Jami Miscik: 'Public Service in Divisive Times', Pepperdine University - 2019

20 March 2019, Malibu, California, USA

Before entering the private sector, Miscik had a distinguished twenty-two year career in intelligence, ultimately serving as the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for intelligence.

Thank you for that kind introduction and for giving me the opportunity to visit Seaver College again.

It is funny. I have briefed Presidents, I have negotiated with Afghan warlords, but there is something weirdly intimidating about coming back to speak at one’s alma mater. I don’t know why that is, but it is true.

I thank Dan for that kind introduction, and I thank you all for welcoming me back.

I want to focus my remarks on the enduring need for public service. I think this is a particularly important topic in these politically divisive times. Today, only one-half of Americans trust their government to do the right thing, and even fewer are satisfied with the way democracy is working.

Too often, I think that the American people see “politics” and think “government.” Or, they think in terms of “bureaucrats” — and have the notion that the government is filled with people who have second-class minds who couldn’t get a job in the private sector. But, next time you hear someone belittling the quality of those “bureaucrats” in Washington, remember that the federal workforce has included 69 Nobel laureates.

Clearly, public service can take many forms. For me, it was serving as an intelligence officer. And, as I make my comments here today, let me be very clear on a couple of critical points:

I am not a partisan.

I am not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat.

As a CIA officer, I was not a policymaker, and I was not a political appointee. Our duty was to serve the President regardless of who was sitting at that desk. This continues to be the case today.

In my time, I served 5 Presidents — 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats. My job was to convey our best intelligence and analytic judgments to the President and his national security team.

We weren’t there to be liked or disliked.

We were there to do our job.

Two Stories

Let me start by telling you two stories.

As I sat here in Elkins Auditorium — my go-to-spot was right over there, on the aisle, about halfway up — I had no idea that I would go into public service. I started at Pepperdine as a political science major. Along the way, I decided to become a double major in economics. I planned to go to law school and to specialize in international law. I took the LSATs, applied to 5 or 6 schools, and waited for my acceptances to roll in.

One day, Professor Caldwell asked me if I really wanted to do that? He suggested that if what I really loved was the international part, then why would I go in through the back door of law school when I could just go for it directly?

I don’t think Professor Caldwell knew he was ultimately directing me into the arms of the CIA, but he did. I hurried to apply to graduate schools of international relations. A year after getting my Masters — and after an incredibly intense vetting process by the Agency — I was offered a job as a GS-9 analyst in CIA’s Office of Global Issues. When I got the job offer, I was working at the mall in Thousand Oaks and living in Malibu Canyon Village. Clearly, I was not focused on having a “Plan B.”

I loaded up my car and started driving across country. The first night I stopped at a hotel in Gallup, New Mexico and turned on the evening news. The lead story was that a bomb had destroyed the US Embassy in Beirut. The front of the Embassy had collapsed, killing many in the CIA station. Colleagues I would never get to know had died in an instant. Later, I would be at the ceremony when their stars were etched into the Memorial Wall in the lobby of CIA headquarters. A solemn reminder of their sacrifice. From war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to risky covert operations in denied areas, the dedication of the people I worked with was inspiring.

One of the first people I met at the Agency was a man named Bill. Bill was probably a dozen years older than me. He had served eight years in the Marine Corps. He had flown more than 75 missions over Vietnam and Laos, but for the five years before joining the Agency, he was right down the road from us, earning his Ph.D at Claremont. Bill graduated with his doctorate in government, and started working at the CIA in January 1979.

That same year, as I was sitting in here in Elkins, the news was filled with stories about the Iranian revolution:

The Shah had fled the country in January.

In February, the Ayatollah Khomeini had returned from exile.

On Valentine’s Day, the US Embassy in Tehran was overtaken over by a group of militants. This was not the famous “student” takeover … that would come later.

That summer, Bill had finished his Agency training, and in August, he was told his 1stoverseas posting would be to Tehran. The Chief of the Iranian Operations Branch told him not to worry about another embassy attack, reassuring him by saying:

The Iranians have already done it once, so they don’t have to prove anything by doing it again.

Besides, the onlything that could trigger an attack would be if the Shah was admitted into the States, and no one in this town [Washington] is stupid enough to do that.

Bill reported for duty in Tehran on the 12thof September.

A month later — at the end of October — the Shah was admitted to the United States for medical treatments.

On November 4th, the US Embassy was overrun, and Bill became a hostage.

He ultimately spent more than 400 days in solitary confinement.

After his release, Bill came back to CIA HQs and continued his public service for another 10-15 years.

People Like You

Why do I tell you these stories? Because this is your government. I want you to know that your government isn’t some distant entity. It is filled with people like you. People who sat in Elkins Auditorium or Claremont’s Davidson Lecture Hall and who chose to do public service. Like the men and women who are in our armed forces or the foreign service officers who work in our Embassies and Consulates around the world. They chooseto serve.

Why do they do it? It certainly isn’t for the pay. It isn’t for public recognition or accolades. In fact, often, they face quite the opposite. A former president once said of the Agency, “Your successes are unheralded, but your failures are trumpeted.” I personally know that to be true.

Bob Gates, one of my first bosses at the Agency and who later became Secretary of Defense for both Presidents Bush and Obama answered the question of why people went into public service by saying this:

“If you scratch deeply enough, you will find that those who serve — no matter how outwardly tough or jaded or egotistical — are, in their heart of hearts, romantics and idealists. And optimists. We actually believe we can make a difference, and [believe] that we can make the lives of others better.”

People at the Agency and throughout the government always speak in terms of “the mission.” The Agency’s mission, like that of its military counterparts, is to protect the country, andto be worthy of being entrusted with that responsibility.

Believe me, there was never a day in my years of service when I questioned whether what I was doing was important. Each time I would walk through the doors of the West Wing and into the Oval Office, I would have one of those “take your breath away” moments:

Me. A girl from Redondo Beach CA, a Redondo SeaHawk, a Pepperdine Wave — was getting ready to brief the President of the United States on the country’s most urgent national security issues.

It was Heady Stuff.

Every time.

Public Service in Divisive Times

Some may shy away from thinking about public service during these polarizing times, but the need is great and the opportunity to make a difference is high. As I said, when I was here at Pepperdine, I had no idea that I would go into public service, and I hope the same holds true for some of you.

Today, only 6 percent of federal employees are under the age of 30. I think most people just don’t think about government as a career option.

That worries me. Without people like you choosing public service, who will lead our important institutions 10 or 15 years from now?

Michael Lewis, the author of great books like The Big Short and Liar’s Poker, just wrote a book on public service called The Fifth Risk. It is worth a read to appreciate the caliber and dedication of the people who work in government, and the magnitude of the problems they are tackling. Lewis notes that the government manages a portfolio of risks that no individual or corporation could or would be willing to take on by themselves.

In one example, he talks about a 2013 incident that took place here in California near San Jose at the Metcalf Electrical Sub-Station.

On the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, 13 hours after the bombs had gone off, someone cut the communication lines to and from the Metcalf substation.

At the same time, a sniper took out 17 of the electrical transformers. They knew precisely which manhole covers would lead them to the right lines to cut, and exactly where to shoot.

This was the feeder station for Google and Apple.

For local law enforcement, the federal government, and the company, the questions were enormous: Was this the second terrorist attack of the day? Was someone trying to take down the Internet? Or was it unrelated — possibly just guys with guns, drinking beers, and shooting at things in the night?

But, then why were key cables cut?

Because there was sufficient backup on the electrical grid that night the incident didn’t get much attention unless you were one of the government’s employees who worries about attacks to our infrastructure and vulnerabilities in our electrical grid.

It took two years of sustained effort and investigations before Department of Homeland Security was able to say they believed the culprit was a former company insider.

Every year the Partnership for Public Service gives out an award called “The Sammy” — it is short for “Service to America Medals.” Michael Lewis said he was struck by the mind-blowing accomplishments of the recipients so I looked at some of the awardees over last few years. All of them were people who chose to put their world-class expertise to work for our government.

There was a PhD scientist at The Center for Disease Control who assembled a rapid response team to protect expectant mothers and their babies from the Zika virus.

Or, the woman who led a USAID team into Liberia in the middle of an Ebola outbreak and crafted a successful strategy of containment where previously there had only been chaos.

Or someone, I knew personally, a master of disguise at CIA who orchestrated the daring rescue of six US diplomats. A story that Ben Affleck turned into his Academy Award winning movie, Argo.

As a country, our citizens know disturbingly little about our government and our history. Up until the 1970s, civics and government were part of almost everyone’s mandatory education. That has changed.

A study from last October found that only one in three native-bornAmericans could pass the exam that immigrants must take to become citizens.

For those under the age of 45, the passage rate dropped to just 19 percent.

I know I shouldn’t laugh, but on the multiple choice test many of those who failed the test, answered that they thought the phrase, “The Cold War” had something to do with climate change!

