A Decade of Wisdom: Commencement speech highlights: Recent Episodes
Tipping Point
As graduation rolls around, take a trip down memory lane and revisit the best commencement speeches of the past 10 years.
"It is the greatest irony of my life that losing my husband helped me find deeper gratitude—gratitude for the kindness of my friends, the love of my family, the laughter of my children. My hope for you is that you can find that gratitude—not just on the good days, like today, but on the hard ones, when you will really need it."
" If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle."
“It’s not cool to not know what you are talking about. That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you are talking about.”
“Don’t shrink from risk. And tune out those critics and cynics. History rarely yields to one person, but think, and never forget, what happens when it does. That can be you. That should be you. That must be you.”
“I don’t want to die … I don’t want to die poor. Two great motivators in the history of human cultures.”
“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
"Whatever your dream is right now, if you don't achieve it, you haven't failed, and you're not some loser. But just as importantly — and this is the part I may not get right and you may not listen to — if you do get your dream, you are not a winner...And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life"
“This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.”
“For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity and not to give in to peer pressure to try to be something that you’re not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person, to contribute in some way … Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost, and you see a path. Then, by all means, you should follow that.”
“If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
"We might have the right intentions, but instead of acting, we decide to wait.. We keep waiting until we run out of “untils.” Then it is too late."