George Saunders

Author of NYT Best Seller Book and Professor of English

Syracuse University, May 11 2013

George Saunders's graduation speech transcript is posted on the New York Times website.
Reportedly it is set out to become a book.

"Err in the direction on kindness".

- George Saunders.

EXCERPT

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual
process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There‘s
a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there‘s also a cure. So be a good and
proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf – seek out the most
efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in
love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for
monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do
those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce
you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if
you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare‘s, bright as
Gandhi‘s, bright as Mother Teresa‘s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this
secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits
tirelessly.

***

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 Mark S. Lewis
Professor, clinical psychology
Commencement Speech at University of Texas, 2000

"The way to be happy is to like yourself and the way to like yourself is to do only things that
make you proud."

TRANSCRIPT
I want to tell you three true stories this evening. Together they make a point that I consider one
of the great secrets of life and I hope you‘ll remember these stories, because I promise you that
you‘ll need them at some time or another. The first story is called "the First Tightrope Walker."

Story I: The First Tightrope Walker

In 1859 the Great Blondin -- the man who invented the high wire act, announced to the world
that he intended to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Five thousand people including the Prince
of Wales gathered to watch. Halfway across, Blondin suddenly stopped, steadied himself,
backflipped into the air, landed squarely on the rope then continued safely to the other side.
During that year, Blondin crossed the Falls again and again -- once blindfolded, once carrying a
stove, once in chains, and once on a bicycle. Just as he was about to begin yet another crossing,

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this time pushing a wheelbarrow, he turned to the crowd and shouted "who believes that I can
cross pushing this wheelbarrow." Every hand in the crowd went up. Blondin pointed at one man.
"Do you believe that I can do it?" he asked.
"Yes, I believe you can," said the man.
"Are you certain?" said Blondin
"Yes," said the man.
"Absolutely certain?"
"Yes, Absolutely certain."
"Thank you" said Blondin, "then sir, get into the wheelbarrow."

Now, you‘ve just had a first class education, from a first class university in a first class college,
in one of the best psychology departments in the world. Like that man in the crowd, you know a
lot of things. But also like that man, there will be times in your life when knowing things won‘t
matter as much as how scary the situation is -- and when that happens you‘ll have to decide
whether or not to get into the wheelbarrow. My second story is about how to make that decision.
It‘s also about an odd event that over the last thirty-eight years of my life came to be known as
"the bet."

Story 2: The Bet

There were three of us. Carl, Ben and I grew up on the same street in Cincinnati and we played a
lot of games together. One day in 1962 we were playing a game called careers. If you played that
game as a child, you remember that you travel around a board like in monopoly, but instead of
collecting money and property, you collect stars, hearts and dollar signs which represent fame,
happiness and money.

Well, one of us won the game -- I don't remember who-- but I do remember that whoever it was
started gloating and an argument followed about who would actually be the most successful in
achieving fame, happiness and wealth. The argument ended in "the bet." We agreed to meet 38
years later at noon of leap year day – February 29th in the year 2000. We would each tell our life
story and the person who had been most successful, presumably the one who had gathered the
most money, stars and hearts, would have the honor of humiliating the two losers by paying for
their dinners at the fanciest restaurant in Cincinnati-- The Maisonette-- which also happened to
be one of only eleven five-star restaurants in the United States.

Carl, was probably the favorite to win the bet. He was strikingly handsome and very cool. and
after we graduated from high school and then college he made a strong start, at least in terms of
dollar signs, stars and hearts. He went to New York and rose high in the organized crime world.
He owned limousines, mansions and yachts. He was well known around town and often seen in
the company or beautiful women. Then one day a freighter carrying a shipload of his smuggled
goods ran aground off the coast of the United States. Carl escaped before the coast guard seized
the ship but his fortune was wiped out in a single day. For the first time in his life his confidence
broke and he returned to Cincinnati and got a job as a TV cameraman. He had always said that
he would never live to see age 35 and one Halloween night in 1982 his prophecy was fulfilled.
Carl was killed while driving drunk at the age of 34.

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Ben, the second participant in the bet, could sell anything to anybody. He started his own
advertising agency and in 1982, the same year that Carl died, Ben‘s agency had 30 employees
and 20 million dollars in billing. Then one day after years of building the business, Ben realized
that he had no life outside of work. He sold his advertising agency, put the money in trust for his
kids, and went to India. When he returned he became a teacher in an inner city school but he
didn‘t do so well in that job and he was fired after the first year. I remember him telling me how
interesting it was to have failed. It was the first time that he had failed at anything, but he was far
from crushed. Rather, he was fascinated with the idea. Ben went through another half-dozen
jobs, all of them successful as he gradually learned how to combine his sales ability with his
desire to help others. He is now a team building consultant and troubleshooter for large
corporations. He's called in when there's a communications problem and he shows people how to
work together. And incidentally he makes several thousand dollars a day for doing so.

Me--I went into teaching. I have to tell you that not once in 38 years did I think that I would lose
the bet. Not because I thought my success greater than Ben's or Carl's, but because I couldn't
imagine anybody feeling more fulfilled than I felt. There is an inexpressible joy that comes,
standing in front of a large class and knowing that the next thing you are going to say will
change their way of looking at the world forever. I had that joy and I didn't see how Ben or Carl
could match it.

For thirty-eight years, whenever anyone got a raise, or a new job or got married or divorced or
broke a limb we recalculated their standing in the bet. Everybody had a chance to win. We all
had interesting lives, we all experienced the best and worst that life offers. We all travelled to far
places, lived under extraordinary conditions, and weathered grave dangers. We all got married,
we all got divorced, we all remarried. We all had babies. We all became incredibly rich, we all
went dead broke. We all did all of those things but not in the same order, and that kept things
interesting. So much so that when Ben jumped out of an airplane on his fortieth birthday, I
jumped with him just in case we later decided that that kind of thing mattered. Don't
misunderstand me. None of us particularly cared about wining the bet, but we cared mightily
about not losing.

As leap year day 2000 approached, Ben and I realized that neither of us knew how to judge who
had been most successful. We knew what we had meant by success when we had played that
careers game so many years before but we no longer thought that the board game reflected
reality. I can't tell you how much of a shock that realization created. When we first started on the
road to success it seemed that the only problem was how to get from here to there. Only after we
had gone 38 years down that road did we realize that the goal had changed.

That was the nicest part of the bet. I am sure that even without the bet at some point in our lives
we would have sat down and assessed whether or not we had been successful. But I am also sure
that if we had not made the bet, and if we had not had had to come up with the criteria for
deciding it, we never would have discovered how the meaning of "success" had changed for us
over the years.

Last February 29th, Ben and I met at our old high school to decide the bet. A few months earlier,
we had asked the English honors class there to help us and they had posed to us a series of essay

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questions about success. We had sent our answers the month before. Now they questioned us
about our answers in person – in what I called the "swimsuit contest." Along the way, we had
also acquired newspaper, television and magazine reporters – why I‘m not sure, but I presume
that it‘s because of the billions of childhood bets that get made, we were the only two who were
competitive enough to keep ours going for a lifetime. Winning or losing had always included
lifetime gloating rights, but with the press on hand there was the potential for national
humiliation.

The biggest surprise of the meeting with the students was the discovery that in our lives Ben and
I had both learned the same central thing about success, and what we had learned had nothing to
do with fame or money or happiness. It had to do with fear. Both of us had learned that on
occasion, life will look you in the eye and say "get into the wheelbarrow." At that moment, all of
your knowledge won't matter. All that will matter is how badly you need to get to the other side
of the tightrope and how much you are afraid of falling.

Ben faced a wheelbarrow when he quit his business. He climbed in and with no money, started a
new life. I got into my wheelbarrow about ten years ago on a lonely road in India when I broke
my leg hundreds of miles from help. In the two weeks that it took to get to medical care, I
learned things about survival that professors don‘t often get to learn. Carl faced his wheelbarrow
when he lost everything. Maybe he would have climbed in after a time, but we‘ll never know –
As they say in the jungle "sometimes a bird falls out of the nest." That‘s what happened to Carl.

Why did Carl hit bottom and quit while Ben hit bottom, failed in his first job after that, and yet
still had enough spirit to be fascinated with the situation rather than crushed? The answer has to
do with the nature of success and the secret of life that I mentioned in my introduction. That
secret is the subject of this third and last story. So, put away the bet for a moment. I'll and tell
you who won after this last story called "The Worst Olympic Ski Jumper Ever.

Story 3: The Worst Olympic Ski Jumper Ever

Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards was Britain's only hope for a medal in ski jumping in the 1988
Olympics in Calgary. On the day of the event, the winner jumped 403 feet. Eddie the Eagle, in a
borrowed ski suit and goggles held together with tape, jumped 238 feet. He finished 56th in a
field of 56. For a while he was a laughingstock. Television commentators poked fun -- reporters
tried to make him look foolish. But Eddie refused to be embarrassed. "This is the best day in my
life. I'm representing Britain in the Olympics," he said -- " I just jumped 72 meters through the
air -- that's a hard thing to do." Eddie was having a great time. Then somebody noticed that
Eddie, was the first Olympic ski jumper that Britain had ever had. He had, by default, stumbled
off with the British jumping record. Eddie became the darling of the public.

Eddie got rich over the next few years, giving endorsements. But then things went bad. He lost
his money in bad investments, he was barred from the 1992 Olympics and he crashed in a post
Olympic jump. "Broke me collarbone, fractured me skull, tore ligaments in me knee, damaged
me kidney... And cracked me ribs."

The last I heard of Eddie, he was practicing on a jump simulator in his apartment, more than a

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thousand miles from the nearest real jump. And what does he say about his brush with glory now
that the cameras have turned elsewhere?

"Calgary? Oh, it was brilliant. That was my dream since I was 8. Life since has been great. I've
had a wonderful time, been all over the world. Been to lots of interesting places, done lots of
interesting things, met lots of interesting people. I wouldn't give that up for the world."

What I learned from the bet, and what I want to tell you tonight, is what Eddie the Eagle seemed
to know all along: There are times when you are going to do well, and times when you're going
to fail. But neither the doing well, nor the failure is the measure of success. The measure of
success is what you think about what you've done. Let me put that another way: The way to be
happy is to like yourself and the way to like yourself is to do only things that make you proud

When Ben realized that he was failing, he risked everything to start again. He wasn‘t an instant
success, but he kept trying. He never declared himself a failure, because he was proud of himself
through every effort. When Carl failed as a criminal, he had nothing to be proud of. He wasn‘t
proud of his life. He had to rely on the world‘s opinion of him and the world‘s opinion was that
he was a failure.

The way to be happy is to like yourself. That‘s the real reason not to lie or cheat or turn away in
fear. There‘s that old joke, not very funny, that goes "no matter where you go, there you are."
That‘s true. The person who you‘re with most in life is yourself and if you don‘t like yourself
you‘re always with somebody you don‘t like.

When Ben and I finally went to the Maisonette to settle the bet with a 4 hour, 12 course, multi-
vintage wine dinner, we split the $600 tab. If you take that to mean that the outcome was a tie
then I haven't made my point. The fact is, that along with our final definition of success came the
understanding that both of us had won. So by the rules of the bet we were each bound to pay for
the other's dinner.

Ok, here‘s the part of the talk that will be on the test: There are
many people around you today who have great hopes for your future. I myself, have three hopes
for you:

First, there is going to come a time in your life when in order to

succeed you will have to trust -- when you will have to make a big leap of faith -- and when that
time comes I hope you will swallow your fear and get into the wheelbarrow.

Second, whatever strong belief you now hold about what it means to be successful, I hope you
will stay open to the possibility that you‘ve got it all wrong and graciously accept your new
awareness when it comes, with gratitude and humility.

And third, my dear friends, I hope you'll always be like Eddie the
Eagle and only do things that make you proud so that you can truly be your own hero.

Well that's pretty much all I have to tell you. Go get started on all

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of the successes and failures and all of the other great things that you will do in your life. But
when, in the course of some business or
social ski jump, you come in dead last, remember to smile for the
cameras -- And be sure along the way to become so proud of yourself that when the cameras turn
to away you can go home alone and say to yourself. "Oh it was brilliant."

David Carr
NYT Columnist, Writer, and Author
University of California at Berkeley, School of Journalism 2014

Don't just do what you're good at. If you stay in your comfort zone, youll never know what
you're capable of.

GRADUATION SPEECH EXCERPTS

I don‘t want to take an opportunity commencing at such an august institution in not throwing
down just some short bits of advice. I mean, you‘d do it if you were up here, wouldn‘t you? Just
a little bit. These are ten bits of graduation advice you won‘t see on any BuzzFeed listicle.

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Remember my credentials, though. I was on welfare. I became dependent on the state for both
food and medical treatments. I became a single parent at a time when nobody would trust me
with a ficus plant. Other than that, I‘ve been sort of a model citizen. So take what applies, and
leave the rest, that‘s what I‘m saying.

Right now, in your class, I know you guys are all having your kumbaya moment and you‘re
hugging each other and saying how great you all are. But there are gunners, who are really just
heads and shoulders above everybody, and they‘re bound for glory. You know what? They‘re not
the ones that are going to change the world. It‘s somebody that was underestimated. It‘s
somebody that you do not know that‘s really going to kill it. I guarantee it. I guarantee it as
somebody who has worked with young people. And you know what? Maybe you‘re that person.
I just want to say.

This has been a theme, and I just want to echo, do what‘s in front of you. When you leave
school, you‘ve got your loans weighing down on you, you‘ve got parents saying ―What the hell
are you going to do with all this?‖ Just do what is in front of you. Don‘t worry about the plot to
take over the world. Just do what is in front of you, and do it well. I think that if you concentrate
on your plot to take over the world you‘re going to miss things.

Journalism is like housekeeping. It‟s a series of small, discrete acts performed over and
over. It‟s really the little things that make it better. So don‟t think about the broad sweep of
your journalism. Just do a good job on what‘s in front of you. Working on your grand plan is
like shoveling snow that hasn‘t fallen yet. Just do the next right thing.

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I think you should be a worker among workers. I say that because we‘re in a brand of narcissism
and personal brand. Don‘t worry about branding yourself, other than not being naked on your
social feeds. I don‘t think it‘s really important to work a lot on brand development. I believe in
social media engagement, and I‘ve got a little problem with Twitter as Ed points out. It‘s more
important that you fit in before you stick out, that‘s what I‘m saying.

Number five is the mom rule. Don‘t do anything you couldn‘t explain to your ma. All these big,
ethical conundrums where — Ed and me will run a three-day symposium on ethics, when in fact,
if you can‘t explain what you‘re up to with your mother without her saying, ―Honey that seems a
little naughty to me, what you‘re doing. It seems a little bad, that isn‘t nice.‖ Don‘t do it. Don‘t
go near it. Use the mom rule. Call her up. She‘s a great resource.

Don‘t just do what you‘re good at — that‘s number six. If you stay in your comfort zone, you‘ll
never know what you‘re capable of. As has been pointed out, you need to learn to experience
frustration, and you need to experience that frustration as a teachable moment, and you
need to humble yourself and ask for help. Can you help me build your website? Yes, you
can.

Being a journalist is permission for life time learning. Don‘t be a know-it-all. Ask the people
around you.

Number seven is, be present. I don‘t want to go all Oprah on you. So many people spend time
like their phone right now is burning a hole in their pocket. Like, who‟s on there? What are
they talking about? And you know what‟s going on when you‟re thinking about that? Your
whole life. Your whole life is going on.

I can‘t tell you the times I‘ve gone to some extraordinary event where some big throbbing brain
is talking. Everybody‘s walking around like this. They never look up. And it‘s like, if your head
is in your phone, the scenery never changes. So don‟t worry about documenting the
moment. Experience the moment.

I have close to half a million followers on Twitter, but the person who needs to know what
I‟m doing is me. Here I stand. This is what I‟m doing. I got some pictures earlier, and I might
tweet them out later, but Twitter isn‘t waiting to see what I think. I need to experience this
extraordinary moment as it unfolds, and maybe later on I‘ll put a photo on Facebook or tweet
something out.

Look who you‘re speaking to. Get your face out of your phone. Do not be a bystander in your
own life. You‘ll miss everything.

You should take responsibility for, not just the good stuff, but the bad stuff. I have noticed in
leadership, in covering people over and over, it‘s the people who are capable of taking ownership
over failure and apologizing very directly for their shortcomings that succeed.

We‟re all broken, in one way or another. To pretend or expect otherwise is stupid. And
when you come up short, just say so, don‟t make excuses. Excuses — they explain

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everything and they excuse nothing. Just be honest about what you did wrong, take
ownership, and resolve to do better.

I think this is very important, number nine, is to be honest. This is a tactical approach these days.
People always say, ―I love that thing you‘ve got where you just say whatever‘s on your mind.
You just come right out with it. It‘s like, you know, the truth.‖ It‘s like, well, that‘s not really a
tactic. That‘s a way of living. That‘s a way of being.