With all the talk of immigration in the last few years, it is interesting to note that some of the people most drawn to public service are first-generation Americans. Coming from countries where they had first-hand experience with collapsing governments and failed states may have given them a greater appreciation for the importance of good government.

One of government’s key responsibilities is to keep its citizens safe. Whether you are a food or drug tester at the FDA, an air traffic controller, a technician at a nuclear power plant, or one of the firemen who protected Pepperdine during the Woolsey fire last year — their job is to keep you safe. Even the poor guy at the IRS is ultimately collecting taxes to help keep you safe and protected.

The goal of government is to give its citizens the opportunity to excel — be it through education, research and development, or economic growth. The presidential election in 2016 laid bare the extent to which so many Americans felt they had been denied those opportunities.

They were parents who felt the system was rigged against them, and that their children had no chance of getting ahead.

They wanted leaders who recognized that their jobs had been lost, their towns hollowed out, and their health increasingly jeopardized.

They felt patronized by elites who ignored their concerns. And now, instead of seeing education as a way up or a way out of their circumstances, they saw it as a barrier-to-entry put in place to protect the establishment and the status quo.

Their rage was not ideological. They were neither exclusively to the far-left nor to the far-right. They were more “anti-whatever-we-already-had-and-already tried.” I was stunned by how many voters turned their support from Bernie Sanders when he dropped out directly to Donald Trump. That isn’t ideological. That is a desire to find something different. They wanted to be heard, and they trusted an outsider to hear them.

Today our society is facing a multitude of forces working to drive us apart.

We choose to listen to media outlets that not only tell us what we want to hear, but reaffirm that we are right, and castigate those who disagree with us.

We choose to live in gated communities.

We allow ourselves to believe that one must be protected fromdisquieting ideas and speakersrather than to be challenged by them, and to learn from them.

You will find that opening your mind and experiences to the uncomfortable or unfamiliar is an important part of your lifelong education. When I was here at Seaver, I tutored a boy at Camp David Gonzales — the maximum security prison for juveniles that used to be up Malibu Canyon Road. Henry was serving a prison sentence for a gang-related murder, and I was teaching him math and reading. He was 16. He had a metal plate in his head where he had been shot. He was a father. He was smart, but he only had a second grade education, despite having been “passed” through every grade until he went to prison.

One day we were talking and I asked him how he came to join his particular gang? Was it based on where he lived? Or where he went to school? Henry told me it was easy for him. He had simply joined his mother’s gang. That was an eye-opening moment for me. Talk about a discomforting idea. He lived in a world so different than my own. Sadly, studies now show us that your future success can be determined by your zip code.

Had Henry grown up in a different zip code, he may well have been the one standing here talking to you today.

I make these points to underscore that we must find ways to come together as a society.

The unofficial motto of the United States is “E Pluribus Unum.”

From Many, One.”

Today, our country is in urgent need of “We.” Not us. Not them, “We.”

And public service is a great way to take up that charge.

The first time I heard the phrase “GOAT,” it didn’t stand for “Greatest of All Time.” I was in England and there they use it to mean a “Government of All Talents.” That is what we need in the United States today. We need your ideas, your energy, and your talents.

To truly be “Proud to Be an American,” — to go beyond a simple song title or slogans at a pep rally — we have to remember as responsible citizens we each have an obligation to serve our country.

The factthat our union remains imperfect should compel each of us to want to work to make it better.

Does that mean I think that everyone should go to work for the Federal government. “Absolutely not!”

Critical Thinking as a Public Service

Whatever profession you choose, one of the biggest contributions you can make to the health of our democracy is to be an informed citizen and a critical thinker.

Ignorance is not a virtue. It is just plain lazy.

Critical thinking is, in and of itself, a vital and needed public service. To be a critical thinker you need to:
• Recognize that it is much easier to be against something than to be for something. If you disagree with something, push yourself to consider what the better alternative might be. If you don’t like one solution, think of another, but don’t deny the existence of the problem altogether.
• Understand what really constitutes balanced reporting. Cable news shows that put one person on from the left and another person on from the right aren’t giving you true balanced reporting. This is what people mean when they talk about false equivalency. If one person says it is raining and another person says it is not, it is the job of the journalist to look out the window and tell you what is really happening.
• Learn to disagree with someone without demonizing them. Just because you think they are wrong, doesn’t mean they are immoral or their idea is not worthy of discussion.
• Be critical of those you agree with as well as those you don’t. When someone oversteps or stretches the truth, challenge them; when a newspaper makes judgments in what is supposed to be a factual news story, take note and recognize the difference between reporting and commentary.
• Recognize that opinion is not fact, and often, it isn’t even analysis. As intelligence officers we would analyze a complicated issue for weeks or months on end. We would agonize over the precise wording needed to capture the story and convey the caveats. We also had to ask ourselves: What are we missing? In Washington, policy makers wanted to know what we knew, but they also wanted to know what we didn’t know. Only then could they make a truly informed choice.
Finally, it is critically important to realize how much words matter.

Complex issues can’t be reduced to bumper stickers or hats. Don’t succumb to doing it yourself. Using phrases like “Fake News,” “Deplorables,” or “Deep State” isn’t helpful. The shorthand is intellectually corrupt, and the impact can be corrosive.

Those of you with a strong liberal arts education like the one you receive here at Pepperdine have an advantage. You have been taught how to assess information and reach conclusions. In your classes, you question and, hopefully challenge, your teachers. Sorry faculty!

In an era of social media, however, we have to be cognizant that we are fed a stream of information that constantly needs to be questioned and assessed.

So question actively, listen respectfully, and make informed decisions. Hold true to your principles, but let your opinions and positions change when new information is presented.

Bringing it Back to My World

Let me bring my remarks on public service back to my world of geopolitics, national security, and risk.

Dedicated public servants and informed citizens make for a powerful combination. The final piece needed to close the circle is political leadership. We need leaders who focus on meeting our challenges, and inspiring us to positive outcomes.2000, I was the first intelligence officer to go to the Governor’s Mansion in Austin to begin George W. Bush’s daily intelligence briefing. As governor of Texas, he had grappled with all sorts of complex issues, but as Governor, he never had to learn the details of a North Korean nuke or throw-weight of a ballistic missile. In 2016, when President Trump was elected he was confident in his own abilities — he was someone who trusted his gut and his instincts — but, again he had little experience dealing with the foreign policy issues he would face.

No elected official can be expected to be an expert on every issue. There are analysts, scientists, and specialists in government who have spent decades monitoring things like weapons programs, acting to slow their advancement when possible, and supporting diplomats tracking compliance with international accords. Elected officials and their political appointees should take advantage of this expertise on a daily basis.

When expertise is coupled with a leader’s strong conviction, it is a powerful force.

In fact, to achieve maximum national security effectiveness, you need to have both.

I worry when I see that the 2020 budget proposal suggests cutting the State Department’s budget by 24 percent. I would be amongst the first to agree that budgets in Washington can be trimmed, but a cut of this size would seriously jeopardize expertise and the ability of our diplomatic corps to protect US interests abroad.

Everyone who goes into public service in the national security community takes an oath to protect the country to the best of their ability. Elected officials may have the leeway to exaggerate, embellish, or add rhetorical flourishes, but national security professionals do not. If you are lucky enough to rise to a senior leadership position in the national security world, you also carry huge responsibilities.

One of the key responsibilities is that you often have to tell an elected official what they don’t want to hear. One former CIA Director said it is like being a skunk at a garden party. Picture it: The President and his political team are sitting in the Oval Office — they are happy with how things are going — and in walks an intelligence officer who says, “We have a report that Leader X who promisedyou he would do one thing is actually doing the exact opposite.” You can see the body language change and the mood darken. I suspect that President Trump recently had one of those “skunk at the garden party” moments when intelligence officers walked in with the latest reporting on North Korea.

Another responsibility for senior officials is to take a principled stand. You can’t wantthe job so much that you stop holding true to your principles. General Mattis’ recent resignation as Secretary of Defense is a perfect example. In my own case, I had to threaten to resign once when certain high-level policy makers were trying to change my intelligence analysts’ judgments to fit their political agenda.

Senior officials also have a duty to “own their own mistakes.” When we had a major intelligence failure on Iraq, on my watch, I put together a emergency task force to find out what we had missed, why we missed it, and what we should have done better.

The deputy at the time was a Naval Academy graduate so we borrowed a practice from the US Navy. When there is an incident on a nuclear submarine, they have what they call a “safety stand down”…everything stops until everyone knows what the problem was and how to fix it. We did the same thing with every CIA analyst. Whether they worked on Russia or Latin America, terrorism or finance, every one of them need to know what had gone wrong and how we proposed to fix it.

It was our responsibility to help future intel officers avoid similar mistakes.

Conclusion

The challenges we face as a country are daunting.

The world order is changing, as is our place in it. We face a rising China with its strongest leader in decades propelling it forward and doing so increasingly through one-man rule.

Our planet is fragile and in danger. The science is clear and action is needed.

