Wisdom words from Dr. Wu-Lang Lee

作者李五郎

Looking Back at the Path of My Foot Steps

The life is indeed short. When I look at the beginning of my career at NBER, it seems just like yesterday. But close to 40 years has passed by. And I had experienced many events during those years. Time is a very strange thing.

Every day we lost a certain amount of time without knowing it. We have to constantly remind ourselves that our time on the earth is limited and have to make good use of this limited time we have for useful activities. Nobody says life is fair. We just have to do the best we can when we are living!

Concluding Remarks – Lessons Learned

Several lessons I learned throughout my life including at least the following three:

1. You have to take initiative to get what you want. This applies to jobs, work assignments, and material things you need in life such as houses, clothing’s, autos, and other stuffs. If you are passive, no body will do that for you. In other words, you sometime have to be a little bit aggressive to get the things you deserve. This may include the selection of your partner for life.

2. There are always options in life. Sometime people failed to achieve certain things they wanted and felt frustrations for the failing. But, in life, there are always options; you just to evaluate the merits and opportunity costs of each option. Of course, not every option has the same consequences. You make the choice and you accept the consequences, good or bad. In my case, I could have returned to Taiwan after I finished my graduate study. As I noted earlier, the life consequences would be different and I accepted the consequences of the decisions I made in those critical moments in my life journey.

3. Family is critical in any endeavor. I could not achieve whatever accomplishments, if any, without the supports of my parents, brothers, sister, and relatives, and especially my partner Jen-Wen Lee. You just can not imagine the mileages a Taiwan country boy had to travel to become a U.S. Treasury manager without the family supports! For Asians like us, there is nothing more important than a supportive family as we struggle to establish ourselves in America! And I thank all members of my family for their supports.

Jen-Wen and Wu-Lang posed in TASS 2012 annual meeting (May 2012) in Rockville, MD.