When you‘re honest with someone, when the door opens and you have to have a difficult
conversation, just walk through it and have the difficult conversation. Show the people in front
of you the respect to be honest with them.

One of the things I hate about being in California is you guys always — when you talk, you
sound like you‘re agreeing with each other. You‘re not! You‘re having — oh I totally hear what
you‘re saying and I‘m sure we can work with that. We obviously gotta loop in some other — and
it‘s like, no, you‘re wrong, I‘m right, here‘s why.

When you develop this gimmick, this reputation for telling the truth, people tend to listen to what
you have to say.

And last thing is, don‘t be afraid to be ambitious. I‘m living a pipe dream, and I‘m living it
because I wanted it. I wanted it really badly. I was 34 years old, washed out of my profession, on
welfare, terrible reputation, single parent, and I just met the woman who would be my wife. And
she said, ―Where do you see yourself five years from now?‖ I said, ―Well, I want to be figure on
the national media scene.‖ And she said, ―Well honey, you‘re unemployed and you‘re on welfare
now.‖ I know! I‘m just trying to articulate a goal.

The other thing I see is the people who doubt you, like you‘re gonna get out of here and you‘re
gonna have friends who work for Morgan Stanley or whoever they working for, they‘re working
for a hot dot-com. And they say, well, good luck with that, you‘re going to sink below your
waist. Those are your friends, the people who doubt you. Because you‘re going to make fools out
of them.

I often think of the people who never thought I would do anything. Those are your allies. Those
are your little secret friends. You keep them close.

I think that what‘s important — I was on a panel with Gay Talese, the great New York Times
journalist, great narrative journalist. And he was, people were asking him about the great age of
journalism. We‘re Boswells. We sit in a cubicle and we write about people who write. That we
end up in this meta, crazy place where we don‘t have anything original, we‘re just putting a little
topspin on everything that‘s going by.

And the great Gay Talese said, we are outside people. We leave, we find people more interesting
than us, and we come back and we tell their stories.

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Right now, everything looks impossible. Think back when you applied to be here. How many
bodies did you crawl over to get here, for one thing? You‘re extraordinary just by getting in here.
And now you made it to the end — improbably, not everyone probably did, but you‘re here.
You‘re standing here. So when you see the big incline ahead of us, just keep in mind these last
two years. You totally beat the odds, and you fucking landed it. You‘re here.

Odds against you, here you stand. Grads of the Berkeley School of Journalism. Resolve to be
worthy of that. Resolve to do important things with that. Be grateful for the good things that have
come your way.

This small group before you, ladies and gentlemen, I‘m sure will make a big dent in this world.
Maybe somebody should write a story about that.

My deepest congratulations to you, the family; you, the faculty; but most of all, you guys. I‘m
proud of you and I don‘t even know you.

Joyce DiDonato
Mezzo-soprano
Juilliard School | May 23, 2014

Bring that innocent, childlike sense of wonder to your craft, and do whatever you need to
find that truth again. It will continually teach you how to be present, how to be alive, and how to
let go.

Commencement Speech Excerpts:

Chairman Kovner, President Polisi, most distinguished honorees, dedicated family, friends,
faculty, and to EACH of the talented, ambitious, courageous, adventurous Juilliard graduates of
the class of 2014 before us here today, thank you!

I am somehow, miraculously standing before you all today, regaled in an admittedly different
kind of designer gown, dispensing tidbits of ―wisdom‖ before a group of artists who – and this is
honestly no exaggeration – artists who I never could have been classmates with, because there
truly is no way I could have gained admission to your school back in the day. I simply wasn‘t
ready back then. That is the truth. One never, EVER knows where their journey will lead them.
But YOURS has led you here.

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, right here, right now, in this single, solitary,
monumental moment in your life– is to decide, without apology, to commit to the JOURNEY,
and not to the outcome.

There are a few more hard-earned truths – as I have come to know them – that have arisen on my
personal odyssey as a singer and at first glance, they may seem like harbingers of bad news, but I

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invite you to shift your thinking just a bit (or perhaps even radically) – you guys are artists, so
thankfully you‘re already brilliant at thinking outside the conventional box! I offer these four
little observations as tools to perhaps help you as you go forward, enabling you to empower
yourselves from the very core of your being, so that when the challenges of this artistic life
catapult and hurl themselves directly and unapologetically into your heart and soul – which they
will do, repeatedly – you will have some devices at your disposal to return to, to help you find
your center again, so that your voice, your art and your SOUL will not be derailed, but you will
instead find the strength to make yourself heard, and seen, and FELT. Then you will have the
power to transform yourselves, to transform others, and, indeed, to transform the world.

My first observation:

You will never make it. That‘s the bad news, but the ―shift‖ I invite you to make is to see it as
fabulous, outstanding news, for I don‘t believe there is actually an ―it‖. ―It‖ doesn‘t exist for an
Artist. One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, right here, right now, in this single,
solitary, monumental moment in your life– is to decide, without apology, to commit to the
JOURNEY, and not to the outcome. The outcome will almost always fall short of your
expectations, and if you‘re chasing that elusive, often deceptive goal, you‘re likely in for a very
tough road, for there will always be that one note that could have soared more freely, the one line
reading that could have been just that much more truthful, that third arabesque which could have
been slightly more extended, that one adagio which could have been just a touch more magical.
There will always be more freedom to acquire and more truth to uncover. As an artist, you will
never arrive at a fixed destination. THIS is the glory and the reward of striving to master your
craft and embarking on the path of curiosity and imagination, while being tireless in your pursuit
of something greater than yourself.

A second truth:

The work will never end. This may sound dreadfully daunting – especially today when you are
finally getting out of here!!!! But what I have found is that when things become overwhelming –
which they will, repeatedly ~ whether it‘s via unexpected, rapid success or as heart-wrenching,
devastating failure ~ the way back to your center is simply to RETURN TO THE WORK. Often
times it will be the only thing that makes sense. And it is there where you will find solace and
truth. At the keyboard, at the barre, with your bow in hand, articulating your arpeggios ~ always
return to your home base and trust that you will find your way again via the music, the pulse, the
speech, the rhythm. Be patient, but know that it will always be there for you – even if in some
moments you lack the will to be there for it. All it asks is that you show up, fully present as you
did when you first discovered the magic of your own artistic world when you were young. Bring
that innocent, childlike sense of wonder to your craft, and do whatever you need to find that truth
again. It will continually teach you how to be present, how to be alive, and how to let go. Therein
lies not only your artistic freedom, but your personal freedom as well!

Perhaps my favorite truth:

It’s not about you. This can be a particularly hard, and humbling lesson to face – and it‘s one
I‘ve had to continue to learn at every stage of my own journey – but this is a freeing and

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empowering truth. You may not yet realize it, but you haven‘t signed up for a life of glory and
adulation (although that MAY well come, and I wish with every fiber of my being, that it WILL
come in the right form for every single one of you – however, that is not your destination, for
glory is always transitory and will surely disappear just as fleetingly and arbitrarily as it arrived.)
The truth is, you have signed up for a life of service by going into the Arts. And the life-altering
results of that service in other people‘s lives will NEVER disappear as fame unquestionably will.
You are here to serve the words, the director, the melody, the author, the chord progression, the
choreographer ~ but above all and most importantly, with every breath, step, and stroke of the
keyboard, you are here to serve humanity.

You, as alumni of the 109th graduating class of The Juilliard School are now servants to the ear
that needs quiet solace, and the eye that needs the consolation of beauty, servants to the mind
that needs desperate repose or pointed inquiry, to the heart that needs invitation to flight or silent
understanding, and to the soul that needs safe landing, or fearless, relentless enlightenment. You
are a servant to the sick one who needs healing through the beauty and peace of the symphony
you will compose through blood-shot eyes and sleepless nights. You are an attendant to the lost
one who needs saving through the comforting, probing words you will conjure up from the ether,
as well as from your own heroic moments of strife and triumph. You are a steward to the closed
and blocked one who needs to feel that vital, electric, joyful pulse of life that eludes them as they
witness you stop time as you pirouette and jettè across the stage on your tired legs and bleeding
toes. You are a vessel to the angry and confused one who needs a protected place to release their
rage as they watch your eyes on the screen silently weep in pain as you relive your own private
hell. You are a servant to the eager, naïve, optimistic ones who will come behind you with wide
eyes and wild dreams, reminding you of yourself, as you teach and shape and mold them, even
though you may be plagued with haunting doubts yourself, just as your teachers likely were –
and you will reach out to them and generously invite them to soar and thrive, because we are
called to share this thing called Art.

You are also serving one other person: yourself. You are serving the relentless, passionate,
fevered force within you that longs to grow and expand and feel and connect and create; that part
of you that craves a way to express raw elation and passion, and to make manifest hard-core
blissful rapture and – PLEASE, I beg of you, never forget this – FUN! Don‘t ever abandon that
intoxicating sense of FUN in your ART. Thought that, you are serving your truth. My hope for
you is that you will let that truth guide you in every moment of your journey. If you can find that,
you have everything. That‘s why ―making it‖ is, in the end, utterly insignificant. LIVING it,
BREATHING it, SERVING it … that‘s where your joy will lie.

I want to share with you a quick email from a soldier on the front lines of our Arts: an
elementary/middle school teacher from Salt Lake City, Ms. Audrey Hill, who is fighting the
great fight! She brought her students to the recent HD telecast of ―La Cenerentola‖, and wrote
the following note to me:

―One of my boys … a 5th grader… wrote in his review this morning that one of his favorite parts
(besides the spaghetti food-fight scene) was where at the end you were singing about getting
revenge, and how he really liked that your revenge was going to be forgiveness. This boy was
new to our school this year, has a beautiful singing voice, and has been teased a lot. I have seen

13
him getting more and more angry as the year was coming to a close and today it seemed like all
that had disappeared. It was very moving for me to experience.‖

* That‘s exactly who you are serving as you now go out into the world. How lucky are you?!??!

Ah, so OK, I lied … I think this may be my favorite truth:

The world needs you. Now, the world may not exactly realize it, but wow, does it need you. It is
yearning, starving, dying for you and your healing offer of service through your Art. We need
you to help us understand that which is bigger than ourselves, so that we can stop feeling so
small, so isolated, so helpless that, in our fear, we stop contributing that which is unique to us:
that distinct, rare, individual quality which the world is desperately crying out for and eagerly
awaiting. We need you to remind us what unbridled, unfiltered, childlike exuberance feels like,
so we remember, without apology or disclaimer, to laugh, to play, to FLY and to stop taking
EVERYTHING so damn seriously. We need you to remind us what empathy is by taking us
deep into the hearts of those who are, God forbid, different than us – so that we can recapture the
hope of not only living in peace with each other, but THRIVING together in a vibrant way where
each of us grows in wonder and joy. We need you to make us feel an integral PART of a shared
existence through the communal, universal, forgiving language of music, of dance, of poetry and
Art – so that we never lose sight of the fact that we are all in this together and that we are all
deserving of a life that overflows with immense possibility, improbable beauty and relentless
truth.

What an honor it is to share in this day with you – savor every single moment of it – and then fly
out of this building, armed with the knowledge that YOU make a difference, that your art is
NECESSARY, and that the world is eagerly awaiting to hear what YOU have to say. Go on,
make us laugh, cry, dance, FEEL, unite, and believe in the incredible power of humanity to
overcome anything!

14
 JENNIFER LEE
"Frozen" Screenwriter and Director
University of New Hampshire | May 2014

And if I‘ve learned one thing, it‘s that self-doubt is one of the most destructive forces. It
makes you defensive instead of open, reactive instead of active. Self-doubt is consuming and
cruel and my hope is today that we can all collectively agree to ban it.

SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

Thank you President Huddleston, distinguished guests, honored faculty, and parents…but
especially thank you to the University of New Hampshire‘s graduating class of 2014. It‘s so
fabulous to be back. I‘ve already partied at the Field House, at Murkland, at the Alumni Center
and the Presidents place…just like old times. I first came to this campus when I was just 14 and
my older cousin Mark was starting as a freshman. I sat on a bench in front of Thompson Hall and
I thought – this is what college is supposed to feel like. Mark paved the way for my older sister
to come here, then me, then my younger cousin Alex…who met his wife here. So my family has
deep roots here and deeper debt.

And it really does feel like I was just here yesterday…. So much so, that when I was asked to be
the commencement speaker, my first reaction was, I am way too young. And then my sister so
15
kindly pointed out that I was 42, which I then realized made me pretty much exactly twice your
age…which I then realized pretty much sucked.

But then I moved onto a worse thought, which was: I‘m not good enough to be the
commencement speaker…‖ and ultimately it was that horrible thought that made me say yes.

It did, because in that thought I realized there might be something during my few extra rounds on
this planet that I had learned that might be of use to you. And it has to do with self-doubt, that
―I‘m- -not-good-enough‖ motto of living, something I‘m a bit of an expert on.

My sister and I grew up on a poor street in a rich town. It was bad enough that everyone in
America was wearing Seventies clothes, but we were in hand-me-down Seventies clothes. And
to make it worse, I had the energy of the Tasmanian devil and the grace of a pile of pick-up
sticks. My hair was perpetually full of knots. Stains on the clothes. Goodness, I was the perfect
target for bullies. And I was bullied. Every day. For years. And something happens to you,
when everything you do is fuel for ridicule and mockery. Eventually, you drink the bully
koolaid and self-doubt takes.

People talk about the dangers of rose-colored glasses, but let me tell you, the lenses of self-
doubt are far worse. They are nasty. Thick and filthy… they‟re covered in swamp scum
and mold -- there‟s like a family of snails living on them. And they‟re nearly impossible to
see past.

Were it not for my family loving me, brushing out my tangled hair, fostering my love of books
and drawing and creating, I‘m not sure what I would have done. They helped me find my relief
in story telling. Reading, writing, drawing, were moments of escape from myself. Lying in bed at
night, I‘d concoct magical, grand, epic and yes sometimes musical adventures, stories of wrongs
righted, justices served, bullies revenged. I guess it should have been a sign, but I was wearying
those darned lenses of self-doubt and I and couldn‘t see it.

And then something happened. I noticed I wasn‘t alone in this feeling of not being good enough.
It started right after I made my first friend again. I need to take a second to acknowledge her.
She‘s here and she was the first person to step between the bullies and me. Her name is Jen and
she‘s been my friend for 30 years now. So with her, as the two over. Jens, we entered that
horrible self-doubt festering incubator called high school. You know what I mean; it‘s like all
warm and full of puberty and hair…and it smells, and while you‘re just trying to get used to your
grown-up face and body, your GPA is pulsing in the center like the eye of Sauron. And before
you know it, the lenses of self-doubt are so thick you need like a big ole‟ strap to hold them
up. I remember looking around at my fellow classmates and wondering if anyone thought they
were good enough.

...it‘s just that when you are free from self-doubt, you fail better, because you don‘t have
your defenses up, you can accept the criticism. You don‘t become so preoccupied with that
failure that you forget how to learn from it, you forget how to grow. When you believe in
yourself, you succeed better. Hours spent questioning, doubting, fearing, can be given over to
working, exploring, living .

16
And then I met him. Here a UNH, in fact, a student, who for whatever magical reason never
doubted himself. He was magnetic, but kind, infectious and motivating. His name was Jason
MacConkey and he could sell you a car while convincing you to write him a love song. Our time
together at UNH was some of the best years of my life: Yes, I lived at Stoke Hall, but creatively I
had Ham-Smith, Gay Nardone‘s dance company, my KD gang, and wonderful class called foods
and dudes. Of course back then things were a bit different here at UNH. Kegs were still legal on
campus, grunge was the fashion, bathing was undervalued…The many houses of the greek
system were at their most powerful and at war with the bureaucrats…there were wildcats,
endless snow, debauchery; it was like Game of Thrones, I‘m telling you. Such good times.
Really.

But I will say that, during those years, while I could admire Jason‘s comfortable acceptance of
himself, his motivating spirit, I was not quite ready to let go of doubt for myself. But in April of
our junior year Jason was killed in a boating accident. And life knocked those lenses of doubt off
my face so hard I went right down with them.

When you wake up so young with such loss, there is no doubt, only grief. And in that grief you
see clearly. The world drips with color. Death exaggerates the significance of life. And you
suddenly know better than to waste a second doubting. I loved New York City and books and
storytelling. And so I graduated and moved to New York, found Book publishing, which led to
book writing, then to screenplay writing. And over a course of decade I settled back into life, but
I also unknowingly slipped back on those lenses of doubt. I remember looking at Columbia film
school website afraid to apply. Because I wanted to go so badly; but feared I wasn‘t good
enough. The only reason I sent in that application because of Jason. He was a reminder that if
there was a chance to live the life I wanted, I owed it to him to go for it. And I got in. For two
decadent years and only $60,000+, I was going to make movies.