Just think about how many apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster movies start with some politician ignoring the scientists’ warnings.

I am just sayin’.

As our country pulls back from the international stage, our enemies see opportunities, and our allies are questioning our commitment to them.

For the last two generations, our global leadership has been buttressed by our strong economy. Now our fiscal deficits are ballooning and soon we will no longer be the world’s largest economy. It is folly to focus solely on short-term metrics, and ignore the long-term ramifications of these changes.

The technological transformation we face is unprecedented. Automation, robotics, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and quantum computing will change our lives in the next 10 years. Some jobs will be created, but many more will be lost and people will be displaced during the transition.

It will be an economic upheaval on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution. And, note the use of the word “revolution.” One of my colleagues in government used to say, “Revolution is unthinkable, until it is inevitable.”

These are serious challenges and I haven’t even mentioned the Middle East, terrorism, Russia, Brexit, growing income inequality, gun violence, or cyber attacks.

We must work to find new solutions to old problems, and to spot and mitigate new risks as early as possible. We also need to recognize that meeting these challenges will not be without cost and sacrifice. Sacrifice is something we rarely want to consider. But, if we are clear about:

• What we are trying to achieve,

• What we are trying to prevent,

• And what sacrifices we are willing to make.

We can prevail.

We need our leaders and those in public service to focus not on taking us back to our past, but on preparing us to excel in the future. We need the best minds in the country, be it in public sector, the private sector, or in this room to be working to make our country a more perfect union.

Finally, I want to read you one quote:
Our government and our people have never stood so acutely in need of developing the full the talents of our ablest public servants” ….

But, a growing disdain for public service in our Nation as a whole. and in our colleges in particular, is now coupled with the trend of increasingly complex national problems.

We must secure the services of the best minds of our Nation.
This quote is 100 percent applicable today, and yet this was John F. Kennedy speaking in 1958. They had their own worries then. The Soviet Union – our Cold War rival — had just launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, and the Space Race was on.

A few years later, in his Presidential Inaugural Address, Kennedy famously challenged Americans to:

• “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but to

• “Ask what you can do for your country.”

I would urge the same for all of you. Whatever path you have chosen for your personal pursuits make sure there is a public service commitment as well.

Pepperdine’s motto is “Freely Ye Received, Freely Give.” You are part of a privileged community. You are amongst the most able to help our country meet its challenges and prosper. It is both your responsibilityand your opportunity.

Thank You.

K. Sparks: 'A setback is just a set up for a comeback', Failure, faith, fruition', 45 PS, Clarence Witherspoon - 2019

21 June 2019, Queens, New York City, USA

Sonia Sotomayor: 'Education has a more important value than money', Manhattan College - 2019

Speech by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor begins at 1:29:50

17 May 2019, Manhattan College, New York City, USA

Hello, I’m thrilled to be a new Jasper. President O’ Donnell, i thank you and the Board of Trustees of this college of bestowing on me my honorary degree. I take great pride of joining the great Class of 2019. It is an honor for me to share this occasion with all of you. It is especially lovely for me to be here because it lets me return to my home borough, the Bronx. [cheers and applause]

A place that makes my heart smile whenever i come back to it. You can send a girl to Washington, D.C., but you can't take the Bronx out of her. [cheers].

Just notice how i have been saying ‘the Bronx’, the right way. President O'donnell, you began your tenure at Manhattan College in 2009. I became a Justice a month later in august 2009. We are both celebrating our 10th year anniversary and i congratulate you on your 10 years thus far. As a baseball fan, i am thrilled to be here at the birthplace of the seventh inning stretch. A tradition dating back to a game in the 1880's between your Jaspers and what is today New York City's second best baseball team, the Mets. Guess what team i favor. Hopefully, mr. President, we are both still in the early innings of our respective outings. You deserve to take particular pride in this College because it epitomizes the values of what i grew up here in the Bronx, commitment to education and community.

The five Christian Brothers who founded this institution back in 1853, following in the footsteps of the great educational pioneer, st. John Baptist understood that education has the power to change lives. And i do not just mean as i will explain today to change the financial conditions of people's lives, i mean also the power of education to touch minds and hearts, to help students lead lives of meaning and purpose.

As some of you already know, i grew up in the poorest area of the Bronx in a housing project in the southeastern part of that borough. Some of you may share similar backgrounds, i know our valedictorian does. My dad had finished sixth grade and my mom was a practical nurse that got her diploma as part of a grant after she left the army. My parents did not have many educational opportunities themselves growing up, but they and especially my mom made education the center value of the lives of my brother and me who my mom raised alone after my dad died when i was 9. She repeatedly, just like your mother, told me that education would open the door of opportunity.

Eventually when my brother and i were in high school, my mother was able to achieve her own lifelong dream of going to college and becoming a registered nurse. For all of the parents and even grandparents out there, it is never too late to go back to school. It was impossible for my brother and me not to study hard when we watched how hard mom studied night after night at our kitchen table. My mother made clear both some words and deeds that a good education was the key to success in life.

As is so often the case, i have learned my mother was right, so much so that the front cover of a children's book i published this year called Turning Pages has an illustration of me walking up the steps of the Supreme Court holding a key. That key i tell people of all ages represents what opened the whole world to me, reading and education.

It is what has opened the world for you and like all good things, it did not come easily. You have put in years of very hard work to get your degree today. You and likely your families have sacrificed time and money to make it possible, through triumphs and trials, sweat and fatigue, you have arrived at this moment.

While i hope you will congratulate yourself on this achievement, i hope that you also take time to thank those who helped you along the way, working together with others, you may have already discovered is one of the great secrets to achieving anything in the world. I first realized after my own time in college, which as you heard, felt a little bit like arriving in an alien country. My very first semester, i was assigned to write a midterm paper in the Introductory American History course i was taking. When i got my paper back, i saw a big red C Plus marked at the top. That was the lowest grade i had received on anything since the fourth grade. I was devastated. I went to my history professor and asked why i had received such a low grade. Her feedback that both my structure and grammar needed work could have been disabling, instead, however, i learned from it and i asked for help. Before the next essay, in addition to spending countless hours poring over basic grammar books, i sought out the assistance of my professors. By the time i graduated and as you know, summa cum laude, i have come to see that dreams come true only if you work hard to make them come true.

And they come true not just because of your own efforts, but also because other people in your life help you succeed. So thanks to a lot of hard work and help from others, you have made it here today and as you sit here about to receive your diplomas, i imagine you are both excited and a bit nervous, excited rightly about what you have accomplished, yet you may also be a little nervous about what this education has brought you.

Many academics and journalists are writing these days about the value of a college education, in terms of credentialing and income, particularly in the face of rising costs. Amid these conversations, it can be all too easy to ask whether pursuing a college education is worth it. The answer is yes. [cheers and applause]

Most say a college degree remains very important. Economic data shows that in the long run, a college degree means more long term earnings, particularly in comparison to a high school degree, the value of which has decreased over the years. So even though you may have a job or are looking for one and your pay may not be what you had imagined, you should be less nervous about the worth of your degree from a dollar and cents perspective. It will pay off.

But what all of this economic data misses is that education has a more important value than money. It is deeply important to our growth as people and as our community. I have been often asked if i ever imagined as a child being on the Supreme Court, the highest court of the United States. No, i say. When i was a child my family was poor. No lawyers or judges lived in my neighborhood. I had no idea of the Supreme Court, its work in interpreting the Constitution and the laws of the United States affects people's lives.

You cannot dream of becoming something you do not know about. You have to learn to dream big.

Education expose us to what the world has to offer, to the possibilities open to you. It teaches you how to navigate your profession and life in general. For me, education opened my eyes to what i could become. Education enriches you as a person. I often ask kids to identify the most interesting person they have met. Inevitably, they identify a person who speaks about his or her worth with knowledge, who inspires others to consider a new idea or perspective or simply amuses people with a play on words or an insightful poke of fun on a human condition.

Education expands your knowledge and your ability to relate with and in the world. Education helps you to think critically, to argue persuasively and to think about things from many different perspectives. These abilities in turn also help you navigate the difficulties that life presents, to map problems on to a broader understanding of how things work

. To paraphrase a prayer from a late theologian, you learn a way to manage the things, things that can change and wisdom to tell the difference. Those skills are the real value of education and what has made it worthwhile to you. For each of you, different courses and topics you studied here will help you navigate your lives in different ways. Whichever way these are for you, i know that they have and will help you on your journey because education empowers you to grow beyond the limits you once knew and it takes you beyond the places and ways of thinking you already know and exposes you to the greater potential that exists in the world.

My education taught me about the Supreme Court, a workplace beyond my wildest dreams as a child, but the value of an education diminishes unless you put it to use, particularly good use.

Good use includes earning a living and supporting your families. I suspect your parents are happy to hear that I'm telling you that.

It also does mean something more significant. It means that your education here at Manhattan College has underscored. It means contributing to the betterment of the community and world you live in. That betterment does not have to be in a big or public way by becoming a Supreme Court Justice.

