dubai. Dubai was his dream city, the place that he had always imagined starting an exciting career. He worked really, really hard for it and he was elated with the news.
But there was only one complication, and the complication was: me. Sorry about that, but I was spending three months on an internship in Germany back then, and we were planning our wedding for right after I came back. So, Wilford asked whether his—by then will be—the new wife would join him in Dubai after we graduated. But the answer from the company was a very firm no. Visa rules, accommodations, a lot of arrangements, the list went on.
Wilford was left with a trade-off: his dream career, or new wife. We talked about long distance, you know, it’s possible. We would have already been apart for three months while I was in Germany, and Dubai would stretch it to nine months, and possibly much longer if he decided to stay.
That was hard for him. It was the opportunity that he had hoped for and worked for. In the end, he weighed his trade-offs carefully and, for reasons that I still don't fully understand, he made the right choice. He chose me, even without any concrete next steps, which I feel like was the hardest thing to do.
And that’s the part that I love. Just a couple of weeks later, he received another confirmed offer, and that time would be in Shanghai, also with a very great company. This is where we started our new life together.
Shanghai is also where I faced my own trade-off. Back when we first graduated, I had just finished an internship, as I’ve mentioned, at the United Nations University, and I was doing research on climate change. I was full of hope, and you know, passion about the future that I could help with real development problems.
For almost two months, nothing that I applied in Shanghai spoke to my heart. Then I found a small international company looking for a researcher on sustainable transportation in China. I thought, "Ooh, that is my job!" But the interview was rough, because I had no technical background in transportation at all.
That same week, I did some substitute teaching at an international school. The only task that afternoon was to take thirty first graders to watch the movie Frozen. That was the job of the day and it was the easiest and honestly pretty good money. Soon afterwards, the school offered me a full-time job as an English teacher. A day later, the research company also offered me a job too. But—there’s always a but—at almost half of the salary.
Let's be honest: we needed money for the rent and the groceries and so on. But with all due respect to the wonderful English teachers or emerging English teachers out there, I didn't get my education to become one, and honestly, I don't think I'd have been a good one either. Ever since high school, my passion had been on the environment and development issues.
So, I asked Wilford what to do because, you know, by then he knew something about hard choices, and he told me, "Just follow your heart." I’m very happy to report that I did follow my heart. I mean, I think it would be funny if I said I followed the money and that would be the end of my speech. But I did follow my heart, and I chose the research job, and we ate cup noodles for the next couple of months.
But, and actually, you know what? Beside the cup noodles, that choice did not make life easier. The learning curve was very, very steep. Over time, though, the answers came, in my career and in my family. That cup-noodle job helped me to springboard into another organization that became the frontrunner of the sustainable transport movement in the United Nations framework on climate change and sustainability. It had become an extremely intellectually rewarding experience and I have since worked with countries, with investors, and with industry leaders around the world on fixing our transportation systems worldwide. Wilford has been the most supportive husband, we welcomed two boys into our family, and my work has given me all the flexibility I needed to be present for them.
When I look back, I feel a quiet witness from Heavenly Father that these trade-offs, Wilford's and mine, were really worth it.
I've often wondered what trade-offs are like for God. With His eternal perspective, you might think that His trade-offs would be easier. Yet God honours our agency completely, and that makes His choices even harder than ours.
Think about the premortal existence. When Heavenly Father presented a plan to all of us, a plan that would allow His children to grow, make choices and become like Him. But Lucifer rebelled, and a third of Heavenly Father's spirit children chose to follow him. [1] Imagine being a Father who could have forced His children to stay, but chose not to, because forced goodness isn't goodness after all. "The heavens wept over him—Lucifer." [2]
When Enoch saw God weep, he was astonished and he asked, “How could a holy and eternal God weep?" The Lord answers that these are His own children, and the work of His own hands, and asks why the heavens should not weep when they will suffer. [3]
Then there was the greatest trade-off of all. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son", [4] knowing that not all of us would choose to come back. Why? He said, "This is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." [5] These costly trade-offs were made for you and for me. Now it's our turn to honour them with the choices that we make.
So, dear friends, when you face your hard choices and decisions, big or small, ask what Heavenly Father would value. Look past what's easy to count and measure, and see what really matters. Be willing to give up something good now for something that lasts.
You won't always see the full picture right away. Wilford didn't see that when he turned down Dubai, and I didn't while we were eating cup noodles in Shanghai. I testify that Heavenly Father will guide you through these hard choices, and the light will come.
I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes:
[1] Doctrine and Covenants 29:36
[2] Doctrine and Covenants 76:26
[3] Moses 7:29, 32, 37
[4] John 3:16
[5] Moses 1:39