In film school, the first thing you study is character. And you learn that insecure
characters, characters that don‟t think much of themselves, are not very interesting, they
aren‟t inspirational, or hopeful and no one wants to watch them. Ouch. But the only
characters worse than insecure characters are perfect characters. They are lifeless, boring,
generic, they never feel authentic. The best characters, the ones we love, who inspire us,
who we want to remember forever, are flawed, and one-of-a-kind. The only characters not
good enough are ones who aren‟t complex, or messy, or vulnerable, the ones who aren‟t
real.

While in film school, I met a man named Phil Johnston. He was in my opinion the most talented
person in the program. An Emmy-award-winning journalist, with the most gloriously twisted
sense of humor. You might know him from a film he wrote called Cedar Rapids or as my co-
writer on Wreck-it Ralph. Anyway, back in grad school, he thought I was good enough to work
with. Again and again he thought that. Iwould always act so surprised that someone so good
would want to work with me.

And one day he made me promise to do something that would change my life forever. He said:
“you can be as insecure as you want in your life, but just promise me you‟ll leave that
insecurity out of your work. Just know, you‟re good enough.” And I did.

17
Six months later, I had two film options and I got my first paycheck as a screenwriter. One year
later, Phil I were writing Wreck-it Ralph together. And then…and then came…FROZEN.

So while I stand here before you, a person so far from perfect that there isn‘t even a subway line
to perfect anywhere near me. Gypsy cabs won‘t even go near my neighborhood of imperfection,
I‘m THAT not perfect… maybe… I am enough.

And if I‟ve learned one thing, it‟s that self-doubt is one of the most destructive forces. It
makes you defensive instead of open, reactive instead of active. Self-doubt is consuming
and cruel and my hope is today that we can all collectively agree to ban it.

Think about it: how many hours do you spend analyzing yourself? Your looks, you‘re hair, too
thin, too straight, too curly; how much time do you spend being disgusted by yourself, cringing
over the dumb thing you said, worrying you won‘t get a date because while you‘re hilarious in
your head but you speak it sounds like you‘re explaining tax code. Think about all the crazy
ways you feel different from everyone else…and now take the judgment out of it…what you‘re
left with is such a holy dynamic, original character, the kind that could lead an epic story.

And now think to the moments in your life when you forgot to doubt yourself. When you
were so inspired that you were just living and creating, and working. Pay attention to those
moments, they‟re trying to Reach you through those lenses of doubt and trying to show you
your potential.

One side note: being good enough doesn‘t let you off the hook to be lazy. It‘s not an excuse to
spend your twenties on your parents‘ couch admiring your enough-ness.

It‘s not like a free pass to get out of changing and growing and maturing. No, it‘s just that when
you are free from self-doubt, you fail better, because you don‟t have your defenses up, you
can accept the criticism. You don‟t become so preoccupied with that failure that you forget
how to learn from it, you forget how to grow. When you believe in yourself, you succeed
better. Hours spent questioning, doubting, fearing, can be given over to working ,
exploring, living .

You will still fail a lot. In fact, people to your face will say, “that is not good enough .” But
just don‟t make it about yourself. If you can learn to not take it personally, you will be able
to listen to the constructive criticism and find it inspiring. And it might motivate you and
show you that you are capable of far more than you ever imagined. I will say if we made the first
draft of FROZEN, if I‘d been too insecure and defensive to listen to the criticism and notes, if I
wasted my time trying to prove I was good enough instead of using that time to make FROZEN
what it needed to be, it would have been a far different movie and I guarantee you, I would be
standing here. Thing is when you accept that who you are is enough; you become the biggest
participant in making your work and even your relationships better.

And get this, they say that the number one thing driving bullies is insecurity, so we ban self-
doubt and we kill two birds with one stone right here.

18
So what do you say? Can we go ahead and ban self - doubt right now?

Okay, so now that self-doubt is out of the way, think about it; what would you dare to do?

I won‘t go too English Lit on you, but there‘s this line in Raise ― High the Roof Beam Carpenters
‖ by J. D. Salinger , when Seymour says to his brother, Buddy, an inspiring writer, that the first
question he‟ll be asked when he dies is, “Did you have your stars out?” I love that idea.
That you have stars in you, bright vibrant stars that could shine if you worked hard
enough to get them out.

But while, you might have those stars, you won‟t see them if you‟re wearing the big-ole
nasty lenses of doubt. Take them off and see how bright the sky is.

So if I can leave you with one thing today and I‘m going to ask your parents to please remind
you if you ever forget, please know that from here on out, you are enough, dare I say , more
than enough. Thank you and congratulations!

JIM CARREY
Actor
Maharishi University of Management | May 24, 2014

The decisions we make in this moment are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose
our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach
and ridiculous to expect so we never ask the universe for it.

SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

Thank you Bevan, thank you all!

I brought one of my paintings to show you today. Hope you guys are gonna be able see it okay.
It‘s not one of my bigger pieces. You might wanna move down front — to get a good look at it.
(kidding)

Faculty, Parents, Friends, Dignitaries... Graduating Class of 2014, and all the dead baseball
players coming out of the corn to be with us today. (laughter) After the harvest there‘s no place
to hide — the fields are empty — there is no cover there! (laughter)

I am here to plant a seed that will inspire you to move forward in life with enthusiastic hearts and
a clear sense of wholeness. The question is, will that seed have a chance to take root, or will I be
sued by Monsanto and forced to use their seed, which may not be totally ―Ayurvedic.‖ (laughter)

19
Excuse me if I seem a little low energy tonight — today — whatever this is. I slept with my head
to the North last night. (laughter) Oh man! Oh man! You know how that is, right kids? Woke up
right in the middle of Pitta and couldn‘t get back to sleep till Vata rolled around, but I didn‘t
freak out. I used that time to eat a large meal and connect with someone special on Tinder.
(laughter)

Life doesn‘t happen to you, it happens for you. How do I know this? I don‘t, but I‘m making
sound, and that‘s the important thing. That‘s what I‘m here to do. Sometimes, I think that‘s one
of the only things that are important. Just letting each other know we‘re here, reminding each
other that we are part of a larger self. I used to think Jim Carrey is all that I was...

Just a flickering light

A dancing shadow

The great nothing masquerading as something you can name

Dwelling in forts and castles made of witches – wishes! Sorry, a Freudian slip there

Seeking shelter in caves and foxholes, dug out hastily

An archer searching for his target in the mirror

Begging to be enslaved

Pleading for my chains

Blinded by longing and tripping over paradise – can I get an ―Amen‖?! (applause)

You didn‘t think I could be serious did ya‘? I don't think you understand who you're dealing
with! I have no limits! I cannot be contained because I‘m the container. You can‘t contain the
container, man! You can‘t contain the container! (laughter)

I used to believe that who I was ended at the edge of my skin, that I had been given this little
vehicle called a body from which to experience creation, and though I couldn‘t have asked for a
sportier model, (laughter) it was after all a loaner and would have to be returned. Then, I learned
that everything outside the vehicle was a part of me, too, and now I drive a convertible. Top
down wind in my hair! (laughter)

I am elated and truly, truly, truly excited to be present and fully connected to you at this
important moment in your journey. I hope you‘re ready to open the roof and take it all in?!
(audience doesn‘t react) Okay, four more years then! (laughter)

I want to thank the Trustees, Administrators and Faculty of MUM for creating an institution
worthy of Maharishi‘s ideals of education. A place that teaches the knowledge and experience
necessary to be productive in life, as well as enabling the students, through Transcendental

20
Meditation and ancient Vedic knowledge to slack off twice a day for an hour and a half!!
(laughter) — don‘t think you‘re fooling me!!! — (applause) but, I guess it has some benefits. It
does allow you to separate who you truly are and what‟s real, from the stories that run
through your head.

You have given them the ability to walk behind the mind‟s elaborate set decoration, and to
see that there is a huge difference between a dog that is going to eat you in your mind and
an actual dog that‟s going to eat you. (laughter) That may sound like no big deal, but many
never learn that distinction and spend a great deal of their lives living in fight or flight
response.

I‘d like to acknowledge all you wonderful parents — way to go for the fantastic job you‘ve done
— for your tireless dedication, your love, your support, and most of all, for the attention you‘ve
paid to your children. I have a saying, ―Beware the unloved,‖ because they will eventually hurt
themselves... or me! (laughter)

But when I look at this group here today, I feel really safe! I do! I‘m just going to say it — my
room is not locked! My room is not locked! (laughter) No doubt some of you will turn out to be
crooks! But white-collar stuff — Wall St. ya‘ know, that type of thing — crimes committed by
people with self-esteem! Stuff a parent can still be proud of in a weird way. (laughter)

And to the graduating class of 2017 — minus 3! You didn't let me finish! (laughter) —
Congratulations! (applause) Yes, give yourselves a round of applause, please. You are the
vanguard of knowledge and consciousness; a new wave in a vast ocean of possibilities. On the
other side of that door, there is a world starving for new leadership, new ideas.

I‘ve been out there for 30 years! She‘s a wild cat! (laughter) Oh, she‘ll rub up against your leg
and purr until you pick her up and start pettin‘ her, and out of nowhere she‘ll swat you in the
face. Sure it‘s rough sometimes but that‘s OK, ‗cause they‘ve got soft serve ice cream with
sprinkles! (laughter) I guess that‘s what I‘m really here to say; sometimes it‘s okay to eat your
feelings! (laughter)

Fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much. You can spend
your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about your pathway to the future, but all there
will ever be is what‟s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are
based in either love or fear.

So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want
seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe
for it. I‘m saying, I‘m the proof that you can ask the universe for it — please! (applause) And if
it doesn't happen for you right away, it‘s only because the universe is so busy fulfilling my order.
It‘s party size! (laughter)

My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn‘t believe that was possible for him, and
so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12

21
years old, he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could to
survive.

I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at
what you don‟t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love. (applause)

That‘s not the only thing he taught me though: I watched the affect my father‘s love and humor
had on the world around me, and I thought, ―That‘s something to do, that‘s something worth my
time.‖

It wasn‘t long before I started acting up. People would come over to my house and they would be
greeted by a 7 yr old throwing himself down a large flight of stairs. (laughter) They would say,
―What happened?‖ And I would say, ―I don't know — let‘s check the replay.‖ And I would go
back to the top of the stairs and come back down in slow motion. (Jim reenacts coming down the
stairs in slow-mo) It was a very strange household. (laughter)

My father used to brag that I wasn‘t a ham — I was the whole pig. And he treated my talent as if
it was his second chance. When I was about 28, after a decade as a professional comedian, I
realized one night in LA that the purpose of my life had always been to free people from
concern, like my dad. When I realized this, I dubbed my new devotion, ―The Church of Freedom
From Concern‖ — ―The Church of FFC‖— and I dedicated myself to that ministry.

What‘s yours? How will you serve the world? What do they need that your talent can provide?
That‘s all you have to figure out. As someone who has done what you are about to go do, I can
tell you from experience, the effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there
is. (applause)

Everything you gain in life will rot and fall apart, and all that will be left of you is what was
in your heart. My choosing to free people from concern got me to the top of a mountain. Look
where I am — look what I get to do! Everywhere I go – and I‘m going to get emotional because
when I tap into this, it really is extraordinary to me — I did something that makes people present
their best selves to me wherever I go. (applause) I am at the top of the mountain and the only one
I hadn‘t freed was myself and that‘s when my search for identity deepened.

I wondered who I‘d be without my fame. Who would I be if I said things that people didn‘t want
to hear, or if I defied their expectations of me? What if I showed up to the party without my
Mardi Gras mask and I refused to flash my breasts for a handful of beads? (laughter) I‘ll give
you a moment to wipe that image out of your mind. (laughter)

But you guys are way ahead of the game. You already know who you are and that peace, that
peace that we‘re after, lies somewhere beyond personality, beyond the perception of others,
beyond invention and disguise, even beyond effort itself. You can join the game, fight the wars,
play with form all you want, but to find real peace, you have to let the armor fall. Your need for
acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don‘t let anything stand in the way of the light
that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory. (A sheet drops and reveals
Jim‘s painting. Applause.)

22
(Re: the painting) It‘s not big enough! (kidding) This painting is big for a reason. This painting is
called ―High Visibility.‖ (laughter) It‘s about picking up the light and daring to be seen. Here‘s
the tricky part. Everyone is attracted to the light. The party host up in the corner (refers to
painting) who thinks unconsciousness is bliss and is always offering a drink from the bottles that
empty you; Misery, below her, who despises the light — can‘t stand when you‘re doing well —
and wishes you nothing but the worst; The Queen of Diamonds who needs a King to build her
house of cards; And the Hollow One, who clings to your leg and begs, ―Please don‘t leave me
behind for I have abandoned myself.‖

Even those who are closest to you and most in love with you; the people you love most in the
world can find clarity confronting at times. This painting took me thousands of hours to complete
and — (applause) thank you — yes, thousands of hours that I‘ll never get back, I‘ll never get
them back (kidding) — I worked on this for so long, for weeks and weeks, like a mad man alone
on a scaffolding — and when I was finished one of my friends said, ―This would be a cool black
light painting.‖ (laughter)

So I started over. (All the lights go off in the Dome and the painting is showered with black
light.) Whooooo! Welcome to Burning Man! (applause) Some pretty crazy characters right?
Better up there than in here. (points to head) Painting is one of the ways I free myself from
concern, a way to stop the world through total mental, spiritual and physical involvement.

But even with that, comes a feeling of divine dissatisfaction. Because ultimately, we‟re not the
avatars we create. We‟re not the pictures on the film stock. We are the light that shines
through it. All else is just smoke and mirrors. Distracting, but not truly compelling.

I‟ve often said that I wished people could realize all their dreams of wealth and fame so
they could see that it‟s not where you‟ll find your sense of completion. Like many of you, I
was concerned about going out in the world and doing something bigger than myself, until
someone smarter than myself made me realize that there is nothing bigger than myself!
(laughter)

My soul is not contained within the limits of my body. My body is contained within the
limitlessness of my soul — one unified field of nothing dancing for no particular reason,
except maybe to comfort and entertain itself. (applause) As that shift happens in you, you
won‟t be feeling the world you‟ll be felt by it — you will be embraced by it. Now, I‟m
always at the beginning. I have a reset button called presence and I ride that button
constantly.

Once that button is functional in your life, there‟s no story the mind could create that will
be as compelling. The imagination is always manufacturing scenarios — both good and bad
— and the ego tries to keep you trapped in the multiplex of the mind. Our eyes are not only
viewers, but also projectors that are running a second story over the picture we see in front
of us all the time. Fear is writing that script and the working title is, „I‟ll never be enough.‟

23
You look at a person like me and say, (kidding) ―How could we ever hope to reach those kinds
of heights, Jim? How can I make a painting that's too big for any reasonable home? How do you
fly so high without a special breathing apparatus?‖ (laughter)

This is the voice of your ego. If you listen to it, there will always be someone who seems to
be doing better than you. No matter what you gain, ego will not let you rest. It will tell you
that you cannot stop until you‟ve left an indelible mark on the earth, until you‟ve achieved
immortality. How tricky is the ego that it would tempt us with the promise of something we
already possess.

So I just want you to relax—that‘s my job—relax and dream up a good life! (applause) I had a
substitute teacher from Ireland in the second grade that told my class during Morning Prayer that
when she wants something, anything at all, she prays for it, and promises something in return
and she always gets it. I‘m sitting at the back of the classroom, thinking that my family can‘t
afford a bike, so I went home and I prayed for one, and promised I would recite the rosary every
night in exchange. Broke it—broke that promise. (laughter)

Two weeks later, I got home from school to find a brand new mustang bike with a banana seat
and easy rider handlebars — from fool to cool! My family informed me that I had won the bike
in a raffle that a friend of mine had entered my name in, without my knowledge. That type of
thing has been happening ever since, and as far as I can tell, it‘s just about letting the universe
know what you want and working toward it while letting go of how it might come to pass.
(applause)

Your job is not to figure out how it‟s going to happen for you, but to open the door in your
head and when the doors open in real life, just walk through it. Don‘t worry if you miss your
cue. There will always be another door opening. They keep opening.

And when I say, ―life doesn‘t happen to you, it happens for you.‖ I really don‘t know if that‘s
true. I‟m just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as something beneficial so
that I can deal with them in the most productive way. You‘ll come up with your own style,
that‘s part of the fun!

Oh, and why not take a chance on faith as well? Take a chance on faith — not religion, but faith.
Not hope, but faith. I don‘t believe in hope. Hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire. Faith
leaps over it.

You are ready and able to do beautiful things in this world and after you walk through those
doors today, you will only ever have two choices: love or fear. Choose love, and don‟t ever
let fear turn you against your playful heart.

Thank you. Jai Guru Dev. I‘m so honored. Thank you.

24
 Adm. William McRaven
Naval Admiral
University of Texas at Austin | May 15, 2014

SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

President Powers, Provost Fenves, Deans, members of the faculty, family and friends and most
importantly, the class of 2014. Congratulations on your achievement.