My grandmother bettered her community by ensuring that no one around her ever went hungry.

My mom as a practical nurse would give shots to neighbors who needed them or help others with blood pressure readings or changing of bandages. I recall calling my mother endlessly, when the Senate was voting for my nomination to the second circuit, i was unable to reach her because she had taken her neighbor to a doctor's appointment. Just as i am sure you have learned, my family taught me to measure happiness, not by what i do as work, but from what i give to others.

It is the most important lesson and the deepest source of meaning i have found in life. There are many ways in which you can use your education to foster that kind of meaning in your own lives, joining your school boards, becoming members of the Board of Trustees, for example, or assisting with food or clothing collections or tutoring in local schools.

Indeed, i suspect that your time at Manhattan College has exposed you to many possibilities given the commitment of this college to service including its rikers island jail project. These are examples of ways in which education can broaden your perspective and open up new sources of purpose and meaning. In the end, however you decide to be of service, it is the willingness to put your newly gained knowledge to use that will both help you grow as an individual and also help us grow as a community and as a nation.

My decision to become a lawyer was itself an exercise in service, working in the law is a career that i have always understood to be fundamentally about helping people. Lawyers both help individual clients and our society as a whole by insuring that the rules we create to organize ourselves as a society are applied justly, neutrally, and fairly.

That is the kind of work i have always woken up to in the morning and i am excited to be able to do it. But helping people is not a feature you need to learn. It should be and is a part of every job. If you do your job, bearing that goal in mind, you will be happy and you will help people.

So as you go forth from this institution, ask yourself each day, who have i helped today, how have i made a difference today. Who did you smile at? Who did you call to find out if they're feeling ok? What have you done? If you can answer those questions each day, then you are living life in its most meaningful way. You have given and shared something of great value.

My hope for all of you here today is that you find a life filled with meaning and that you create that meaning by serving your community and the people in your life. Education, hard work, and a sense of community are what made me who i am, they are the values of Manhattan College whose ranks i am proud to join with the honorary degree you have given today and the values that will sustain your life in your future.

Class of 2019, i thank you for letting me share this day with you. Go off, dream big and accomplish much, but pause to have fun celebrating tonight and remember to thank all of the people in the audience and beyond, your family, friends, professors, and administrators and all of the others who are the unheralded heroes of today, they have labored side by side with you and a sure you, they will labor with you each step of your way forward. Please join me now, not in applauding me, they will labor with you each but in applauding yourselves and all of the people who have helped to make your dreams of today come true. [cheers and applause] thank you, and applaud all of the people in the audience. [cheers and applause]

Glenn Close: 'Your perspective is unique', College of William & Mary - 2019

11 May 2019, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

Thank you Chancellor Gates, Rector Littel and President Rowe for this great, great honor. I am humbled and deeply moved to receive this from a community that had everything to do with who I am today. A community that challenged me, prepared me and inspired me. A community whose passions and philosophies became part of my DNA, giving me strength and resilience, as I stepped out into the world. Thank you. Thank you. I will treasure this always.

To the distinguished faculty, guests, families and — most importantly — to the graduating class of 2019, I’m proud to be here to help celebrate the women who have worked, taught and studied at this incredible institution. And I am particularly proud to be on this stage with President Katherine Rowe. I‘m pretty sure King William is spinning in his grave. God bless ‘im!

But I know the dust of Queen Mary has been fist-pumping in the nether world for the past 100 years. At a time when being part of a tribe can have negative, divisive connotations, I am deeply and forever proud to be a part of the mighty tribe of William & Mary graduates — past, present and future.

When I graduated, 45 years ago, I was the first woman in my family to earn a college degree. My mother never finished high school. She got married at 18 and had her first child two years later. Neither of my grandmothers, or great-grandmothers, went to collage. In their society, at the time, it just wasn’t done. My paternal grandmother, however, did run away from Texas and worked in a bank in order to put her sister through college. My two sisters never went to college. So being here today has an extra special significance for me.

I just want to mention briefly why I happened to end up at William & Mary. I won’t go into the complexities of the story, but suffice it to say that the first time I saw this campus was in the late 60’s when I sprinted off the girls’ bus, in my cheery travel uniform, as a member of a singing group for which I wrote songs and performed for five years after high school. The show was the offshoot of a cult-like group that my parents fell prey to when I was 7-years-old. Once off the bus, we enthusiastically set up our mics and speakers in the old Student Rec Center on Dog Street, and proceeded to sing our hearts out for whatever students paused to listen.

As I sang the simplistic songs and did the regimented choreography, I studied the students who were lounging on the furniture or leaning against the walls and there came a moment when I knew that I had to somehow leave the group and come get my education here. And you want to know why? It was because, almost to a person, they were looking at us like this … as if they were thinking — “Really?” That’s what I’d been secretly feeling for a long, long time, but I hadn’t had the courage to face it and do something about it. “Really? Is this who I really am?"

Somehow, in spite of my ignorance, I sensed that on this campus, I would find kindred souls. So eventually, against their wishes, and with no encouragement, whatsoever, I left the group and, 49 years ago, I entered The College of William & Mary in Virginia, a 22 year-old clueless freshman, with an essentially empty toolbox and a passionate determination to get a liberal arts education and become an actress. That fateful September, I walked into Phi Beta Kappa Hall and auditioned for the first play being staged that season —Twelfth Night. Professor Howard Scammon, head of the Theater Department, cast me in one of the principal roles: Olivia. He eventually understood the seriousness of my intent and was my mentor for the four years I was here. Meanwhile, I soaked up everything I could learn and, like a desert when the rains come, for the first time in my life I started to bloom. The rest is history.

I wanted to tell you about why I ended up here because I have learned how important it is to have a healthy dose of skepticism. I don’t mean cynicism or contempt, I mean the crucial ability to question and assess — from a dispassionate, objective point of view — whatever beliefs or tribes you eventually choose to espouse. It doesn’t come to me naturally. I had been raised to be a total believer, to not question. But for me, coming into this ideas-rich community, having had all my beliefs and behaviors dictated to me from the age of 7, it was vital that I learn how to question. You have a much harder time of it now than I ever had. When I graduated, there was no Internet. You wrote your papers on typewriters! There was no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I didn’t have the added, enormous pressure of social media against which to develop as an adult. I think my mind would have exploded. I didn’t have that insistent, seductive noise in my pocket and at my fingertips. Even now, I try to question, but how do I maintain my individuality without thinking that I am somehow not relevant, not hip enough, rich enough, not posting enough, that I don’t have enough followers?

What each of you have, and what you must believe in from this day forward, is your inherent uniqueness. Your singular point of view. No one looks out onto the world through your eyes. Your perspective is unique. It’s important and it counts. Try not to compare it to anyone else. Accept it. Believe in it. Nurture it. Stay fiercely, joyously connected to the friends you have made here, to those you love and trust. You will have each other’s backs for the rest of your lives.

I wish I were funny like Robin Williams. I wish I could make you laugh so hard you’d fall off your chairs. I’m not wise. I have had the lucky chance to learn by doing. After being in my profession for 45 years, though, I have learned a few things that I want to briefly share with you today.

In order to inhabit a character I have had to find where we share a common humanity. I can’t do characters justice if I am judging them. I have to find a way to love them. The exploration into each character I play has made me a more tolerant and empathetic person. I have had to literally imagine myself in someone else’s shoes, looking out of someone else’s eyes. I urge you to learn how to do that. You can with practice. Start by being curious about the “whys” of someone’s behavior. Before you judge someone, before you write them off, take the time to put yourself in their shoes and see how it feels.

I have been a part of collaborative companies of actors and directors for 45 years. Companies are like living organisms, extremely sensitive to the chemistry, to the contributions of all those involved. When I was in a Broadway musical early in my career, my dressing room was right next to the stage door. I wasn’t the star, but I was a co-star and I was working my ass off every night to squeeze all there was to squeeze out of what was a pretty thankless role. It was hard work. The play was a big hit, which was fabulous, but every performance I would empty myself out, emotionally and physically, onstage and every night I could hear the producers come in the Stage Door and pass by my dressing room, on their way up to schmooze the star. It really hurt that they never knocked on my door, not to schmooze or hang out, but to simply say thank you for the hard work — eight shows a week — for which they were reaping huge benefits.

I remember that hurt and because of it, when I am the member of a company, especially if I am leading that company, I am careful to notice everyone on the team, learn about what they do and thank them. People like the craft-service guy on a movie set, who gets up earlier than everyone else and leaves the set after everyone else, who hauls heavy urns of coffee and food from location to location, rain or shine. To be aware of and to sincerely appreciate the contributions of everyone on a team makes a palpable difference.

Then there is kindness. My nephew, Calen, lives with schizophrenia. He had his first psychotic break when he was 17. My sister, Jessie, Calen’s mom, lives with bipolar disorder. Ten years ago, we founded an organization called Bring Change to Mind to fight against the stigma around mental illness because they found that stigma is as hard — sometimes harder — than the diseases themselves. We decided to talk about mental illness and stigma on a national platform. Jessie and Calen were inconceivably courageous, because 10 years ago, not many people were talking about it.

