For the rest of you, this is your life. First, you’re going to graduate today. Parts of the next year will be amazing, and parts are really going to suck. Very few will have jobs as exciting as being a college senior. From now on, no one will be paid to read your writing or your fascinating seminar interventions. You won’t have a social life pre-organized right there in front of you the way it is here at Dartmouth.

All of us love certain things: certain friends, certain subjects, certain dreams, certain professional goals. But you don’t really know the nature of your love until you’ve tested it with reality.

When I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I knew I wanted to do some teaching. I thought I wanted to be a playwright or a novelist, go into politics, have a spouse, children.

But I didn’t know exactly what order my loves came in. So like everyone in their 20s, I got to test my loves and I got to sample some new loves. It was like trying on clothes at the mall. After ten years, some of my loves, like playwriting, just didn’t fit or faded away. Some new ones came into view. But most important, over the next ten really formless years, my heart developed some contours and I learned what I loved most—writing was more important to me than politics. I could write out a priority list on a piece of paper of the things I loved, and I could rank them and I could devote my best energies to my highest loves.