It‘s been almost 37 years to the day that I graduated from UT.

I remember a lot of things about that day.

I remember I had throbbing headache from a party the night before. I remember I had a serious
girlfriend, whom I later married—that‘s important to remember by the way—and I remember
that I was getting commissioned in the Navy that day.

But of all the things I remember, I don‘t have a clue who the commencement speaker was that
evening and I certainly don‘t remember anything they said.

So…acknowledging that fact—if I can‘t make this commencement speech memorable—I will at
least try to make it short.
25
The University‘s slogan is,

―What starts here changes the world.‖

I have to admit—I kinda like it.

―What starts here changes the world.‖

Tonight there are almost 8,000 students graduating from UT.

That great paragon of analytical rigor, Ask.Com says that the average American will meet
10,000 people in their life time.

That‘s a lot of folks.

But, if every one of you changed the lives of just ten people—and each one of those folks
changed the lives of another ten people—just ten—then in five generations—125 years—the
class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.

800 million people—think of it—over twice the population of the United States. Go one more
generation and you can change the entire population of the world—8 billion people.

If you think it‘s hard to change the lives of ten people—change their lives forever—you‘re
wrong.

I saw it happen every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A young Army officer makes a decision to go left instead of right down a road in Baghdad and
the ten soldiers in his squad are saved from close-in ambush.

In Kandahar province, Afghanistan, a non-commissioned officer from the Female Engagement

Team senses something isn‘t right and directs the infantry platoon away from a 500 pound IED,
saving the lives of a dozen soldiers.

But, if you think about it, not only were these soldiers saved by the decisions of one person, but
their children yet unborn—were also saved. And their children‘s children—were saved.

Generations were saved by one decision—by one person.

But changing the world can happen anywhere and anyone can do it.

So, what starts here can indeed change the world, but the question is…what will the world look
like after you change it?

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of
their flippers.

26
Well, I am confident that it will look much, much better, but if you will humor this old sailor for
just a moment, I have a few suggestions that may help you on your way to a better a world.

And while these lessons were learned during my time in the military, I can assure you that it
matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform.

It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social
status.

Our struggles in this world are similar and the lessons to overcome those struggles and to move
forward—changing ourselves and the world around us—will apply equally to all.

I have been a Navy SEAL for 36 years. But it all began when I left UT for Basic SEAL training
in Coronado, California.

Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the
cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and
always being cold, wet and miserable.

It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find
the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.

But, the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant
stress, chaos, failure and hardships.

To me basic SEAL training was a life time of challenges crammed into six months.

So, here are the ten lesson‘s I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to
you as you move forward in life.

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam
veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your
bed.

If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just
under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—rack—that‘s
Navy talk for bed.

It was a simple task—mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to
perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were
aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs—but the wisdom of this simple act has
been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will
give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and
another.

27
By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.
Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

If you can‟t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you
made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

During SEAL training the students are broken down into boat crews. Each crew is seven
students—three on each side of a small rubber boat and one coxswain to help guide the dingy.

Every day your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surfzone and
paddle several miles down the coast.

In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be 8 to 10 feet high and it is exceedingly difficult
to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in.

Every paddle must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert
equal effort or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously tossed back on the
beach.

For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.

You can‘t change the world alone—you will need some help— and to truly get from your
starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the good will of strangers and a strong
coxswain to guide them.

If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.

Over a few weeks of difficult training my SEAL class which started with 150 men was down to
just 35. There were now six boat crews of seven men each.

I was in the boat with the tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of the the little
guys—the munchkin crew we called them—no one was over about 5-foot five.

The munchkin boat crew had one American Indian, one African American, one Polish American,
one Greek American, one Italian American, and two tough kids from the mid-west.

They out paddled, out-ran, and out swam all the other boat crews.

The big men in the other boat crews would always make good natured fun of the tiny little
flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feetprior to every swim.

28
But somehow these little guys, from every corner of the Nation and the world, always had the
last laugh— swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us.

SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your
color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their
flippers.

Several times a week, the instructors would line up the class and do a uniform inspection. It was
exceptionally thorough.

Your hat had to be perfectly starched, your uniform immaculately pressed and your belt buckle
shiny and void of any smudges.

But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat, or pressing your
uniform or polishing your belt buckle—- it just wasn‘t good enough.

The instructors would fine ―something‖ wrong.

For failing the uniform inspection, the student had to run, fully clothed into the surfzone and
then, wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of your body was covered
with sand.

The effect was known as a ―sugar cookie.‖ You stayed in that uniform the rest of the day—cold,
wet and sandy.

There were many a student who just couldn‘t accept the fact that all their effort was in
vain. That no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right—it was unappreciated.

Those students didn‘t make it through training.

Those students didn‘t understand the purpose of the drill. You were never going to
succeed. You were never going to have a perfect uniform.

Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform you still end up as a sugar
cookie.

It‘s just the way life is sometimes.

If you want to change the world get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.

Every day during training you were challenged with multiple physical events—long runs, long
swims, obstacle courses, hours of calisthenics—something designed to test your mettle.

29
Every event had standards—times you had to meet. If you failed to meet those standards your
name was posted on a list and at the end of the day those on the list were invited to—a ―circus.‖

A circus was two hours of additional calisthenics—designed to wear you down, to break your
spirit, to force you to quit.

No one wanted a circus.

A circus meant that for that day you didn‘t measure up. A circus meant more fatigue—and more
fatigue meant that the following day would be more difficult—and more circuses were likely.

But at some time during SEAL training, everyone—everyone—made the circus list.

But an interesting thing happened to those who were constantly on the list. Overtime those
students-—who did two hours of extra calisthenics—got stronger and stronger.

The pain of the circuses built inner strength-built physical resiliency.

Life is filled with circuses.

You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it
will test you to your very core.

But if you want to change the world, don‘t be afraid of the circuses.

At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course
contained 25 obstacles including a 10-foot high wall, a 30-foot cargo net, and a barbed wire
crawl to name a few.

But the most challenging obstacle was the slide for life. It had a three level 30 foot tower at one
end and a one level tower at the other. In between was a 200-foot long rope.

You had to climb the three tiered tower and once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung
underneath the rope and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end.

The record for the obstacle course had stood for years when my class began training in 1977.

The record seemed unbeatable, until one day, a student decided to go down the slide for life—
head first.

Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted
the TOP of the rope and thrust himself forward.

It was a dangerous move—seemingly foolish, and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury
and being dropped from the training.

30
Without hesitation—the student slid down the rope—perilously fast, instead of several minutes,
it only took him half that time and by the end of the course he had broken the record.

If you want to change the world sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle head first.

During the land warfare phase of training, the students are flown out to San Clemente Island
which lies off the coast of San Diego.

The waters off San Clemente are a breeding ground for the great white sharks. To pass SEAL
training there are a series of long swims that must be completed. One—is the night swim.

Before the swim the instructors joyfully brief the trainees on all the species of sharks that inhabit
the waters off San Clemente.

They assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark—at least not recently.

But, you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position—stand your ground. Do not
swim away. Do not act afraid.

And if the shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts towards you—then summons up all your
strength and punch him in the snout and he will turn and swim away.

There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim you will have to deal
with them.

So, If you want to change the world, don‘t back down from the sharks.

As Navy SEALs one of our jobs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We
practiced this technique extensively during basic training.

The ship attack mission is where a pair of SEAL divers is dropped off outside an enemy harbor
and then swims well over two miles—underwater—using nothing but a depth gauge and a
compass to get to their target.

During the entire swim, even well below the surface there is some light that comes through. It is
comforting to know that there is open water above you.

But as you approach the ship, which is tied to a pier, the light begins to fade. The steel structure
of the ship blocks the moonlight—it blocks the surrounding street lamps—it blocks all ambient
light.

To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel—the
centerline and the deepest part of the ship.

31
This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship—where you cannot see
your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship‘s machinery is deafening and
where it is easy to get disoriented and fail.

Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission—is the time when
you must be calm, composed—when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your
inner strength must be brought to bear.

If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

The ninth week of training is referred to as ―Hell Week.‖ It is six days of no sleep, constant
physical and mental harassment and—one special day at the Mud Flats—the Mud Flats are area
between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana slue‘s—a
swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.

It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15
hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure to
quit from the instructors.

As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some
―egregious infraction of the rules‖ was ordered into the mud.

The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us
we could leave the mud if only five men would quit—just five men and we could get out of the
oppressive cold.

Looking around the mud flat it was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was
still over eight hours till the sun came up—eight more hours of bone chilling cold.

The chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear
anything and then, one voice began to echo through the night—one voice raised in song.

The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm.

One voice became two and two became three and before long everyone in the class was singing.

We knew that if one man could rise above the misery then others could as well.

The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing—but the
singing persisted.

And somehow—the mud seemed a little warmer, the wind a little tamer and the dawn not so far
away.

32
If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of
one person—Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela and even a young girl from Pakistan—
Malala—one person can change the world by giving people hope.

So, if you want to change the world, start singing when you‘re up to your neck in mud.

Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell. A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound
for all the students to see.

All you have to do to quit—is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5
o‘clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims.

Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT—and you no
longer have to endure the hardships of training.

Just ring the bell.

If you want to change the world don‘t ever, ever ring the bell.

To the graduating class of 2014, you are moments away from graduating. Moments away from
beginning your journey through life. Moments away starting to change the world—for the
better.

It will not be easy.

But, YOU are the class of 2014—the class that can affect the lives of 800 million people in the
next century.

Start each day with a task completed.

Find someone to help you through life.

Respect everyone.

Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often, but if take you take some risks, step up
when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give
up—if you do these things, then next generation and the generations that follow will live in a
world far better than the one we have today and—what started here will indeed have changed the
world—for the better.

Thank you very much. Hook 'em horns.

33
 Shonda Rhimes
TV Producer and Writer
Dartmouth College | June 8th, 2014

34
How do you do it all? The answer is this: I don't. Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding
in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life.

SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

President Hanlon, faculty, staff, honored guests, parents, students, families and friends—good
morning and congratulations to the Dartmouth graduating class of 2014!

So.

This is weird.

Me giving a speech. In general, I do not like giving speeches. Giving a speech requires standing
in front of large groups of people while they look at you and it also requires talking. I can do the
standing part OK. But the you looking and the me talking ... I am not a fan. I get this
overwhelming feeling of fear. Terror, really. Dry mouth, heart beats superfast, everything gets a
little bit slow motion. Like I might pass out. Or die. Or poop my pants or something. I mean,
don't worry. I'm not going to pass out or die or poop my pants. Mainly because just by telling
you that it could happen, I have somehow neutralized it as an option. Like as if saying it out loud
casts some kind of spell where now it cannot possibly happen now. Vomit. I could vomit. See.
Vomiting is now also off the table. Neutralized it. We're good.

Anyway, the point is. I do not like to give speeches. I'm a writer. I'm a TV writer. I like to write
stuff for other people to say. I actually contemplated bringing Ellen Pompeo or Kerry
Washington here to say my speech for me ... but my lawyer pointed out that when you drag
someone across state lines against their will, the FBI comes looking for you, so...

I don't like giving speeches, in general, because of the fear and terror. But this speech? This
speech, I really did not want to give.

A Dartmouth Commencement speech? Dry mouth. Heart beats so, so fast. Everything in slow
motion. Pass out, die, poop.

Look, it would be fine if this were, 20 years ago. If it were back in the day when I graduated
from Dartmouth. Twenty-three years ago, I was sitting right where you are now. And I was
listening to Elizabeth Dole speak. And she was great. She was calm and she was confident. It
was just ... different. It felt like she was just talking to a group of people. Like a fireside chat
with friends. Just Liddy Dole and like 9,000 of her closest friends. Because it was 20 years ago.
And she was just talking to a group of people.

Now? Twenty years later? This is no fireside chat. It's not just you and me. This speech is filmed
and streamed and tweeted and uploaded. NPR has like, a whole site dedicated to Commencement
speeches. A whole site just about commencement speeches. There are sites that rate them and
mock them and dissect them. It's weird. And stressful. And kind of vicious if you're an introvert
perfectionist writer who hates speaking in public in the first place.

35
When President Hanlon called me—and by the way, I would like to thank President Hanlon for
asking me way back in January, thus giving me a full six months of terror and panic to enjoy.
When President Hanlon called me, I almost said no. Almost.

Dry mouth. Heart beats so, so fast. Everything in slow motion. Pass out, die, poop.

But I'm here. I am gonna do it. I'm doing it. You know why?

Because I like a challenge. And because this year I made myself a promise that I was going to do
the stuff that terrifies me. And because, 20-plus years ago when I was trudging uphill from the
River Cluster through all that snow to get to the Hop for play rehearsal, I never imagined that I
would one day be standing here, at the Old Pine lectern. Staring out at all of you. About to throw
down on some wisdom in the Dartmouth Commencement address.

So, you know, yeah. Moments.

Also, I'm here because I really, really wanted some EBAs.

OK.

I want to say right now that every single time someone asked me what I was going to talk about
in this speech, I would boldly and confidently tell them that I had all kinds wisdom to share. I
was lying. I feel wildly unqualified to give you advice. There is no wisdom here. So all I can do
is talk about some stuff that could maybe be useful to you, from one Dartmouth grad to another.
Some stuff that won't ever show up in a Meredith Grey voiceover or a Papa Pope monologue.
Some stuff I probably shouldn't be telling you here now because of the uploading and the
streaming and the tweeting. But I am going to pretend that it is 20 years ago. That it's just you
and me. That we're having a fireside chat. Screw the outside world and what they think. I've
already said "poop" like five times already anyway ... things are getting real up in here.

OK, wait. Before I talk to you. I want to talk to your parents. Because the other thing about it
being 20 years later is that I'm a mother now. So I know some things, some very different things.
I have three girls. I've been to the show. You don't know what that means, but your parents do.
You think this day is all about you. But your parents ... the people who raised you ... the people
who endured you ... they potty trained you, they taught you to read, they survived you as a
teenager, they have suffered 21 years and not once did they kill you. This day ... you call it your
graduation day. But this day is not about you. This is their day. This is the day they take back
their lives, this is the day they earn their freedom. This day is their Independence Day. So,
parents, I salute you. And as I have an eight-month-old, I hope to join your ranks of freedom in
20 years!

OK. So here comes the real deal part of the speech, or you might call it, Some Random Stuff
Some Random Alum Who Runs a TV Show Thinks I Should Know Before I Graduate:

You ready?

36
When people give these kinds of speeches, they usually tell you all kinds of wise and heartfelt
things. They have wisdom to impart. They have lessons to share. They tell you: Follow your
dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and
make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and
don't stop dreaming until all of your dreams come true.

I think that's crap.

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the
really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.

The dreamers. They stare at the sky and they make plans and they hope and they talk about it
endlessly. And they start a lot of sentences with "I want to be ..." or "I wish."

"I want to be a writer." "I wish I could travel around the world."

And they dream of it. The buttoned-up ones meet for cocktails and they brag about their dreams,
and the hippie ones have vision boards and they meditate about their dreams. Maybe you write in
journals about your dreams or discuss it endlessly with your best friend or your girlfriend or your
mother. And it feels really good. You're talking about it, and you're planning it. Kind of. You are
blue-skying your life. And that is what everyone says you should be doing. Right? I mean, that's
what Oprah and Bill Gates did to get successful, right?

No.

Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not
come true just because you dream them. It's hard work that makes things happen. It's hard work
that creates change.

So, Lesson One, I guess is:

Ditch the Dream and Be a Doer

not a dreamer. Maybe you know exactly what it is you dream of being, or maybe you're
paralyzed because you have no idea what your passion is. The truth is, it doesn't matter. You
don't have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing
something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn't have to
fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring and dreams are not real. Just
... do. So you think, "I wish I could travel." Great. Sell your crappy car, buy a ticket to Bangkok,
and go. Right now. I'm serious.

You want to be a writer? A writer is someone who writes every day, so start writing. You don't
have a job? Get one. Any job. Don't sit at home waiting for the magical opportunity. Who are
you? Prince William? No. Get a job. Go to work. Do something until you can do something else.

37
I did not dream of being a TV writer. Never, not once when I was here in the hallowed halls of
the Ivy League, did I say to myself, "Self, I want to write TV."

You know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. That
was my dream. I blue sky'ed it like crazy. I dreamed and dreamed. And while I was dreaming, I
was living in my sister's basement. Dreamers often end up living in the basements of relatives,
FYI. Anyway, there I was in that basement, and I was dreaming of being Nobel Prize-winning
author Toni Morrison. And guess what? I couldn't be Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison,
because Toni Morrison already had that job and she wasn't interested in giving it up. So one day
I was sitting in that basement and I read an article that said—it was in The New York Times—
and it said it was harder to get into USC Film School than it was to get into Harvard Law School.
And I thought I could dream about being Toni Morrison, or I could do.