The fact is that, conservatively, one in six of us in this room is touched in some way by mental illness. It makes absolutely no sense to me that we don’t talk about it like any other chronic illness. Starting the conversation is the first step. Two days ago, I was with Calen, in front of 2,000 people, listening to him talk about living with something as scary as schizophrenia. I am astounded by how he has willed himself to manage his illness. He spoke, albeit sometimes hesitantly, searching for words without losing his train of thought, talking with grace and knowledge. Someone from the audience asked him what they should do when confronted with someone who is struggling with mental health issues and Calen simply said, “Be kind.”

Kindness. It’s a simple word, but it is essential if we are to survive as a species on this planet. So I come to another thing I’ve learned. I learned, from reading the writings of the great Edward O. Wilson, that one of the core reasons we have been so successful as a species is that we evolved the capacity to empathize. That means that the tribes who espoused empathy were more successful at survival than the ones who didn’t. In order for the community, the tribe, to survive and thrive, we humans had to evolve the ability to register the emotions, the plight, the fears and the needs of other members of our tribe and to respond to them with empathy. We die without connection. Nothing is worse for us humans than to be bereft of community. Empathy evolved because two eyes looked into two eyes. It’s the most immediate and powerful way we humans communicate. Empathy evolved because we looked at each other, face to face, not on a screen. Studies have shown that the farther away we get from two eyes looking into two eyes, the harder it is to empathize. What I have learned is that if we are to remain a free and viable society, we need to spend less time looking at screens and more time looking into each other’s eyes.

To end, I thought I’d share with you bits of a letter that somehow got to me from an old William & Mary friend. I wrote it to him 42 years ago, when I had been out in the world for three years. Reading it from where I am now in my life and in my career was quite moving. I wrote:

My mind has been all over the place because of a very erratic rehearsal schedule. I did get the part of Estelle in The Rose Tattoo and am right now of the frame of mind that I should never have taken it. The scene is over before it starts. There is no time to really make any kind of statement. … any kind of progression. So one has to enter as a totally interesting and real person, be on for five minutes and leave. I really hate it, but I suppose it’s a good exercise of sorts. I’m just at the despairing stage and am feeling totally untalented. … Oh, well.

To maintain any semblance of wit and equilibrium seems to be a major feat. As life unfolds before me, I have more and more respect for anyone who survives and prevails. Just to endure is impressive enough, but to endure and to triumph — on your own terms — is the feat of a lifetime. Everyone needs so much gentleness and love. I don’t mean that idealistically; I mean it as a major means of survival. There is just too much working against sanity and civilization. … from within ourselves, to the differences between people and sexes … to the whole human comedy. Gentleness and love. I can forget so easily, but it’s always a great comfort to come back to.

I’m going to cook a hamburger and some zucchini.

Thank you.

Stacey Abrams: 'You need to know what you believe', American University School of Public Affairs - 2019

11 May 2019, American University School of Public Affairs, Washington DC, USA

[Excerpt, full transcript to come]

Stacey Abrams: Thank you. You guys are too nice to me, I may not go home. To President Burwell, to Provost Meyers, Dean Wilkins, trustees, faculty administration, family, friends, and the graduating class of 2019, thank you for having me here today. You're welcome.

As a fellow graduate in the work of public affairs, I've had more than 20 years to think about what I intended to do with my degree and where I am today. And to cut to the chase, I had no idea this is what was going to happen. I didn't imagine any of the outcomes of the last six months and I knew precious little about the proceeding 20 years, and that's entirely okay. I certainly thought I knew what was to come.

Some of you may know from my book, Lead From the Outside, when I was 18, I had a very bad breakup with a very mean boy. He said nasty things about me and how I was not going to find love because I was too committed to doing other things. I possibly said inappropriate things back to him, I don't remember that part of the conversation, but what I do remember was the sense that I was going to show him. I was going to accomplish many things and I was going to control the world and make his life very, very difficult.

And so I took myself to the computer lab at Spelman College. Thank you. This is back in 1992, so when I turned on the computer, I did not log onto the internet. I logged onto Lotus 1-2-3. I began to type out all of the things I intended to accomplish for the next 40 years. I wanted to be mayor of Atlanta. I wanted to be somewhere near Oprah. I wanted to be a writer. I knew that the way I could get those things done was to write it down, and over the last 20 years, I have tended my spreadsheet like Gollum tends his precious.

I have looked at it and cultivated it. I've made changes and edits. I've erased things and ignored others. And along the way I realized I had no idea what I was talking about. Because, you see, I made a plan for my life, but what I was trying to do was prepare to succeed. And that's what I want to talk to you about today. Because you don't have to plan your life the way I did, but in the process we have to prepare to succeed, and we do that by knowing what we believe, knowing what we want, and knowing that sometimes it might not work. First you need to know what you believe.

Our ambitions, our decisions, our responses are shaped by what we hold to be true. Beyond the easy labels of party and ideology are the deeply held convictions that shape those labels. But too often adherence to conservative or progressive, to liberal or moderate, to Democrat or Republican or Independent, to being pro this or anti that becomes an excuse for lazy thinking. It becomes an excuse for hostile action. And for today, at least, I urge you to set aside your labels and explore what your principles say about the world you wish to serve.

Because beliefs are our anchors. If they aren't, we run the risk of opportunism making choices because others do so not because we should. But those anchors should never weight us down. They shouldn't weight on our capacity for thoughtful engagement and reasonable compromise. For seven years, I served as the democratic leader in the House of Representatives and they told me about my ability to be successful because my title was minority leader. There was to be no confusion that I wasn't going to get there by myself. What they wanted me to understand, what the system is designed to do, is force compromise and force our beliefs to be lived.

And that's why I was able to work with a Republican governor to push forward the strongest package of criminal justice reform in Georgia history, and I would argue in American history. Because my belief said ... Thank you. Because my belief said that I had to set aside labels for the work that we were going to do together, and it worked. We also have to understand that it's critical to know what you believe because public policy is complicated. We're balancing the needs and desires and the arguments of many a cacophony of demands that all seem to have merit. And as leaders, you represent not only those who share your core values, but people who despise all that you hold dear. Therefore, your beliefs, your principles must be concrete and fundamental and you have to know what they are.

Be willing to distinguish between a core belief and an idea you just like a lot or it sounded good when you read it on Twitter. As public servants, you will impose your beliefs through policy and through action. So take the time to deeply examine those notions that you would call your own. Be certain you would ask others not only to share those principles, but as leaders that you would deny access or restrict someone's freedom to enforce that belief because fundamentally that's what we do. And no ancestral teachings or religious tendencies are not sufficient cause for belief. You can clap for that, it's okay.

As provost Meyers pointed out, I'm the daughter of not one but two United Methodist ministers, and one of the darkest days of my life was the day my parents said they weren't taking us to heaven with them. It was really harsh. We were coming back from church and we made some comment and my mom turned around and said, "Look, you've got to figure out what you believe because we can't take you with us." What she was telling us, what my father said even less kindly, was that we had to examine what we wanted to be true and how we were going to live our lives. That they were there as guideposts, but they were never going to be able to make our decisions for us. They wanted us to understand that we needed to hold our core beliefs because our beliefs would shape the world we would bring forth.

So if you believe something, make sure you mean it. Once you know what you believe, try not to believe in too much. I am loathe to follow folks who are absolutely certain they know everything. The ones who have a definite opinion about every headline, every decision, and they can give you the answer before you ask the question. And if you can't figure out who in your circle is that person, it might be you. But you see, beliefs shouldn't be on everything. Public policy usually isn't good or evil. Sometimes it's not even that interesting.

It's mundane and routine and it cuts across neighborhoods and nations and ideologies. But when your lens only allows for a single myopic focus, when you've already made your decision before you know the question, then you do not have the capacity to be a leader. Because you leave no room for debate and you miss the true role of government and public policy and you miss the chance to learn and become a better public servant.

Now, I do have core beliefs, but I don't have an unshakable position on every issue. I do not believe that taxes are good or evil. I do believe that poverty is an abomination and that freedom of speech must be held sacrosanct and that we have to restore justice to criminal justice. I believe climate change is real, but I don't believe there's one answer to solving the problem. And I understand most of all that I have to accept that I may not know enough about an issue to actually render judgment, which is why I have to study and read everything I can, especially counterarguments to my own position.

That's why we must always seek to understand what others believe and why. I had a good friend in the state legislature, his name was Bobby Franklin. Bobby and I both agreed that we were from Georgia. That was about it. Bobby introduced legislation every year that I would have opposed every year. But we sat together and we talked together and we learned about one another. And in the process we were able to aid one another and work together on a bill. It was about civil asset forfeiture, which is a deeply scintillating topic.

But when Bobby and I introduced an amendment together, it was so startling and surprising to the body that the speaker actually called it up without falling the process and we think it passed just because people were too stunned to say no. But it was because I listened to Bobby's concerns and he listened to mine that we were able to figure out how to address an issue that affected his rural white community and my urban black community. We were able to move beyond our positions and hear each other's arguments and find a solution together.

The truest road to good decision making is acknowledging that the other guy might have a point, even if it's not yours. And if it turns out that the new information alters your thinking, the terrifying reality may be that you are accused of flip-flopping. I know, that's the death sentence to any ambition. But as a society that seeks to champion knowledge, we must accept that a person can change where he or she believes as long as that change is authentic and grounded in a true examination of philosophy and reality. Changing who you are to accommodate others or to advance your career, that is craven and is not worthy of real leaders.

But hear me clearly in this day and age, when evolution is based on investigation and interrogation, when people are willing to admit they made a mistake and are willing to write their wrongs, then that should be celebrated and welcomed. It makes us smarter. It makes us better. It makes us stronger. As you enter the world of public affairs for the first time, or on a return ticket, be careful to know if you are evolving or caving in because the internet will never let you forget. And whether you leave here destined to be an administrator or a policy maker or an active citizen, always keep clear in your mind the difference between principle and policy between belief and behavior.

Policy is what we should do. Principle, belief is why we do it. So know what you believe, know why you believe it, and be willing to understand the other side. So know what you believe and the next, know what you want. Some of you may have heard that in 2018, I ran for governor of Georgia. And the first few weeks after I announced my candidacy, I did what you're supposed to do in politics, which is reach out to your friends and your family to start to raise the absurd amounts of money it takes to try to become an elected official.

My family has no money, so I was mostly calling friends. And in the course of this process, I raised over $42 million, the most raised by any candidate in Georgia history. But it didn't start out that way. You see, I started calling friends, people who'd invested in me when I ran legislature in 2006, people who invested in me when I stood to become minority leader, people who supported the new Georgia project and organization I started to register more than 300,000 people of color in the state of Georgia. People who stood with me at every turn. But over and over again I would call and I would hear, "Stacey, we think you're so talented. Stacey, I think you're so qualified, but you're a black woman."

I was like, "I know." But they whispered it to me as though they were giving me a terminal diagnosis. Because you see, they had decided what I was capable of based on what they saw, not based on what they knew. People I'd known for years kept telling me that I wasn't ready for this. In fact, it was suggested that I support the other person running and just ask for a role in her administration. That didn't work for me then and it doesn't work for me now. I was told that I needed to wait until Georgia was ready for me. I was told to wait my turn.

And after a while listening to people who supported me for so many years, I started to wonder if they were correct. If maybe I was pushing too far too fast, if maybe what I wanted wasn't real or possible. I listened to their doubts and I started to internalize their diminution of my capacity until I reminded myself that I knew what I wanted and I had a plan to get it. Because when you aim high, when you stretch beyond your easiest conceptions, the temptation to pare back your ambitions will be strong, especially when there are those who don't share them. Hear me clearly. Do not edit your desires.

You are here in this space. You are entering this world to want what you want regardless of how big the dream. You may have to get there in stages. You may stumble along the way, but the journey is worth the work. And do not allow logic to be an excuse for setting low expectations. You know, this occurs when we allow ourselves to be less because we think if it were possible someone would've done it before, but the fact is no one ... The fact is no one can tell you who you are, and the fact that no one has done it before doesn't mean it can't be done. I became the first black woman to be a major party nominee for governor in our nation's 242 year history.

Now, let's be clear. I realize I am not the governor. That's a topic for another day. But what I do not ask is why hasn't anyone else done it? What I ask is how do I get it? Because if we have the ambition to save our world, we have to ask how we do it, not why it hasn't been done before. That's why you're here and that's what you're going forth to do. How? By writing it down and making a plan. If it's simply an idea in your head, it's easy to forget. It's easy to let it float away in a femoral idea that doesn't have concrete meaning and doesn't have concrete action.

If you just see a title on a roster, but you don't make a plan to get there, you'll be regretting it for the rest of your life. If you know what you want, force the question by plotting how you get there. By knowing what you believe, you have the reason and by knowing what you want, you can start to draw the map. But if you know what you believe and you know what you want, you need to be prepared to know it might not work. Otherwise, known as Stacey 2019. Because the thing is our beliefs may close off avenues that are available to others. Our ambitions may be too audacious or too different for traditional paths, and our very persons may challenge the status quo more than the quo is ready to accommodate. Plus, you might just screw it up and have to try again. But opportunity is not a straight road, and to take full advantage, we must be prepared to fail, to stumble, or to win in a way that looks nothing like you imagined.

For those of us who are not guaranteed access, we must realize that not all worlds operate the same. We are required to discover the hidden formulas to success and too often opportunity looks nothing like we expected. But to hack this very real possibility, look for unusual points of entry. I began my career by learning how to do the various jobs it would take to get me to my ultimate goals. I needed to know how to manage a team, how to raise money, how to make tough choices. So, I volunteered to fundraise when no one else wanted to. I showed up in places I wasn't expected and I asked to do the jobs that others avoided. Each of you harbors a dream that seems outsized, maybe even too big to admit to yourself. You see, I've talked about my dreams publicly and I've been discouraged for doing so that I wanted to be the governor of Georgia, that one day I intend to be the President of the United States and that in between-

But in between my responsibility is to do the work to make those things real, not only for myself, but for the person who was sitting there thinking, "I want that too," but they're afraid to say it aloud. We lead not only for ourselves, we lead for others and our stumbles are opportunities to lay a path for others to follow. And we have to that knowing what we believe in, knowing what we want means that sometimes there are going to be obstacles to us getting there. But I will tell you that if you are willing to put in the effort to accept the grunt work that lets you prove your mettle to dare to want more than you previously imagined, it will come. It may not be in the form, in the shape that you expected, but sometimes it leads you to standing on a stage addressing a group of people you didn't know you'd have a chance to meet because your stumble led you into falling into new opportunities.

To get there, I need you to utilize your networks. You are joining an extraordinary community of graduates from the American University. While you may not know everyone, most of the help you need is only a few degrees away. Ask for it. And if you don't get what you need, ask for it again. Broaden your understanding of who knows whom and who can help, and broaden your understanding of where power actually lies. Don't ignore the IT guy or the administrative assistant, the housekeeping staff or that mid-level associate you haven't quite figured out what they do.

Because the thing of it is, it's the administrative assistant who can squeeze you on to that calendar when you're trying to get in to see someone. It's the janitor who can open that office when you forgot to do something that needs to be done before anyone notices. And it's the person, the intern that you ignore who can help you finish that last minute project. Regardless of status, those who share our space are part of our networks. Show them respect and they can show you the way. But when you learned that it might not work, embrace the fail and search for new opportunities.

In the wake of my campaign for governor, for about 10 days, I wallowed in my despair and then I reminded myself of why I got into this in the first place. I grew up in poverty in Mississippi, a working class poverty my mom called the genteel poor. We had no money, but we watch PBS and we read books. I grew up in a family where my parents would wake us up on Saturdays to go and serve, to take us to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, to juvenile justice facilities and nursing homes. And when we would point out that the lights were off at home, that we didn't have running water, my mother would remind us that no matter how little we had, there was someone with less and our job was to serve that person. My dad would just say having nothing is not an excuse for doing nothing.

I ran for governor of Georgia because I believe in a better world. I believe that we can educate our children and guarantee economic security. I believe that we can provide access to justice and a clean environment. I believe more as possible for all of us. I believe you can center communities of color and acknowledge the marginalized and not exclude those who have opportunity and access. I believe that we can be an inclusive society without relegating ourselves to notions of identity as a bad thing, but instead, using identity to say we see one another, we see your obstacles and we will make you better and stronger because of it. That is why I ran.

And so, in the wake of not becoming governor of Georgia, I had the opportunity to sit back and wallow, to worry and to fret, or to simply be angry. But instead I decided to found Fair Fight Action because I believe voter suppression is real and the threat to our democracy and we will fight for voter rights and for electoral integrity because I believe in the United States of America. That is what we're going to do. I also launched Fair Count because I know the 2020 census is the story of America for the next decade and we have to make certain everyone is counted because if they're not, they will not count. That is our opportunity.
Neither role is where I expected to be today and there are other roles that wait for me. Maybe before 2020 and maybe after, but for me the responsibility is to act as though today is the last day. To do the work I know needs to be done, not because of the position I hold, but because of the work that awaits us. And that is your charge. That is your calling. That is your obligation. When life doesn't work, when the fail seems permanent, acknowledge the pain but reject the conclusion.

Our principles, our beliefs exist to sustain us. Our ambitions are there to drive us, and our stumbles exist to remind us that the work endures. Public service is a passion play. It's the drama of how we shape the lives of those around us, how we allocate resources and raise hopes and ground our dreams in robust reality. You stand as the architects of our better lives. Those who don't fret and worry, who don't just stand on the sidelines and watch but get into the scrum and make it work. You are here because you believe that more is possible and you have been trained to make more a reality. You are here today because you have accepted your destiny as public servants, as leaders for our current age.

Our nation is grappling with existential questions, and our allies and our enemies watch to see how we respond. The tension of elections pull against the urgency of governance and we cannot forget that they are not the same thing. You might be tempted to harden yourself, to cast your lot with what you know ,and to wall yourself off from people and ideas that challenge your direction. But you are here in this school because you understand the deeper calling of our obligations. To serve the grace that is our social contract. To build a better, stronger, more resilient world.

And you are the embodiment of the most deeply held belief of everyone here. That American University, that the school of public affairs, that your friends and your family and your classmates and I all hold today, a singular belief that she'll illuminate us today and forward. We believe in you. Thank you. And congratulations.

Kristen Bell: 'When you lead with your nice foot forward, you'll win', USC School of Dramatic Arts - 2019

10 May 2019, University of Southern California, California, USA

[Excerpt]

When you respect the idea that you are sharing the earth with other humans, and when you lead with your nice foot forward, you’ll win, every time. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it comes back to you when you need it,” she said. “We live in an age of instant gratification, of immediate likes. and it is uncomfortable to have to wait to see the dividends of your kindness. But I promise you, it will appear exactly when you need it.

Ken Jeong: 'Find your passion,' University of North Carolina Greensboro - 2019

10 May 2019, University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA

[Excerpt]

What is your act II? Everyone here has a different timeline. Everyone here has a unique story. Figure out what your act II is, and embrace the change, embrace the twists and the unexpected turns. They’ll be good and they’ll be bad, but embrace that. There’s always downsides to every journey, but because of my education, I have this core stability that makes me unshakeable no matter what happens. I’m also able to take the good with the bad … They say everything happens for a reason. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know everything happens, and it’s up to you to maximize the reality of your situation.

Oprah Winfrey: 'Success is a process', Colorado College - 2019

19 May 2019, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

I’m here to tell you that your life isn’t some big break, like everybody tells you that is. It’s about taking one big life transforming step at a time.

You can pick a problem, any problem—the list is long. There’s gun violence, and inequality, and media bias...and the dreamers need protection...the prison system needs to be reformed, misogyny needs to stop. But the truth is you cannot fix everything. What you can do here and now is make a decision, because life is about decisions—and the decision that you can make is to use your life in service. You will be in service to life, and you will speak up, you will show up, you will stand up, you will volunteer, you will shout out, you will radically transform whatever moment you’re in, which will lead to bigger moments.

The truth is, success is a process—you can ask anybody who’s been successful. I just passed on the lane up here here, successful restauranteur Danny Meyer, who’s sitting here with his family—Charles is graduating today. Ask Danny or anybody who’s successful, you go to any one of his restaurants—Shake Shack, love it!—Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern—you will be impressed by not only the food, but the radical hospital and service. Service is not just about when you’re getting served.

When I started my talk show, I was just so happy to be on television. I was so happy to interview members of the Ku Klux Klan. I thought I was interviewing them to show their vitriol to the world, and then I saw them using hand signals in the audience—and realized they were using me, and using my platform. Then we did a show where someone was embarrassed, and I was responsible for the embarrassment. We had somehow talked a man who was cheating on his wife to come on the show with the woman he was cheating with and, on live television, he told his wife that his girlfriend was pregnant. That happened on my watch.

Shortly after I said: I’m not gonna do that again. How can I use this show to not just be a show, but allow it to be a service to the viewer? That question of "How do we serve the viewer?" transformed the show. And because we asked that question every single day from 1989 forward—with the intention of only doing what was in service to the people who were watching—that is why now, no matter where I go in the world, people say "I watched your show, it changed my life." People watched and were raised by that show. I did a good job of raising a lot of people, I must say. That happened because of an intention to be of service.

Your anxiety does not contribute one iota to your progress.

So I live in this space of radical love and gratitude. Truly, I live the most beautiful life that you can imagine. I sit around trying to imagine: Who can have a better life? Whatever you imagine my life to be like…it’s always ten times better than whatever you think! It’s true! It’s not because I have wealth—although I love money, money’s fabulous, I love it—and that I get a lot of attention, which is also good...sometimes. It’s because I had appreciation for the small steps, the seeds that were planted, the maps of my life that unfolded because I was paying attention. You have to pay attention to your life, because it’s speaking to you all the time. That led me to a path made clear.

So that is what I’m wishing for you today: Your own path made clear. I know there’s a lot of anxiety about what the future holds and how much money you’re gonna make, but your anxiety does not contribute one iota to your progress, I gotta tell you. Look at how many times you were worried and upset—and now you’re here today. You made it. You’re going to be okay.

Look at how many times you were worried and upset—and now you’re here today. You made it.

Take a deep breath with me right now and repeat this: Everything is always working out for me. That’s my mantra—make it yours. Everything is always working out for me. Because it is, and it has, and it will continue to be as you forge and discover your own path. But first: You do need a job. And may I say, it doesn't have to be your life’s mission, our your greatest passion, but a job that pays your rent and lets you move out of your parents house—because yes, they are tired of taking care of you, and they’re hoping this CC education will pay off! And it will in ways that you can’t imagine.

I do a lot of graduations, lecturing, talking, and exchanging with the girls, we talk about passion and purpose and realizing your dream. But I realized I was confusing them and their expectations were out of wack. One of my daughter girls two years ago graduated with an internship, bought a used a car, all with no help from me. She’d only been working about six months and called me and said "Mama O, they want to give me a promotion, and I don’t want to take it because I don’t think it fulfills my purpose.” And I said “Your purpose right now is to keep that job! To do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do." (I borrowed that line from the great debaters.)

For years at graduations I’ve said there’s no such thing as failure. But there is.

For years, I had a job, and after years of doing what I didn’t want to do, I ended up finding my life’s calling. My job ended when I was 28 years old. I got my first job in radio at 16, got on tv at 19, and every day I said "I don’t know if this is what I’m really supposed to be doing." But my father was like: ‘You better keep that job!" At 28, it wasn’t working out on the news because I was too emotional. I would cry while interviewing someone who had lost their home. I was told that I was going to be talking on the evening news and put on a talk show, and that was a demotion for me at the time. But that actually worked out for me.

For years at graduations I’ve said there’s no such thing as failure. But there is. I’ve also said failure is life pointing you in a different direction, and it indeed does. But in the moment when you fail, it really feels bad. It’s embarrassing…and it’s bad, and it’s going to happen to you if you keep living. But I guarantee you it also will pass, and you will be fine. Why? Because everything is always working out for you.

I realized this during the struggle of my life trying to build a network at the same time as running a show. I did not have the right leadership, and everything is about having the right people around you to support you. All of my mistakes were in the media—I can’t do anything privately. So when everything is about struggle-struggle, I had to say: What is this about? What is this here to show you? That is now my favorite question in crisis: What is this here to teach you or show you?

Jack Canfield in Chicken Soup for the Soul says “The greatest wound we’ve all experienced is being rejected for being our authentic self. And then we try to be what we’re not to get approval, love, acceptance, money...but the real need for all of us is to reconnect with the essence of who we really are…we all go around hiding parts of ourselves." He said he was with a Buddhist teacher years ago who said, “Here’s the secret: If you were to meditate for 20 years, here’s where you’d finally get to: Just be yourself, but be all of you.”

I’ve made a living—not a living but a real life—by being myself, using the energy of myself to serve the purpose of my soul. That purpose, I’m here to tell you, gets revealed to you daily. It is the thread that’s connecting the dots of who you are.

At 19, I was just happy to have a job. But later through experience, trial, failure, I realized my true purpose was to be a force for good, to allow people to be themselves. so that becomes my legacy. I remember when I finished the [Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls] school, and I went to my friend Maya Angelou’s house, and Maya was making biscuits and teaching me to make the biscuits. I said "I’m so sorry you weren’t able to be there to see the school open..it’s going to be my greatest legacy.” And she put down what she was making and said “Baby, you have no idea what your legacy will be, because your legacy is every life that you touch.”

And that I repeat everywhere, because it’s true. It’s not one thing, it’s everything, and the most important thing is how you touch other people’s lives. Every day, you’re carving out the path, even when it looks like you’re not. Every action is creating equal and opposite reactions. How you think and what you do is being done unto you—that is my religion, I live by that. That is creating a blessed and spectacular life.

If I could teach a class in how to live your best life, it would include some gems I've gotten from world leaders. But also some I have not. Yes, it does pay to floss. Yes, you need to look people in the eye when you speak to them. You need to keep your commitments, you need to make your bed every day because when you do, it makes your whole house look better. And you need to leave your cell phone away at the dinner table.

I put so many of those in a book that I did for graduates like you. I wrote The Path Made Clear with gems of wisdom from thought leaders. Since I know you just wanna get that diploma, I’m gonna save all my wisdom for my book…You get a book and you get a book and you get a book! Everybody gets a book! Congratulations class of 2019!

Robert F. Smith: 'We're going to put a little fuel in their bus', Morehouse College - 2019

6 June 2019, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

This speech became a news story because Robert F Smith pledged to pay off the student debts of every member of the Class of 2019 at Morehouse, estimated at $40 million.

Classmates. Class of 2019. You look beautiful. You look beautiful.

First of all, President Thomas, Board of Trustees, Faculty Staff and Morehouse Alumni, the extraordinary Angela Bassett, the distinguished Professor Dr. Edmund Gordon, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, family and friends, and most of all to my classmates, congratulations.

Earning a college degree is one of the most impressive and greatest accomplishments of life. But success as many parents and as hard as each of you have worked and have achieved today you’ve had a lot of help along the way. We are all the product of a community, a village, a team and many of those who’ve made contributions for you to arrive at this very moment today are with us.

So first and foremost, I’m going to ask you one more time you’re going to stand up. You’re going to turn around and you’re going to celebrate all these people — our community, our family who are here to celebrate you.

All right. Come on sit down class. We got a lot — we got a long way to go. So I want to make sure you got some stretching in.

So standing here before you is one of the great honors of my life. I’m so proud to share it with you, with my mother Dr. Sylvia Smith, a lifelong educator and the greatest role model of my life who is here with me today.

This is a special week for us. We celebrate three graduations this week. My niece is graduating from my alma mater Cornell. My daughter’s graduating from high school and headed off to Barnard this fall. My eldest Zoe is graduating from NYU with honors this week. She is a fifth generation in my family to graduate from college and the fourth to graduate with honors.

So first of all, I want to thank the Morehouse administration for timing this perfectly so I could attend all of those graduation ceremonies.

Morehouse was built to demand excellence and spur the advancement and development of African-American men. I’ve always been drawn to its rich history and I’m optimistic for its bright future. The brothers from Morehouse I’ve met over these years, I’ve revered; they understand the power of education, the responsibility that comes with it.

Willie Woods, Chairman of the Board, he and I have been friends for over 20 years, and I want to thank Chairman Woods for assembling a great class and a great organization of administrators and faculty to help you young men go forward.

In our shared history as a people and as a country, the Morehouse campus is a special place. The path you walked along Brown Street this morning to reach this commencement ceremony was paved by men of intellect and character and determination. These men understood that when Dr. King said “The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice”, he wasn’t saying it bends on its own accord. It bends because we choose to put our shoulders into it together and push.

The degree you earn today is one of the most elite credentials that America has to offer. But I don’t want you to think about it as a document that hangs on the wall or reflects the accomplishments you’ve made up to now. That degree is a contract. It’s a social contract. It calls on you to devote your talents and energies to honoring those legends on whom shoulders both you and I stand.

Lord knows you’re graduating into a complex world. Think about we faced in the last few years of your time here at Morehouse. We’ve seen the rise of Black Lives Matter lending voice to critical issues that have been ignored by too many for too long. We’ve seen the Me Too movement shining a spotlight on how far we still have to go to achieve real gender equality.

We’ve also seen the unapologetic public airing of hate doctrines by various groups. We’ve seen the implications of climate change become impossible to ignore and become even more severe. And our connected world has now to grapple with the new questions about secrecy, privacy, the role of intelligent machines in our work and in our lives.

And we witnessed the very foundation of our political system shaken by the blurring of the sacred line between fact and fiction, right and wrong. Yes, this is an uncertain hour for our democracy and our fragile world order but uncertainty is nothing new for our community.

Like many of yours, my family has been in these United States for eight or nine generations. We have nourished the soil with our blood. We’ve sown the land with our sweat. We protected this country with our bodies, contributed to the physical, cultural and intellectual fabric of this country with our minds and our talent. And yet, I’m the first generation in my family to have secured all my rights as an American citizen.

Think about it. 1865 was the first time most African-American families had a hint of access to the greatest until now wealth generating platform in America, that’s land. The Freedmen’s Bureau was supposed to deliver 850,000 acres of land to these formerly enslaved and then that program was cancelled and replaced by the Freedman’s Savings Bank which was then looted. Essentially that recompense was reneged upon.

We didn’t have broad access to the Homestead Act or the Southern Homestead Act where indeed 10% of America’s land was essentially given away for less the filing fee. And it was until 1868 after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment that my family actually had the birthright to be American citizens.

Then when American decided to create a social safety net — Social Security in 1935, they created the Social Security program. Yet that program had one exclusion — two categories of people: maids and farmworkers which effectively denied benefits to 66% of African Americans and 80% of Southern African Americans.

It was until 1954 that my family had a right to equal education under the protection of the law with Brown versus Board of Education. And while the Fifteenth Amendment gave my family to right to vote, the men at least, starting in 1890 those rights were rolled back in the south and remained suppressed until the passage of the Voter Rights Act of 1965.

Even today more than half a century after that, the struggle still continues to ensure true integrity at the ballot box. All these landmark extensions of our rights and subsequent retrenchments set the stage for new policy of forced desegregation, utilizing school busing that basically went in effect when I reached the first grade in my hometown of Denver, Colorado.

Our family lived in Northeast Denver, and back then, Denver, like most American cities, remained extremely divided by race, both politically and geographically. In my community, my neighbors were mostly educated, proud, hardworking and ambitious. They were dentists, teachers, politicians, lawyers, Pullman porters, contractors, small business owners and pharmacists. They were focused on serving the African-American community and providing a safe and nurturing environment for the kids in our neighborhood.

They were on the front lines of the civil rights movement. We were sacrificing our sons to the Vietnam War. They mourned the death of a King, two Kennedys and an X. And despite all they gave they had yet to achieve the fullness of the American dream. But they continued to believe that it was only a matter of time and if not for them, then surely for their children.

So I was among a small number of kids from my neighborhood who were bused across town to a high-performing, predominantly white school in Southeast Denver. Every morning we loaded up on Bus Number 13 — I’ll never forget it – that was taken over to Carson Elementary School.

That policy of busing only lasted to my fifth-grade year when intense protests and political pressure brought the end to forced busing. But those five years dramatically changed my life.

The teachers of Carson were extraordinary. They embraced me, challenged me to think critically and start moving towards my full potential. In turn, I came to realize at a young age that the white kids, the black kids, the Jewish kid and that one Asian kid were pretty much all the same. It wasn’t just a school itself; it was a community that I lived in that embraced and supported all that we were doing.

Since most of the parents of my neighborhood were working, a whole bunch of us walked over to Mrs. Brown’s house every day after school and stayed there until our parents got home from work. Mrs. Brown was incredible. She kept us safe, made sure we did our homework the right way, gave us nutritious snacks and taught us about responsibility.

Because her house was filled with children of all ages, I had suddenly older kids all around me who acted as role models, who were studying hard and believed in themselves. Mrs. Brown also happened to be married to the first black lieutenant governor of our state. So we saw the possibilities first-hand.

Amazingly almost every single student on Bus Number 13 went on to become a profession. I’m still in touch with many of them as they make up the bedrock of our community today. They’re elected officials, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, professors, community organizers and business leaders — an incredible concentration of black men and black women from the same working-class neighborhood.

Yet when I looked at the extended community that I lived in and those kids who didn’t get a spot on Bus Number 13, their success rate was far lower, and the connection is inescapable. Everything about my life changed because of those few short years but the window closed for others just as fast as it opened for me. And that’s the story of the black experience in America.

Getting a fleeting glimpse of opportunity and success just before the window is slammed shut. The cycle of resistance to oppression followed by legislation, followed by the weakening of that legislation, followed by more oppression and more resistance has affected and afflicted every single generation. And even as we’ve seen some of the major barriers come crashing down in recent years, we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t acknowledge just how many of these injustices still persist.

Where you live shouldn’t determine where you get it whether or not you get educated. Where you go to school shouldn’t determine whether you get textbooks. The opportunity to access — the opportunity for access should be determined only by the fierceness of your intellect and the courage and your creativity, and should be fueled by the grit that allows you to overcome expectations that weren’t set high enough.

We’ve seen remarkable breakthroughs in medical research, yet race-based disparities in health outcomes still exist. You’re 41% more likely to die of breast cancer if you’re an African-American woman in America than if you were white. You’re 2.3 times more likely to die of prostate cancer for an African-American man than if you were white.

If you are African American, you’re more likely to be stopped by the police, more likely to be issued a ticket when you’re stopped, more likely to be threatened with force than when you were white. That’s our reality. This is the world you’re inheriting.

Now I’m telling you things as I don’t want you to think that I’m bitter, nor do I want you to be bitter. I call upon you to make things better. Because the great lesson of my life is that despite the challenges we face, America is truly an extraordinary country and our world is getting smaller by the day and you are equipped with every tool to make it your own.

Today for the first time in human history, success requires no prerequisite of wealth or capital, no ownership of land or natural resources or people. Today success can be created solely through the power of one’s mind, ideas encouraged. