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The following is inspired by a graduation I recently
attended (though the speech below is only in my
imagination).
First of all, my congratulations to all of you,
and your parents, for enduring the past four years
of higher education. I'm sure you all will have
many memories of this time as you live out your
lives - some fond memories, and some difficult
ones. Many of you will have a monthly reminder
of this time as you make payments on your considerable
college loans.
I've heard many addresses of this kind, and they
seem to be targeted
at the achievers who will use this experience as
a launching pad into a life of further accomplishment
in business or the professions, perhaps with a
brilliant few years in graduate school along the
way. Or they're targeted at the students who did
OK academically but who have family connections
that will smooth the way to material success. And
the usual advice from guys like me is to stop and
smell the roses, do community service, and all
that. Consider the advice given, even if you have
no intention of following it. You achievers and
well-connected grads can all tune out now. Just
wake up in time for a little polite applause when
I finally run out of things to say.
Most addresses of this kind also seem to leave
the majority of us feeling a little bit intimidated
and inadequate. We don't have connections. We haven't
made such an academic splash that the waves and
ripples will carry us so far into personal success
that we need to be reminded to stop and smell the
roses. We got good but not excellent grades. We
hung out with friends. We indulged in too many
extracurricular substances. We partied hard.
The prospect of having to make our way in the
world or succeed in grad school scares the crap
out of us. The world seems so very important and
huge, and we're so small.
Here are what I hope will be some encouraging
words.
First, it's unrealistic to think that everyone
has to have a peak experience in just the four
years from your late teens to early adulthood.
Your peak experiences are ahead of you. Some of
your high-achieving classmates - the ones dozing
through this speech - may go on to even better
things. But some of them have already peaked. Their
life from here to retirement or death is one long,
slow, downhill slide. The nostalgia of their middle
years will morph into disillusionment and bitterness.
You, on the other hand, have a lot to look forward
to.
Second, the funk you're in now, perhaps enhanced
by a haze of booze and weed, will lift for most
of you. Work in the so-called real world, and even
graduate school work, is typically far more focused
and engaging than your past four years of wandering
and wondering. If you manage to choose well (actually,
if you manage to get any sort of focused work),
the haze will lift and you'll feel like you're
shot from guns. The chemical enhancements, legal
and illegal, should lose much of their allure simply
because you've discovered something better to do
with your time. Do beware, however, that the sellers
of the legal stuff have huge advertising budgets.
You may have been caught up in the novelty of booze
at one time; don't get caught up in the hype.
Third, you are sitting before me all regimented
and dressed identically probably for the first
and last time in your life. Look around you. Bunch
of conformists, all dressed up in funny hats and
robes. But if you were not among the elite few
on this campus, it's probably because you didn't
conform to many of the rules. Oh, yeah, we do often
choose to follow some rules to keep ourselves healthy
and to keep from hurting other people. But you
have a head start in shunning the orthodoxy of
many of the soul-killing "shoulds" in
your lives. This may not have been by conscious
choice - you may have just had an intuitive feeling
that mindless conformity to convention was bad
for your health. The challenge ahead of you is
to make your choices more aware and intentional.
Fourth - we're almost done now - think about who
gets to define what success is. If you believe
our mass culture, success is dying with the most
toys. Or retiring at 45. Or getting to run the
show as CEO. Or becoming a multimillionaire. Or
owning two or three homes. Or driving a car that
costs as much as your parents paid for their house.
Or winning the Nobel or Pulitzer prize. With these
definitions of success, the vast majority of us
are abject failures. A more modest definition might
go like this: Living my life in such a way that
future generations will benefit. This is not as
easy as it might seem, but it is at least achievable
by us ordinary folks, even if we don't discover
the cure for cancer or bring about world peace.
How do you go about it? I would modestly propose
the following:
Be kind. Raise your children, if you have any,
to be kind and thoughtful, independent-thinking
beings. Those are peak experiences that can last
a lifetime and beyond.
That's it. If you're sitting next to someone who
has dozed off, give that person a nudge and say
that it's time to applaud.
Thank you.
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