At film school, I discovered an entirely new way of telling stories. A way that suited me. A way
that brought me joy. A way that flipped this switch in my brain and changed the way I saw the
world. Years later, I had dinner with Toni Morrison. All she wanted to talk about was Grey's
Anatomy. That never would have happened if I hadn't stopped dreaming of becoming her and
gotten busy becoming myself.

Lesson Two. Lesson two is that tomorrow is going to be the worst day ever for you.

When I graduated from Dartmouth that day in 1991, when I was sitting right where you are and I
was staring up at Elizabeth Dole speaking, I will admit that I have no idea what she was saying.
Couldn't even listen to her. Not because I was overwhelmed or emotional or any of that. But
because I had a serious hangover. Like, an epic painful hangover because (and here is where I
apologize to President Hanlon because I know that you are trying to build a better and more
responsible Dartmouth and I applaud you and I admire you and it is very necessary) but I was
really freaking drunk the night before. And the reason I'd been so drunk the night before, the
reason I'd done upside down margarita shots at Bones Gate was because I knew that after
graduation, I was going to take off my cap and gown, my parents were going to pack my stuff in
the car and I was going to go home and probably never come back to Hanover again. And even if
I did come back, it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't be the same because I didn't live here
anymore.

On my graduation day, I was grieving.

My friends were celebrating. They were partying. They were excited. So happy. No more school,
no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks. And I was like, are you freaking kidding me? You
get all the fro-yo you want here! The gym is free. The apartments in Manhattan are smaller than
my suite in North Mass. Who cared if there was no place to get my hair done? All my friends are
here. I have a theatre company here. I was grieving. I knew enough about how the world works,
enough about how adulthood plays out, to be grieving.

Here's where I am going to embarrass myself and make you all feel maybe a little bit better about
yourselves. I literally lay down on the floor of my dorm room and cried while my mother packed
up my room. I refused to help her. Like, hell no I won't go. I nonviolent-protested leaving here.

38
Like, went limp like a protestor, only without the chanting—it was really pathetic. If none of you
lie down on a dirty hardwood floor and cry today while your mommy packs up your dorm room,
you are already starting your careers out ahead of me. You are winning.

But here's the thing. The thing I really felt like I knew was that the real world sucks. And it is
scary. College is awesome. You're special here. You're in the Ivy League, you are at the pinnacle
of your life's goals at this point—your entire life up until now has been about getting into some
great college and then graduating from that college. And now, today, you have done it. The
moment you get out of college, you think you are going to take the world by storm. All doors
will be opened to you. It's going to be laughter and diamonds and soirees left and right.

What really happens is that, to the rest of the world, you are now at the bottom of the heap.
Maybe you're an intern, possibly a low-paid assistant. And it is awful. The real world, it sucked
so badly for me. I felt like a loser all of the time. And more than a loser? I felt lost.

Which brings me to clarify lesson number two.

Tomorrow is going to be the worst day ever for you. But don't be an asshole.

Here's the thing. Yes, it is hard out there. But hard is relative. I come from a middle-class family,
my parents are academics, I was born after the civil rights movement, I was a toddler during the
women's movement, I live in the United States of America, all of which means I'm allowed to
own my freedom, my rights, my voice, and my uterus; and I went to Dartmouth and I earned an
Ivy League degree.

The lint in my navel that accumulated while I gazed at it as I suffered from feeling lost about
how hard it was to not feel special after graduation ... that navel lint was embarrassed for me.

Elsewhere in the world, girls are harmed simply because they want to get an education. Slavery
still exists. Children still die from malnutrition. In this country, we lose more people to handgun
violence than any other nation in the world. Sexual assault against women in America is
pervasive and disturbing and continues at an alarming rate.

So yes, tomorrow may suck for you—as it did for me. But as you stare at the lint in your navel,
have some perspective. We are incredibly lucky. We have been given a gift. An incredible
education has been placed before us. We ate all the fro-yo we could get our hands on. We skied.
We had EBAs at 1 a.m. We built bonfires and got frostbite and had all the free treadmills. We
beer-ponged our asses off. Now it's time to pay it forward.

Find a cause you love. It's OK to pick just one. You are going to need to spend a lot of time out
in the real world trying to figure out how to stop feeling like a lost loser, so one cause is good.
Devote some time every week to it.

Oh. And while we are discussing this, let me say a thing. A hashtag is not helping. #yesallwomen
#takebackthenight #notallmen #bringbackourgirls
#StopPretendingHashtagsAreTheSameAsDoingSomething

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Hashtags are very pretty on Twitter. I love them. I will hashtag myself into next week. But a
hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change
anything. It's a hashtag. It's you, sitting on your butt, typing on your computer and then going
back to binge-watching your favorite show. I do it all the time. For me, it's Game of Thrones.

Volunteer some hours.

Focus on Something Outside Yourself.

Devote a slice of your energies towards making the world suck less every week. Some people
suggest doing this will increase your sense of well-being. Some say it's good karma. I say that it
will allow you to remember that, whether you are a legacy or the first in your family to go to
college, the air you are breathing right now is rare air. Appreciate it. Don't be an asshole.

Lesson number three.

So you're out there, and you're giving back and you're doing, and it's working. And life is good.
You are making it. You're a success. And it's exciting and it's great. At least it is for me. I love
my life. I have three TV shows at work and I have three daughters at home. And it's all amazing,
and I am truly happy. And people are constantly asking me, how do you do it?

And usually, they have this sort of admiring and amazed tone.

Shonda, how do you do it all?

Like I'm full of magical magic and special wisdom-ness or something.

How do you do it all?

And I usually just smile and say like, "I'm really organized." Or if I'm feeling slightly kindly, I
say, "I have a lot of help."

And those things are true. But they also are not true.

And this is the thing that I really want to say. To all of you. Not just to the women out there.
Although this will matter to you women a great deal as you enter the work force and try to figure
out how to juggle work and family. But it will also matter to the men, who I think increasingly
are also trying to figure out how to juggle work and family. And frankly, if you aren't trying to
figure it out, men of Dartmouth, you should be. Fatherhood is being redefined at a lightning-fast
rate. You do not want to be a dinosaur.

So women and men of Dartmouth: As you try to figure out the impossible task of juggling work
and family and you hear over and over and over again that you just need a lot of help or you just
need to be organized or you just need to try just a little bit harder ... as a very successful woman,
a single mother of three, who constantly gets asked the question "How do you do it all?" For

40
once I am going to answer that question with 100 percent honesty here for you now. Because it's
just us. Because it's our fireside chat. Because somebody has to tell you the truth.

Shonda,

How Do You Do It All?

The answer is this: I don't.

Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means
I am failing in another area of my life.

If I am killing it on a Scandal script for work, I am probably missing bath and story time at
home. If I am at home sewing my kids' Halloween costumes, I'm probably blowing off a rewrite
I was supposed to turn in. If I am accepting a prestigious award, I am missing my baby's first
swim lesson. If I am at my daughter's debut in her school musical, I am missing Sandra Oh's last
scene ever being filmed at Grey's Anatomy. If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at
the other. That is the tradeoff. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes
with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel a hundred
percent OK; you never get your sea legs; you are always a little nauseous. Something is always
lost.

Something is always missing.

And yet. I want my daughters to see me and know me as a woman who works. I want that
example set for them. I like how proud they are when they come to my offices and know that
they come to Shondaland. There is a land and it is named after their mother. In their world,
mothers run companies. In their world, mothers own Thursday nights. In their world, mothers
work. And I am a better mother for it. The woman I am because I get to run Shondaland, because
I get write all day, because I get to spend my days making things up, that woman is a better
person—and a better mother. Because that woman is happy. That woman is fulfilled. That
woman is whole. I wouldn't want them to know the me who didn't get to do this all day long. I
wouldn't want them to know the me who wasn't doing.

Lesson Number Three is that anyone who tells you they are doing it all perfectly is a liar.

OK.

I fear I've scared you or been a little bit bleak, and that was not my intention. It is my hope that
you run out of here, excited, leaning forward, into the wind, ready to take the world by storm.
That would be so very fabulous. For you to do what everyone expects of you. For you to just go
be exactly the picture of hardcore Dartmouth awesome.

My point, I think, is that it is OK if you don't. My point is that it can be scary to graduate. That
you can lie on the hardwood floor of your dorm room and cry while your mom packs up your
stuff. That you can have an impossible dream to be Toni Morrison that you have to let go of.

41
That every day you can feel like you might be failing at work or at your home life. That the real
world is hard.

And yet, you can still wake up every single morning and go, "I have three amazing kids and I
have created work I am proud of, and I absolutely love my life and I would not trade it for
anyone else's life ever."

You can still wake up one day and find yourself living a life you never even imagined dreaming
of.

My dreams did not come true. But I worked really hard. And I ended up building an empire out
of my imagination. So my dreams? Can suck it.

You can wake up one day and find that you are interesting and powerful and engaged. You can
wake up one day and find that you are a doer.

You can be sitting right where you are now. Looking up at me. Probably—hopefully, I pray for
you—hung over. And then 20 years from now, you can wake up and find yourself in the
Hanover Inn full of fear and terror because you are going to give the Commencement speech.
Dry mouth. Heart beats so, so fast. Everything in slow motion. Pass out, die, poop.

Which one of you will it be? Which member of the 2014 class is going to find themselves
standing up here? Because I checked and it is pretty rare for an alum to speak here. It's pretty
much just me and Robert Frost and Mr. Rogers, which is crazy awesome.

Which one of you is going to make it up here? I really hope that it's one of you. Seriously.

When it happens, you'll know what this feels like.

Dry mouth. Heart beats so, so fast. Everything moves in slow motion.

Graduates, every single one of you, be proud of your accomplishments. Make good on your
diplomas.

You are no longer students. You are no longer works in progress. You are now citizens of the
real world. You have a responsibility to become a person worthy of joining and contributing to
society. Because who you are today ... that's who you are.

So be brave.

Be amazing.

Be worthy.

And every single time you get a chance?

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Stand up in front of people.

Let them see you. Speak. Be heard.

Go ahead and have the dry mouth.

Let your heart beat so, so fast.

Watch everything move in slow motion.

So what?

You what?

You pass out, you die, you poop?

No.

And this is really the only lesson you'll ever need to know ...

You take it in.

You breathe this rare air.

You feel alive.

You be yourself.

You truly finally always be yourself.

Thank you. Good luck.

Sandra Bullock
Oscar Winning Actress
Surprise Graduation Speech at Warren Easton Charter School, New Orleans | 2014

Stop worrying so much. Stop being scared of the unknown. Anything I worried about didn't
happen. Other stuff happened, but not what I worried about. The unknown, we can't do anything
about...

SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

43
I was trying to remember my graduation and, oddly, I couldn't remember anything. I
remembered how good I looked and then I went back and looked at pictures and I really didn't
look so good. ... I didn't remember anything because I was so worried about the future, I wasn't
present, which made me think about a question someone asked me just recently. And that
question was, 'If you could go back and talk to your younger self, what would you say?'

And I thought, 'Wow, that's kinda heavy,' and then I realized what I wished someone had said to
me was what I've been spending the last four years telling a little boy who I love more than
anything, who happens to be my son, and who's from New Orleans, and so I thought maybe I
would share that with you guys. That what I tell a four-year-old is what I wish someone would've
told me before I stepped out in the world and the first thing is, stop worrying so much, OK? Stop
being scared of the unknown, because anything I worried about didn't happen. Other stuff
happened, but not what I worried about. The unknown we can't do anything about, and I don't
remember any of the moments in my life where I worried. So that's a lot of time I couldn't get
back.

The second thing was, raise the bar higher. OK? It is noisy out there and for some reason, people
want to see you fail. But that's not your problem. That is their problem. I only remember the
moments where I tried beyond what I thought I could do and I do not remember the failures
because I didn't. Nothing is a failure. It's just not supposed to work out that way because
something better is supposed to come along.

The third thing we work on at home in the mornings is that we turn on the music really, really
loud before we leave the house and the rule is you have to dance a little bit before you step out in
the world because it changes the way you walk. It changes the way you walk out in the world. So
do that. Eat something green every day with every meal. It's growing food for adults as well. Do
not pick your nose in public. Think about this. How about we just don't pick it in private either?
How about we just go get a tissue? I know it takes a little extra effort but it gets the job done
right away and there's no public humiliation and that can go with a lot of other things as well, so
make a little bit of an effort. When someone who cares about you hugs you, hug them back with
two arms. Don't do the one-arm hug, because when you hug with two arms, it allows you to lean
on somebody and we always need someone to lean on.

And if someone doesn't want to play with you, it's OK. It's OK. You know, not everyone's going
to love us. Go find somebody who does want to play with you and who appreciates what you
have to offer. And last but not least is, go find your joy. Whatever that is, go find your joy. Are
you going to have a good day or are you going to have a great day, because it's completely up to
you. It's what you're going to remember in the end. You're not going to remember how you
worried. You're not going to remember the what ifs or the whys or who wronged you. It's the joy
that stays with you, and I want to thank you guys for the amazing joy that Warren Easton brings
me every day. You make me walk out into the world with pride and I want you to go find it and I
want you to go save the world while you're at it, and I thank you so much. Congratulations, class
of 2014. You make me so proud."

44
 Joss Whedon
Writer, Director, Producer
Commencement Address at Wesleyan University 2013

Commencement Speech Transcript

Commencement address—it‘s going well, it‘s going well. Thank you, Jeanine, for…making me
do this.

This is going to be great. This is going to be a good one. It‘s gonna go really well.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and… no. I‘m not that lazy.

I actually sat through many graduations. When I was siting where you guys were sitting, the
speaker was Bill Cosby—funny man Bill Cosby, he was very funny and he was very brief, and I
thanked him for that. He gave us a message that I really took with me, that a lot of us never
forgot, about changing the world. He said, ―you‘re not going to change the world, so don‘t try.‖

That was it. He didn‘t buy that back at all. And then he complained about buying his daughter a
car and we left. I remember thinking, ―I think I can do better. I think I can be a little more
inspiring than that.‖

And so, what I‘d like to say to all of you is that you are all going to die.

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 Don't just be yourself. Be all of yourself. Don't just live. Be that other thing connected to
death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun.

This is a good commencement speech because I‘m figuring it‘s only going to go up from here. It
can only get better, so this is good. It can‘t get more depressing. You have, in fact, already begun
to die. You look great. Don‘t get me wrong. And you are youth and beauty. You are at the
physical peak. Your bodies have just gotten off the ski slope on the peak of growth, potential,
and now comes the black diamond mogul run to the grave. And the weird thing is your body
wants to die. On a cellular level, that‘s what it wants. And that‘s probably not what you want.

I‘m confronted by a great deal of grand and worthy ambition from this student body. You want
to be a politician, a social worker. You want to be an artist. Your body‘s ambition: Mulch. Your
body wants to make some babies and then go in the ground and fertilize things. That‘s it. And
that seems like a bit of a contradiction. It doesn‘t seem fair. For one thing, we‘re telling you, ―Go
out into the world!‖ exactly when your body is saying, ―Hey, let‘s bring it down a notch. Let‘s
take it down.‖

And it is a contradiction. And that‘s actually what I‘d like to talk to you about. The contradiction
between your body and your mind, between your mind and itself. I believe these contradictions
and these tensions are the greatest gift that we have, and hopefully, I can explain that.

But first let me say when I talk about contradiction, I‘m talking about something that is a
constant in your life and in your identity, not just in your body but in your own mind, in ways
that you may recognize or you may not.

Let‘s just say, hypothetically, that two roads diverged in the woods and you took the path less
traveled. Part of you is just going, ―Look at that path! Over there, it‘s much better. Everyone is
traveling on it. It‘s paved, and there‘s like a Starbucks every 40 yards. This is wrong. In this one,
there‘s nettles and Robert Frost‘s body—somebody should have moved that—it just feels weird.
And not only does your mind tell you this, it is on that other path, it is behaving as though it is on
that path. It is doing the opposite of what you are doing. And for your entire life, you will be
doing, on some level, the opposite—not only of what you were doing—but of what you think
you are. That is just going to go on. What you do with all your heart, you will do the opposite of.
And what you need to do is to honor that, to understand it, to unearth it, to listen to this other
voice.

You have, which is a rare thing, that ability and the responsibility to listen to the dissent in
yourself, to at least give it the floor, because it is the key—not only to consciousness-but to real
growth. To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly
earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It‘s not just parroting
your parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about
understanding yourself so you can become yourself.

I talk about this contradiction, and this tension, there‘s two things I want to say about it. One, it
never goes away. And if you think that achieving something, if you think that solving something,
if you think a career or a relationship will quiet that voice, it will not. If you think that happiness

46
means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you
that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot
better.

The other reason is because you are establishing your identities and your beliefs, you need to
argue yourself down, because somebody else will. Somebody‘s going to come at you, and
whatever your belief, your idea, your ambition, somebody‘s going to question it. And unless you
have first, you won‘t be able to answer back, you won‘t be able to hold your ground. You don‘t
believe me, try taking a stand on just one leg. You need to see both sides.

Now, if you do, does this mean that you get to change the world? Well, I‘m getting to that, so
just chill. All I can say to this point is I think we can all agree that the world could use a little
changing. I don‘t know if your parents have explained this to you about the world but… we
broke it. I‘m sorry… it‘s a bit of a mess. It‘s a hard time to go out there. And it‘s a weird time in
our country.

The thing about our country is—oh, it‘s nice, I like it—it‘s not long on contradiction or
ambiguity. It‘s not long on these kinds of things. It likes things to be simple, it likes things to be
pigeonholed—good or bad, black or white, blue or red. And we‘re not that. We‘re more
interesting than that. And the way that we go into the world understanding is to have these
contradictions in ourselves and see them in other people and not judge them for it. To know that,
in a world where debate has kind of fallen away and given way to shouting and bullying, that the
best thing is not just the idea of honest debate, the best thing is losing the debate, because it
means that you learn something and you changed your position. The only way really to
understand your position and its worth is to understand the opposite. That doesn‘t mean the crazy
guy on the radio who is spewing hate, it means the decent human truths of all the people who
feel the need to listen to that guy. You are connected to those people. They‘re connected to him.
You can‘t get away from it.

This connection is part of contradiction. It is the tension I was talking about. This tension isn‘t
about two opposite points, it‘s about the line in between them, and it‘s being stretched by them.
We need to acknowledge and honor that tension, and the connection that that tension is a part of.
Our connection not just to the people we love, but to everybody, including people we can‘t stand
and wish weren‘t around. The connection we have is part of what defines us on such a basic
level.

Freedom is not freedom from connection. Serial killing is freedom from connection. Certain
large investment firms have established freedom from connection. But we as people never do,
and we‘re not supposed to, and we shouldn‘t want to. We are individuals, obviously, but we are
more than that.

So here‘s the thing about changing the world. It turns out that‘s not even the question, because
you don‘t have a choice. You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the
world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you
interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the
world. You always have been, and now, it becomes real on a level that it hasn‘t been before.

47
And that‘s why I‘ve been talking only about you and the tension within you, because you are—
not in a clichéd sense, but in a weirdly literal sense—the future. After you walk up here and walk
back down, you‘re going to be the present. You will be the broken world and the act of changing
it, in a way that you haven‘t been before. You will be so many things, and the one thing that I
wish I‘d known and want to say is, don‘t just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don‘t just live.
Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it,
appreciate it. And have fun.‖

Richard Costolo
Twitter CEO
Commencement Speech at University of Michigan 201

When I was your age, we didn't have the Internet in our pants. We didn't even have the
Internet not in our pants. That's how bad it was.

Speech Excerpts

48
When I woke up this morning and started writing my speech I was thinking about my first month
on campus when I was a freshman and the football team went into the season ranked
number…and we lost our first game 21-14…I'd like you to think of that soaring expectation
followed by crushing disappointment as a metaphor for your next 20 minutes with me.

When I was your age, we didn't have the Internet in our pants. We didn't even have the Internet
not in our pants. That's how bad it was. I sound like my grandfather. 'We didn't have teeth! There
were no questions marks, we just had words!'

Not only can you not plan the impact you're going to have, you often won't recognize it when
you're having it…The impact is what others frame for you and the world after it happens. The
present is only what you're experiencing and focused on right now…You cannot draw that path
looking forward. You cannot draw any of your paths looking forward. You have to figure out
what you love to do, what you have conviction about, and go do that.

So far you guys have gotten where you are by meeting and exceeding expectations. From here on
out, you have to switch gears…There are no expectations. There is no script. When you're doing
what you love to do, you become resilient. You create a habit of taking chances on yourself. If
you do what expected of you and things go poorly, you will look to external sources for what to
do next, because that will be your habit. You will be standing there frozen. If you are just filling
a role you will be blindsided.

What I implore you to do is believe that if you make courageous choices and bet on yourself and
put yourself out there that you will have an impact as a result of what you do and you don't need
to know now what that will be, or how that will happen, because nobody ever does.

49
 Doug Marlette
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist
Commencement Address at Durham Academy , 2005

Graduation Speech
Congratulations, class of 2005, the greatest graduating class in the history of Durham Academy.
If you‘ve grown up here in the Triangle this may be the first southern accent you‘ve heard, so I
wil l try to speak clearly and distinctly and remove all tobacco products from my mouth.

This is a glorious day for you graduating seniors and a bittersweet one for your parents, teachers
and counselors.

One morning last fall at the beginning of the schoo l year, as Ed Costello was standing there
watching the parking lot fill up with Beamers, SUVs, Mercedes and Lexuses he turned to
Michael Ulku - Steiner and in a hushed reverential tone said, ―I believe of all the students we
have ever seen matriculate here at Durham Academy, this class, the class of 2005, is surely the
most recent.‖

It is an honor to talk to a graduating class where practically everybody makes straight A‘s.
Everybody excels. Everybody is sensitive, supportive, diverse and multicultural. I‘ ve seen your
college applications and all of you have a 4. 5 grade - point - average, you‘ve worked with the
needy and the homeless, with Aids babies in sub - Saharan Africa, you‘ve unlocked the secrets of
the human genome, and in your spare time you cobble your own shoes. Upon graduation many
of you will be canonized. Others will simply be assumed bodily into heaven. I salute you.

If you are as ripe under the non - breathable fabric of those robes as I am already just looking at
you then you know this talk wil l be short. I will try to finish before new life forms evolve. When
Melinda and I first talked to Gibb Fitzpatrick in DA Admissions about transferring Jackson from
a public school in Hillsborough to Durham Academy we told him that our main concern with a
private school was that we didn‘t want our son to be turned into a little snot. I‘m delighted to
report he hasn‘t been. But I have. Now I‘m a big snot. A DA snob . To my mind, no other school
, public or private, can compare to DA. And I will tell you why.

...
Now there‘s something about the commencement address that brings out the pompous and
pretentious in all who deliver them, the stained - glass voice, the first person oracular, the
Madonna - high - on - Kabala. For all I know, by the time I‘m done I‘ll be speaking with a
British accent. But don‘t worry, this is not a self - help commencement talk . For one thing,
selves are not that easy to help. Selves, as you will discover, take time and hard work.

I should know. I was a loser in high school. With grades, with girls, with sports. I did not excel. I

50
stayed home and drew. Mad Magazine was my inspiration. I once concocted a parody of the
popular Batman TV show called ―Ratman,‖ which featured several of my teachers at school. My
friends laughed at ―Ratman‖ but one said scornfully, ―You spent your weekend doing this?‖ Yes,
I was a geek, a dweeb, a dork, a tool. I still am, but for a cartoonist that‘s a job description.
Sorry, Catherine. So though I tip my mortarboard to all you high school winners – the sharp, the
slick, the self - possessed, the well - spoken, the body - doubles for the cast of One Tree Hill –
I‟m directing these remarks to the potted plants and human wallpaper of the student body
as well, the ones who don‟t stand out, who feel like extras in a movie about somebody else‟s
life.

And I‘m here to tell all my fellow dweebs and losers that your day will come. High school is not
the final word on you. It‘s a long and winding road. The game is not over. It has just begun.
Things change. You change. Baby fat melts away. Faces clear up. There is hope.

And today is the beginning, Square One, for all of you. Commencement. Today the graduating
class of 2005 says ―Dude, whassup, yo? ‖ to the real world.

And who better than a cartoonist to help administer your graduation reality check? Actually my
job has been getting harder and harder in recent years. Increasingly, reality itself is becoming a
cartoon. Every day it gets weirder, more distorted, grotesque and bizarre out there. How do you
cartoon a cartoon? And even my night job as a novelist is becoming more and more of a
challenge. Real life has become stranger than fiction. So how do you fictionalize a culture like
ours, one that is already exaggerated, distorted, surreal? How do you top reality?

You‘ve heard everybody talk about the crazy times you live in, but because it‘s the only time you
live in you have no way of knowing just how psycho things have become.

Ease up on yourselves. Have some compassion for yourself as well as for others. There‘s no such
thing as perfection, and life is not a race.

Check it out.

Plato and Aristotle asked: How ought one to live? Kierkegaard put it another way: ―What must I
do to be saved?‖ Today higher education asks: ―How did you do on your SATs?‖ I‘m not going
to tell you what I made on my SATs but let me put it this way: none of your places at Princeton
would have been threatened. I know it‘s hard to believe but in real life nobody cares what you
made on your SATs. I‘m not saying it doesn‘t matter how you scored – those fat and skinny
envelopes from the spring attest – but I want to help put SATs and tests in general in perspective.

A few years ago I was at a dinner in New York with a bunch of people who were getting
something called the Golden Plate, an achievement award for doing well in their fields. Some
were celebrities -- Barbara Walters, Calvin Klein, Colin Powell -- others were less well - known,
but had done things like discover the planet Pluto. Oprah emceed. I was the least famous person
there. The idea was to get a bunch of ―achievers‖ together and bring in four hundred high school
National Merit Finalists from around the country for three days of schmoozing with the
accomplished. The idea, I suppose, was that achievement was contagious, like pink eye.

51
We took a cruise around Manhattan, dined at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, hung out at the Waldorf and exchanged business cards with seventeen - year - olds. At a
black tie dinner where we collected our Golden Plates the final night I was seated between the
soap star Susan Lucci and the Pulitzer - prize winning poet James Merrill. The next morning at
breakfast I was discussing the event with a Nobel Prize - winning physicist from Stanford who
had discovered the sub - atomic particles called quarks. What would a cartoonist and a physicist
have to say to each other? We talked about quantum mechanics, the periodic table, Heisenberg‘s
Uncertainty Principle, 4 and Oprah‘s weight. We agreed that the kids we had met seemed
ambitious, self - possessed, well - spoken and generally perfect for the name - brand colleges
they were entering in the fall. The Nobel Laureate asked me, ―Would you have been invited to
something like this when you were in high school?‖ I laughed and said, ―No, I wasn‘t a very
good student.‖ He shook his head and said, ―I didn‘ t even finish high school.‖

I was stunned. ―You‘re kidding.‖

―I had to get my high school equivalency later,‖ he confessed. Then, looking around us, he said,
―I wonder how many of the others invited here were National Merit Scholars in high school.‖

What he was hinting at was the puzzle of human personality, the mystery of success, late -
blooming talent and confidence, the ineffable qualities of character, drive and ambition, qualities
that are often key components of achievement and are sometimes even galvanized by those early
high school humiliations.

I tell you this not to debunk academic achievement – why, some of my best friends were
National Merit Finalists , and I‘m certainly not plugging underachievement -- but simply to say
that success in life isn‘t always predictable. Sometimes, as my quarky friend was implying,
success happens long after the college admissions officers have had their say.

In the spirit of keeping things in perspective, remember, it was Harvard grads, the best and the
brightest, who got us into Vietnam. It was a Duke Law graduate -- Richard Nixon -- who
obstructed justice, ignored subpoenas and was forced to resign the presidency. It was a graduate
of Georgetown, Yale, and Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar – Bill Clinton -- who disgraced the office of
the presidency, lied under oath, and taught a generation how to parse the meaning of is . Enron
execs were, as the book title puts it, The Smartest Guys in the Room . Lawyers today rationalize
torture. As they once did segregation and slavery. The novelist Walker Percy once said that you
can make straight A‘s in school and still flunk life. Which is another way of saying, you can win
the race and still lose your soul. As you venture out into the world, you need to know more than
how to win the race. Unfortunately, our culture has sent you exactly the opposite message. A
recent New Yorker cartoon shows a bum seated on an orange crate with a sign that says, ―Blew
off my SAT prep class.‖

Yes, it‘s a bottom - line world out there, boys and girls. Everything -- including education -- has
been commodified. Consequently, we think everything worth knowing is test - able, quantifiable,
and measurable. It‘s no mystery that so many kids today are on Ritalin. Standardized education
requires standardized little people.

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During the past several months, you‘ve undoubtedly experienced great anxiety about getting into
college. There‘s a reason for that. You‘ve heard the expression, ―Follow the money.‖ Well,
there‘s money in having you feel that anxiety. T e college entrance industry has a stake in your
stress and discomfort. Just as the drug companies have an interest in encouraging your feelings
of misery or inadequacy. You‘ve seen the commercials for antidepressants, mood brighteners
and other psychopharm aceuticals.

―Are you anxious, depressed? Take a pill; it‘s not okay to struggle. Discomfort is not allowed.‖

‖ Do you find it hard to focus? Then you may have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Now that
we‘ve medicated all your children, do we have a pill for you!

Almost everyone is anxious or depressed or distracted sometimes. It‘s called being human. What
used to be the human condition is now a symptom for a disorder or a disease for which they have
a cure. But instead of recognizing that fact andign oring the sales pitch, we begin to wonder
what‘s wrong with us. Whether the cure is deodorant, mouthwash or Ivy League schools,
marketing and advertising are designed first to create a sense of inadequacy and anxiety, then to
offer to solve the artificially created problem by selling you the solution.

You‘ve grown up in a time when performance is everything, whether it‘s soccer or AP courses or
urine tests. From the time you‘re a toddler trying to master potty training until you begin bracing
yourself for college rejection slips, Performance Anxiety is marketed to you in discreet and
insidious ways. Harvard, Yale and Princeton are presented as the educational equivalent of
Viagra, Cialis and Enzyte. The big fix. If you get in, they‘ll cure what ails you, put a smile on
your face, a spring in your step, and give you lifetime bragging rights. But beware the side
effects of this pressurized culture of achievement. Binge drinking, eating disorders and college
suicides are all perfection diseases, ways of acting out the impossibility of perfection. Ease up on
yourselves. Have some compassion for yourself as well as for others. There‘s no such thing as
perfection, and life is not a race.

As the shattering events of recent weeks have taught us, no matter how nice things may appear
on the surface, no matter how privileged and manicured our lives, the darkness in life will come
to all of us, the tragic dimension will rise up and bushwhack us on the road to perfection.

Since I seem to have fallen into the trap of all commencement speakers and started to give you
the advice I promised I wouldn‘t, what - the - hey, let me finish before the British accent kicks
in. Here‘s my advice:

- Don‘t get caught downloading music.

- Don‘t email anything you wouldn‘t want forwarded.

- Practice, practice, practice. It‘s hard to get worse at something if you practice. But talent is not
enough. Talent is not creativity, just as a seed is not a crop. You have to till the soil, plant the
seed, work it, water it, harvest it. Creativity is hard work.

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- Don‘t worship celebrities. With the fall of communism the only ism left to worry about is
showbizm.

- Read. Reading is active. TV, movies and video are passive. Reading engages your imagination.
Video substitutes for your imagination. Reading takes you into life, while television distracts you
from life.

- Recognize political correctness for what it is: a bureaucratic substitute for thinking. It evolved
out of a righteous impulse to rectify historic wrongs -- racism, sexism, va rious forms of bigotry -
- but it has morphed into a Stalinist means of suppressing free speech. It thrives on campuses and
in the human resources departments of large corporations. It‘s a way for businesses to pretend to
have consciences. It‘s cheaper t o install handicapped parking spaces and make employees watch
films on sexual harassment and attend sensitivity training sessions than to pay them decent
wages. It is modern - day Phariseeism. Jesus had a colorful phrase for Pharisees, the so - called
―experts‖ of his time: ―hypocrites,‖ ―brood of vipers.‖ He considered virtue a private matter and
said, ―take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them . . . do not sound a
trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the streets, that they may have glory of men.‖

- And while I‘m waxing biblical, repent of labels, the sophisticated name - calling we dispatch so
easily – manic - depressive, bipolar, OCD, ADD – to summarize and pigeonhole and reduce the
complexity of human beings to a sound - bite. Such labels dehumanize people and enslave us to
stereotypes and limit us with reduced expectations, all defined by the word ‗can‘t.‘ ―Oh, he can‘t
because he‘s ADD. Or she can‘t; she only scored 1100 on her SAT, you know.‖

- Be suspicious of experts. Especially those promiscuous dispensers of labels and meds. Question
authority, including your own. But always trust your own experience and instincts over the
experts. When my high school guidance counselor called me in for my one and only college
counsel ing session – this was before college admission was a growth industry – he asked me
what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be an artist. I didn‘t know what that
meant exactly. Art, where I come from, was black velvet Elvises, poker pl aying dogs, and
popsicle stick birdhouses. Culture was something you scraped off the cow‘s tongue to check for
hoof - and - mouth disease. All I knew was that I wanted to draw pictures for a living. The
counselor looked stricken. ―Douglas, believe me, when you get to college, artists are a dime a
dozen.‖ Then, looking at my grades, he said, ―Why don‘t you use your math skills and drafting
ability and study architecture?‖ I realize now that no responsible high school guidance counselor
would ever in good con science tell some kid, ―Sure, go ahead, be an artist, move to New York,
live in an attic and starve.‖ Fortunately, I knew enough to ignore the experts, but I want you to
know that manners do matter. So I did nod politely, and said ―Yessir,‖ as I left the g uidance
counselor‘s office.

So whether you wind up blazing your own trail, or stumbling blindly down it as I did, have high
standards. Strive for excellence. But don‘t condemn yourself when you fall short. High
expectation without condemnation. If you have to be perfect, if you have to make a hundred on
the test, you may not take the test.

54
- Be competitive, but remember, envy is not competition. The word ―competition‖ derives from
the Latin con , which means ―with‖ and petere , which means ―to strive.‖ Competition – to strive
together. Competitors are in secret alliance, not to do each other in, but to bring out the best in
each other.

- Don‘t do drugs. I know I sound like the mom in ―Almost Famous,‖ but she was right. Anybody
can do drugs . It takes no special talent to get drunk or get high. I worry especially about children
of privilege like you, and the secret guilt you may feel about your advantages. You may drug
yourselves to level the playing field, to dumb yourselves down. Don‘t. Life‘s a gift. Don‘t
anaesthetize yourself to it. Feel life in all its pain and mystery. If you can‘t feel pain, you won‘t
feel joy, either. There‘s plenty of time to be comatose, like for the rest of eternity.

- Above all, remember: You are not your r esume. External measures won‘t repair you. Money
won‘t fix you. Applause, celebrity, no number of victories will do it. The only honor that counts
is that which you earn and that which you bestow. Honor yourself.

And despite all I‘ve said about the authorities, honor your parents. You will eventually realize
that there are no grownups. We are all children in various stages of growing up. And you
undoubtedly know that we adults are the phonies and hypocrites that Holden Caulfield said we
were fifty years ago. But you will learn in time that this is a good thing. If we didn‘t insist that
you do as we say, not as we do, civilization would crumble. Nevertheless, it is a truism that the
older we get the more we realize that nobody really knows anything. You will learn this, too. In
fact, a pretty good definition of maturity is knowing how immature you are. A pretty good
definition of sanity is knowing how crazy you are. A pretty good definition of wisdom is
knowing how foolish you are.

We parents may not know everything under the sun, but one thing is for certain: we think you
hung the moon.

Have fun, don‘t worry, be happy, pick up your towels off the floor, and don‘t call directory
assistance for numbers you can look up yourself. Thank you and congratulations, Durham
Academy‘s Class of 2005!

55
 Jerry Yang
co-founder of Yahoo!Inc.
Commencement Address at University of Hawaii 2009

Commencement Speech Transcript

Thank you, Chancellor Tseng... Aloha! Distinguished guests, faculty, graduates, and the
ohana of the graduating class of 2009.

Congratulations to the graduating class! You've reached the end of a long and rigorous
journey. You've completed your last final exam, wrapped up your last soil analysis, and
finished your dissertation on Hawaiian poetry. And now, following this milestone
occasion of your graduation, you get to dream like the rest of us -- you know, the kind of
dream where you show up to your English lit class for the first time of the semester and
the professor asks everyone to get out their pencils for the final exam.

I'm very honored to be the last person you hear from before you walk across this stage to
receive your hard-earned diplomas. I'd imagine that the university invited me to speak
here today not only because I'm a part-time Hawaii resident, but because they took pity
on me. You see, the idea for Yahoo! was born when I was procrastinating my PhD in
electrical engineering at Stanford in 1994... and the company took off before I had a
chance to finish my degree. So I never actually earned my Ph.D. And that I will receive
Honorary Doctorate today -- without even setting foot in a lab -- is quite amazing.
Mahalo!

My job here today is to spend about 10 minutes or so to share some of my personal

stories with you, so you can go on to do great things with your new degrees, and in your
lives. I'd like to do that with a few bullet points of advice:

Point one: Don't let the news get you down.

Let me read you some headlines: "College Grads Labor Against Shrinking Job Market
Openings, Drop 13% This Year." And, "America Broadens its Deployments in the
Middle East." And "U.S. Taxpayers To Spend Billions Bailing Out Failing Financial
Institutions."

Now, you might think that's today's headlines. In fact, that was in the year 1990, when I
sat where you are now for my graduation. The future looked pretty bleak. Some people
may say that I took the "easy way out" -- I went to graduate school -- but the reality was I
couldn't find a job with an engineering degree from Stanford!

So get out there, go see the world, chart your own footprints on different lands than you are
familiar with! ...It's really hard to dream if you can't imagine the possibilities.

56
 But the point is that great things will come in times of adversity. So it all comes down to
your outlook. Mark Twain once defined an optimist as "a person who travels on nothing
from nowhere to happiness."
I can promise you that great things are being started in down-times like this. Yahoo!
started in an economic downturn in the early 90s. Other great companies, great ideas,
products, even social movements have come about as people were throwing away the
status quo and doing EVERYTHING in new ways. In some ways, there's not a better
time to be a graduate to be part of this renewal.
Point two: You get out of life what you put into it.
Success doesn't come from a high IQ or innate talent. It takes a willingness to work hard.
In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, he introduced the "10,000 hour rule," which holds
that it takes about 10,000 hours of hard work and practice -- or ten years -- to become a
world-class expert in anything. The difference between a good violinist and a virtuoso
comes down to ambition and having the discipline to put in the requisite time. As
someone once said, in golf as in life, it is the follow through that makes the difference.

My mother taught me the rules of perseverance. While I've certainly faced challenges
since founding Yahoo!, they were nothing compared to what my mother faced coming to
the US as a single parent from Taiwan, with two young boys and a few suitcases. I was
ten at the time, and the only English word I knew was the word "shoe." It could have
been very easy to feel discouraged. But I worked hard, studied hard, and played hard
along the way. Yes, good timing and some luck played a role in my starting Yahoo!, but
there is just no substitute for hard work and relentless preparation.
And along the way, I had a great family and friends to support me. Many of you already
know -- especially those of you who have ohana is taking up 15 chairs or more in this
stadium -- that we get our strength from our families and friends.

Now, when I told my Mom that I was stepping out of my Ph.D. to start a company and
basically sell "Internet advertising" for a living, she wasn't too keen on the idea, but she
supported me. These days, she doesn't complain very much!
Point three: Do what you love, even if it takes you down strange alleys.
When David Filo and I were in our graduate student trailer at Stanford, we were supposed
to be spending our research time on figuring out algorithms to design faster and more
efficient computer chips. But then we discovered this cool new thing called the Web and
suddenly our dissertation wasn't so interesting anymore (to be honest, I'm not sure it ever
really was, and I can say that now that I'm gonna get an honorary degree!).

We eventually spent more hours cataloguing web links than we did working on our
thesis. We slept on the floor of our trailer -- one of us would be programming and dealing
with our little Yahoo! site, and the other would sleep... We did it out of love and passion.
We never thought it would turn into a business, we just figured that if people kept coming
to our site, we were doing a great service and we were having fun!

Eventually, others saw the opportunity -- a venture capitalist was even crazy enough to
give us a million dollars to turn it into a business. The lesson here is NOT for you to go

57
 pursue a career as a professional Guitar Hero player, but rather to be open to serendipity
and possibilities.

If you find something that feels right but doesn't seem to fit into your vision of master
plan, take a chance, and commit to it by working hard. You shouldn't be afraid to let
passion get behind the wheel -- you might really love where you end up. To quote Robert
Lewis Stephenson, "Sit loosely in the saddle of life."
Point four: Get to know the world around you. [By the way, how am I doing? Am I losing any
of you? Halfway there!]
That might mean taking your first trip to Honolulu or San Francisco or Shanghai -- or
simply logging onto the Internet.

One downside to being here in Paradise, 2,500 miles from anywhere, is that there's a
great temptation to forget there are other worlds, ideas and experiences beyond these
shores. I'm not suggesting that you need to leave Hawaii to succeed. Quite the contrary --
you can succeed anywhere, especially at a time when technology is making geography
irrelevant.

But take me, for example. I went to college 20 miles from where I grew up, and my
office today is even closer. Yet I've always made it a priority to explore the world. In
grad school, I spent six months living in Japan. There, I made friends who helped me
start Yahoo! a couple of years later, I met my wife there, and became a serious fan of
sumo wrestling. But it also changed my worldview on people, cultures, ideologies... beer.

So get out there, go see the world, chart your own footprints on different lands than you
are familiar with! As the philosopher St. Augustine wrote, "The world is a book and those
who do not travel read only one page." It's really hard to dream if you can't imagine the
possibilities.
Point five: Use your advantages to your advantage.
When I was in college, there were no cell phones, we had to deal with VHS video tapes,
no digital cameras! The Internet didn't exist -- can you imagine life without email,
Wikipedia, Yahoo!, or ComedyCentral.com? I can't even remember how we functioned. I
have two young daughters now and I know the Web is bailing me out of plenty of "Dad,
why is the sky blue?" kinds of questions! My children will soon discover the
opportunities that are literally at their fingertips and they will have no excuse for being
uninformed.

You are starting (or commencing!) your next phase of life with a great tool chest.
Information technology has flattened the world, and your UH Hilo education has
prepared you well. You need to appreciate how great your potential is, given the
incredible tools you are blessed with. I urge you to be curious. Don't ever lose your
enthusiasm and sense of wonder. Never stop learning.
And my last, and perhaps most important, point: Don't take yourself too seriously.
The name Yahoo! - how did we come up with a name like Yahoo!? What were we
thinking? If you looked it up in the dictionary, it means someone who is very "uncivilized

58
and rude." David Filo and I figured we were a couple of yahoos, doing something on the
Web when we were supposed to be doing our dissertation!

Even today, we have a purple cow in our lobby, foosball tables in every office, we yodel
when we're happy, and my official title is Chief Yahoo. I think that probably speaks for
itself. If you can't take yourself lightly along the journey, you are probably trying too
hard!

This commencement marks the beginning of a new journey. You're stepping out into the
real world. You sit here transformed from the person who came here four years ago. You
have a future as critical thinkers, entrepreneurs, lifelong learners, and contributing
members of the local and global society.
But you're probably filled with anxiety and questions... What do I do next? What am I
trading this parchment paper in for? Where can I find my syllabus for this next class
called life? The good news is you don't need the answers today. To borrow the words of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be
understood."

And don't worry -- it's a long life, you don't need to rush to be or do something. Your job
is to walk out into the unknown and see what happens. Take your time, learn and enjoy
something from each job, layer it on, and then pass it along so others can benefit from
your wisdom.

And all along your journey, remember the people who got you here and where you came
from. I can see the pride and confidence in the faces of your ohana. They believe in you
and what you can become. Anyone who spends any time on this island comes to
understand the power of the ohana and the support network you have here â€― it's one
that so few Western societies enjoy. Cherish it. Appreciate it. Be grateful for it. Honor it.

Graduates of the class of 2009... Ho'omaika'i. Congratulations.

And mahalo.

59
 Atul Gawande
Surgeon, Author and Journalist
Commencement Address at Williams College 2012

We had a patient at my hospital this winter whose story has stuck with me. Mrs. C was eighty-
seven years old, a Holocaust survivor from Germany, and she‘d come to the emergency room
because she‘d suddenly lost the vision in her left eye. It tells you something about her that she
was at work when it happened—in the finance department at Sears.

She‘d worked her entire life. When her family left Nazi Germany, they narrowly avoided the
concentration camps but ended up among twenty-thousand Jewish refugees relocated to the
Shanghai ghetto in Japanese-occupied China. She was a teenage girl and spent eight years there,
helping her family just to live and survive, until liberation in September, 1945. Denied a formal
education, she worked as a seamstress upon admission to the United States. She rose to head
seamstress at Bloomingdales in Chestnut Hill, outside Boston. She married at twenty-three, had
two sons, and was widowed at forty-four. She herself remained in remarkably good health.

At eighty-seven, she still lived independently in a second floor apartment in Norwood, Mass. She
drove a Honda Civic. She did all her own shopping and cooking. And she still worked — three

60
and a half days a week at Sears doing office work and her other weekdays volunteering at New
England Sinai Rehabilitation Hospital.

She was sitting at her desk at Sears when the vision in her left eye went completely black. It
came back after three minutes. She dismissed the episode, but the next day the same thing
happened again, only this time the vision didn‘t come back. Her doctor sent her to our
emergency room where she was suspected to have had a stroke caused by a severe
atherosclerotic blockage of the carotid artery in her neck.

She needed urgent surgery to open the blockage. She thought hard before agreeing to it. She had
great fear of the risks and what they could take away from her life. But she had greater fear of
what her condition might take away. Being able to remain independent, work, and contribute in
some way was most important to her, and her best chance of preserving this was to act.
The operation went remarkably well. There were no problems at all. She was weak afterward but
the next day, she ate, got out of bed, felt fine. The day after that, she seemed ready to leave the
hospital. But she complained that constipation was making her nauseated and uncomfortable.
The team tried laxatives, but they did nothing and her belly only became more painful.

A young resident was the one who, looking at her, felt that something wasn‘t right. In fact, this
wasn‘t constipation at all, but a disaster from a strange complication. Her stomach had twisted on
itself, pulled up into her chest, and become trapped—a condition known as a gastric volvulus.
Worse, an ulcer had formed in the lining of her stomach and seemed to have ruptured into her
chest. This is catastrophic for anyone, let alone an eighty-seven year old woman. The textbooks
describe an eighty percent fatality rate.

Yet she did survive. She in fact left the hospital with her son within a week. And the more I
reflect on the story of how that was made possible, the more I think the story is relevant to all of
us, whatever our walks of life.

When I was nearing the end of medical school, I decided to go into surgery. I had become
enthralled by surgeons, especially by their competence. The source of their success, I believed,
was their physical skill—their hand-eye coordination and fine-motor control. But it wasn‘t, I
learned in residency training. Getting the physical skills is important, and they take some time to
practice and master, but they turn out to be no more difficult to learn than the ones Mrs. C
mastered as a seamstress.

Instead, the critical skills the best surgeons I saw had involved the ability to handle complexity
and uncertainty. They had developed judgment, mastery of teamwork, and willingness to accept
responsibility for the consequences of their choices. In this respect, I realized, surgery turns out
to be no different than a life in teaching, public service, business, or almost anything you may
decide to pursue.

We all face complexity and uncertainty no matter where our path takes us. That means we all
face the risk of failure. So along the way, we all are forced to develop these critical capacities—
of judgment, teamwork, and acceptance of responsibility.

61
In commencement addresses like this, people admonish us: take risks. Be willing to fail. But this
has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is ―I like taking risks?‖

The difference between triumph and defeat, you‘ll find, isn‘t about willingness to take risks.
It‘s about mastery of rescue.

We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of
failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise. But how they do it is what seems to matter.

The key to reducing death after surgery was the introduction of ways to reduce the risk of things
going wrong—through specialization, better planning, and technology. They have produced a
remarkable transformation in the field. Not that long ago, surgery was so inherently dangerous,
you would only consider it as a last resort. Large numbers of patients developed serious
infections afterwards, bleeding, and other deadly problems we euphemistically called
―complications.‖ Now, surgery has become so safe and routine, most is day surgery—you go
home right afterwards.

But there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some
places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened
up asking why.

Researchers at the University of Michigan discovered the answer recently, and it has a twist I
didn‘t expect. I thought that the best places simply did a better job at controlling and minimizing
risks—that they did a better job of preventing things from going wrong. But to my surprise, they
didn‘t. Their complication rates after surgery were almost the same as others. Instead, what they
proved to be really great at was rescuing people when they had a complication, preventing
failures from becoming a catastrophe.

Scientists have given a new name to the deaths that occur in surgery after something goes
wrong—whether it is an infection or some bizarre twist of the stomach. They call them a
―Failure to Rescue.‖ More than anything, this is what distinguished the great from the mediocre.
They didn‘t fail less. They rescued more.

This in fact may be the real story of human and societal improvement. Risk is necessary. Things
can and will go wrong. But some have better capacity to prepare for the possibility, to limit the
damage, and to sometimes even retrieve success from failure.

When things go wrong, there seem to be three main pitfalls to avoid, three ways to ―Fail to
Rescue.‖ You could choose a wrong plan, an inadequate plan, or no plan at all. Say you‘re

62
cooking and you inadvertently set a grease pan on fire. Throwing gasoline on the fire would be a
completely wrong plan. Trying to blow the fire out would be inadequate. And ignoring it—
―Fire? What fire?‖—would be no plan at all.

In the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago, all of these elements came into play,
leading to the death of eleven men and the spillage of five million barrels of oil over three
months. According to the official investigation, there had been early signs that the drill pipe was
having problems and was improperly designed, but the companies involved did nothing. Then,
on the evening of April 20, 2010, during a routine test of the well, the rig crew detected a serious
abnormality in the pressure in the drill pipe. They watched it and took more measurements,
which revealed a number of other abnormalities that signal a ―kick‖—an undetected pressure
build up. But it was two hours before they recognized the seriousness of the situation—two hours
without a plan of action.
Then, when they did recognize the trouble, they sent the flow through a piece of equipment that
can‘t handle such pressures. The kick escalated to a blowout, and the mud-gas mix exploded. At
that point, emergency crews went into action. But for twelve minutes, no one sounded a general
alarm to abandon the rig, leading directly to the loss of eleven lives in a second explosion.

There was, as I said, every type of error. But the key one was the delay in accepting that
something serious was wrong. We see this in national policy, too. All policies court failure—our
war in Iraq, for instance. But when you refuse to even acknowledge that things aren‘t going as
expected, failure can become a humanitarian disaster. The sooner you‘re able to see clearly that
your best hopes and intentions have gone awry, the better. You have more room to pivot and
adjust. You have more of a chance to rescue.

But recognizing that your expectations are proving wrong—accepting that you need a new
plan—is commonly the hardest thing to do. We have this problem called confidence. To take a
risk, you must have confidence in yourself. In surgery, you learn early how essential that is. You
are imperfect. Your knowledge is never complete. The science is never certain. Your skills are
never infallible. Yet you must act. You cannot let yourself become paralyzed by fear.

Yet you cannot blind yourself to failure, either. Indeed, you must prepare for it. For, strangely
enough, only then is success possible. When Mrs. C‘s abdominal pain turned to catastrophe, for
instance, my colleagues were prepared. Now, they weren‘t prepared for anything so odd as the
idea that her stomach would have wound on itself like a balloon twisted too tight. In fact, when
the surgical resident told Mrs. C‘s surgeon that he was concerned about the way her abdomen
felt on his exam, the surgeon thought he was being alarmist. She‘d been doing great just the day
before. And what could go wrong in someone‘s belly after neck surgery? He‘d never
experienced seen a serious belly problem happen in this way before.

63
But the surgeon was humble enough to understand he could. You never really know what way
trouble can strike. So he listened. He allowed the resident to order the scan he wanted to get. The
team made sure it was expedited. When it showed the queer twist, no one dismissed it. They got
help from another surgeon immediately. They had her on an operating table within two hours.

Nothing went exactly perfectly. There was still a good deal of fumbling around, as they tried to
sort out what was really going on and what would need to be done. For a time, they hoped for a
small, short procedure, using just a scope and avoiding a big operation. It would have been an
inadequate plan—perhaps even the completely wrong one. But they avoided the worst mistake—
which was to have no plan at all. They‘d acted early enough to buy themselves time for trial and
error, to figure out all the steps required to get her through this calamity. They gave her and
themselves the chance to rescue success from failure.

I spoke to Mrs. C a couple days ago. She‘s living with her son now. She turned eighty-eight this
past April. With her vision gone in her left eye, she cannot work anymore or drive, and she
misses both greatly. ―I‘m not the same person I used to be,‖ she told me. She doesn‘t like being
dependent on others, even for just a ride. But she has otherwise returned to leading a life of her
own. She enjoys her family, especially her grandchildren. She‘s even looking for ways to
volunteer again.

―Life is not perfect, but it is good,‖ she said.

As you embark on your path from here, you are going to take chances—on a relationship, a job,
a new line of study. You will have great hopes. But things won‘t always go right.

When I graduated from college, I went abroad to study philosophy. I hoped to become a
philosopher, but I proved to be profoundly mediocre in the field. I tried starting a rock band. You
don‘t want to know how awful the songs I wrote were. I wrote one song, for example, comparing
my love for a girl to the decline of Marxism. After this, I worked in government on health care
legislation that not only went nowhere, it set back the prospect of health reform almost two
decades.

But the only failure is the failure to rescue something. I took away ideas and experiences and
relationships with people that profoundly changed what I was able to do when I finally found the
place that was for me, which was in medicine.

So you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it‘s what happens afterwards that is
defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for
it—Will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the
difference between triumph and defeat, you‘ll find, isn‘t about willingness to take risks. It‘s
about mastery of rescue.

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 Bono
Rockstar
Commencement Address at University of Pennsylvania 2004

BECAUSE WE CAN, WE MUST

My name is Bono and I am a rock star. Don't get me too excited because I use four letter words
when I get excited. I'd just like to say to the parents, your children are safe, your country is safe,
the FCC has taught me a lesson and the only four letter word I'm going to use today is P-E-N-N.
Come to think of it 'Bono' is a four-letter word. The whole business of obscenity--I don't think
there's anything certainly more unseemly than the sight of a rock star in academic robes. It's a bit
like when people put their King Charles spaniels in little tartan sweats and hats. It's not natural,
and it doesn't make the dog any smarter.

It's true we were here before with U2 and I would like to thank them for giving me a great life, as
well as you. I've got a great rock and roll band that normally stand in the back when I'm talking
to thousands of people in a football stadium and they were here with me, I think it was seven
years ago. Actually then I was with some other sartorial problems. I was wearing a mirror-ball

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suit at the time and I emerged from a forty-foot high revolving lemon. It was sort of a cross
between a space ship, a disco and a plastic fruit.

I guess it was at that point when your Trustees decided to give me their highest honor. Doctor of
Laws, wow! I know it's an honor, and it really is an honor, but are you sure? Doctor of Law, all I
can think about is the laws I've broken. Laws of nature, laws of physics, laws of the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and on a memorable night in the late seventies, I think it was
Newton's law of motion...sickness. No, it's true, my resume reads like a rap sheet. I have to come
clean; I've broken a lot of laws, and the ones I haven't I've certainly thought about. I have sinned
in thought, word, and deed. God forgive me. Actually God forgave me, but why would you? I'm
here getting a doctorate, getting respectable, getting in the good graces of the powers that be, I
hope it sends you students a powerful message: Crime does pay.

So I humbly accept the honor, keeping in mind the words of a British playwright, John Mortimer
it was, "No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense and relatively clean
fingernails." Well at best I've got one of the two of those.

But no, I never went to college, I've slept in some strange places, but the library wasn't one of
them. I studied rock and roll and I grew up in Dublin in the '70s, music was an alarm bell for me,
it woke me up to the world. I was 17 when I first saw The Clash, and it just sounded like
revolution. The Clash were like, "This is a public service announcement--with guitars." I was the
kid in the crowd who took it at face value. Later I learned that a lot of the rebels were in it for the
T-shirt. They'd wear the boots but they wouldn't march. They'd smash bottles on their heads but
they wouldn't go to something more painful like a town hall meeting. By the way I felt like that
myself until recently.

I didn't expect change to come so slow, so agonizingly slow. I didn't realize that the biggest
obstacle to political and social progress wasn't the Free Masons, or the Establishment, or the boot
heal of whatever you consider 'the Man' to be, it was something much more subtle. As the
Provost just referred to, a combination of our own indifference and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of
'no's you encounter as people vanish down the corridors of bureaucracy.

So for better or worse that was my education. I came away with a clear sense of the difference
music could make in my own life, in other peoples' lives if I did my job right. Which if you're a
singer in a rock band means avoiding the obvious pitfalls like, say, a mullet hairdo. If anyone
here doesn't know what a mullet is by the way your education's certainly not complete, I'd ask for
your money back. For a lead singer like me, a mullet is, I would suggest, arguably more
dangerous than a drug problem. Yes, I had a mullet in the '80s.

I used to think the future was solid or fixed, something you inherited like an old building that
you move into... But it's not. The future is not fixed, it's fluid. You can build your own building,
or hut or condo, whatever.

Now this is the point where the members of the faculty start smiling uncomfortably and thinking
maybe they should have offered me the honorary bachelors degree instead of the full blown
doctorate, (he should have been the bachelor's one, he's talking about mullets and stuff). If

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they're asking what on earth I'm doing here, I think it's a fair question. What am I doing here?
More to the point: what are you doing here? Because if you don't mind me saying so this is a
strange ending to an Ivy League education. Four years in these historic halls thinking great
thoughts and now you're sitting in a stadium better suited for football listening to an Irish rock
star give a speech that is so far mostly about himself. What are you doing here?

Actually I saw something in the paper last week about Kermit the Frog giving a commencement
address somewhere. One of the students was complaining, "I worked my ass off for four years to
be addressed by a sock?" You have worked your ass off for this. For four years you've been
buying, trading, and selling, everything you've got in this marketplace of ideas. The intellectual
hustle. Your pockets are full, even if your parents' are empty, and now you've got to figure out
what to spend it on.

Well, the going rate for change is not cheap. Big ideas are expensive. The University has had its
share of big ideas. Benjamin Franklin had a few, so did Justice Brennen and in my opinion so
does Judith Rodin. What a gorgeous girl. They all knew that if you're gonna be good at your
word if you're gonna live up to your ideals and your education, its' gonna cost you.

So my question I suppose is: What's the big idea? What's your big idea? What are you willing to
spend your moral capital, your intellectual capital, your cash, your sweat equity in pursuing
outside of the walls of the University of Pennsylvania?

There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called
the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you
want to serve the age, betray it." What does that mean to betray the age?

Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes.
It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.
Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as
it was--which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became
president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to
betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954,
Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really
be equal. Amen to that.

Fast forward 50 years. May 17, 2004. What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are
the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age? What's worth spending your
post-Penn lives trying to do or undo? It might be something simple.

It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has
equal worth. Could that be it? Could that be it? Each of you will probably have your own answer,
but for me that is it. And for me the proving ground has been Africa.

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Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our
pieties and our commitments because there's no way to look at what's happening over there and
it's effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God.
There is no chance.

An amazing event happened here in Philadelphia in 1985--Live Aid--that whole We Are The
World phenomenon the concert that happened here. Well after that concert I went to Ethiopia
with my wife, Ali. We were there for a month and an extraordinary thing happened to me. We
used to wake up in the morning and the mist would be lifting we'd see thousands and thousands
of people who'd been walking all night to our food station were we were working. One man--I
was standing outside talking to the translator--had this beautiful boy and he was saying to me in
Amharic, I think it was, I said I can't understand what he's saying, and this nurse who spoke
English and Amharic said to me, he's saying will you take his son. He's saying please take his
son, he would be a great son for you. I was looking puzzled and he said, "You must take my son
because if you don't take my son, my son will surely die. If you take him he will go back to
Ireland and get an education." Probably like the ones we're talking about today. I had to say no,
that was the rules there and I walked away from that man, I've never really walked away from it.
But I think about that boy and that man and that's when I started this journey that's brought me
here into this stadium.

Because at that moment I became the worst scourge on God's green earth, a rock star with a
cause. Christ! Except it isn't the cause. Seven thousand Africans dying every day of preventable,
treatable disease like AIDS? That's not a cause, that's an emergency. And when the disease gets
out of control because most of the population live on less than one dollar a day? That's not a
cause, that's an emergency. And when resentment builds because of unfair trade rules and the
burden of unfair debt, that are debts by the way that keep Africans poor? That's not a cause, that's
an emergency. So--We Are The World, Live Aid, start me off it was an extraordinary thing and
really that event was about charity. But 20 years on I'm not that interested in charity. I'm
interested in justice. There's a difference. Africa needs justice as much as it needs charity.

Equality for Africa is a big idea. It's a big expensive idea. I see the Wharton graduates now
getting out the math on the back of their programs, numbers are intimidating aren't they, but not
to you! But the scale of the suffering and the scope of the commitment they often numb us into a
kind of indifference. Wishing for the end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa is like wishing
that gravity didn't make things so damn heavy. We can wish it, but what the hell can we do about
it?

Well, more than we think. We can't fix every problem--corruption, natural calamities are part of
the picture here--but the ones we can we must. The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade, as I say,
sharing our knowledge, the intellectual copyright for lifesaving drugs in a crisis, we can do that.
And because we can, we must. Because we can, we must. Amen.

This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. It's not a theory, it's a fact. The fact is that this
generation--yours, my generation--that can look at the poverty, we're the first generation that can
look at poverty and disease, look across the ocean to Africa and say with a straight face, we can
be the first to end this sort of stupid extreme poverty, where in the world of plenty, a child can

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die for lack of food in it's belly. We can be the first generation. It might take a while, but we can
be that generation that says no to stupid poverty. It's a fact, the economists confirm it. It's an
expensive fact but, cheaper than say the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from communism and
fascism. And cheaper I would argue than fighting wave after wave of terrorism's new recruits.
That's the economics department over there, very good.

It's a fact. So why aren't we pumping our fists in the air and cheering about it? Well probably
because when we admit we can do something about it, we've got to do something about it. For
the first time in history we have the know how, we have the cash, we have the lifesaving drugs,
but do we have the will?

Yesterday, here in Philadelphia, at the Liberty Bell, I met a lot of Americans who do have the
will. From arch-religious conservatives to young secular radicals, I just felt an incredible
overpowering sense that this was possible. We're calling it the ONE campaign, to put an end to
AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa. They believe we can do it, so do I.

I really, really do believe it. I just want you to know, I think this is obvious, but I'm not really
going in for the warm fuzzy feeling thing, I'm not a hippy, I do not have flowers in my hair, I
come from punk rock, The Clash wore army boots not Birkenstocks. I believe America can do
this! I believe that this generation can do this. In fact I want to hear an argument about why we
shouldn't.

I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy
rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this,
outside this campus--and even inside it--idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism
and all the other isms of indifference. Baggism, Shaggism. Raggism. Notism, graduationism,
chismism, I don't know. Where's John Lennon when you need him.

But I don't want to make you cop to idealism, not in front of your parents, or your younger
siblings. But what about Americanism? Will you cop to that at least? It's not everywhere in
fashion these days, Americanism. Not very big in Europe, truth be told. No less on Ivy League
college campuses. But it all depends on your definition of Americanism.

Me, I'm in love with this country called America. I'm a huge fan of America, I'm one of those
annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask
you all kinds of annoying questions about why you didn't live up to that.

I'm that kind of fan. I read the Declaration of Independence and I've read the Constitution of the
United States, and they are some liner notes, dude. As I said yesterday I made my pilgrimage to
Independence Hall, and I love America because America is not just a country, it's an idea. You
see my country, Ireland, is a great country, but it's not an idea. America is an idea, but it's an idea
that brings with it some baggage, like power brings responsibility. It's an idea that brings with it
equality, but equality even though it's the highest calling, is the hardest to reach. The idea that
anything is possible, that's one of the reasons why I'm a fan of America. It's like hey, look there's
the moon up there, lets take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it. That's the kind of America that
I'm a fan of.

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In 1771 your founder Mr. Franklin spent three months in Ireland and Scotland to look at the
relationship they had with England to see if this could be a model for America, whether America
should follow their example and remain a part of the British Empire.

Franklin was deeply, deeply distressed by what he saw. In Ireland he saw how England had put a
stranglehold on Irish trade, how absentee English landlords exploited Irish tenant farmers and
how those farmers in Franklin's words "lived in retched hovels of mud and straw, were clothed in
rags and subsisted chiefly on potatoes." Not exactly the American dream...

So instead of Ireland becoming a model for America, America became a model for Ireland in our
own struggle for independence.

When the potatoes ran out, millions of Irish men, women and children packed their bags got on a
boat and showed up right here. And we're still doing it. We're not even starving anymore, loads
of potatoes. In fact if there's any Irish out there, I've breaking news from Dublin, the potato
famine is over you can come home now. But why are we still showing up? Because we love the
idea of America.

We love the crackle and the hustle, we love the spirit that gives the finger to fate, the spirit that
says there's no hurdle we can't clear and no problem we can't fix. (sound of helicopter) Oh, here
comes the Brits, only joking. No problem we can't fix. So what's the problem that we want to
apply all this energy and intellect to?

Every era has its defining struggle and the fate of Africa is one of ours. It's not the only one, but
in the history books it's easily going to make the top five, what we did or what we did not do. It's
a proving ground, as I said earlier, for the idea of equality. But whether it's this or something
else, I hope you'll pick a fight and get in it. Get your boots dirty, get rough, steel your courage
with a final drink there at Smoky Joe's, one last primal scream and go.

Sing the melody line you hear in your own head, remember, you don't owe anybody any
explanations, you don't owe your parents any explanations, you don't owe your professors any
explanations. You know I used to think the future was solid or fixed, something you inherited
like an old building that you move into when the previous generation moves out or gets chased
out.

But it's not. The future is not fixed, it's fluid. You can build your own building, or hut or condo,
whatever; this is the metaphor part of the speech by the way.

But my point is that the world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to
hammer it into shape. Now if I were a folksinger I'd immediately launch into "If I Had a
Hammer" right now get you all singing and swaying. But as I say I come from punk rock, so I'd
rather have the bloody hammer right here in my fist.

That's what this degree of yours is, a blunt instrument. So go forth and build something with it.
Remember what John Adams said about Ben Franklin, "He does not hesitate at our boldest
Measures but rather seems to think us too irresolute."

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Well this is the time for bold measures. This is the country, and you are the generation. Thank
you.

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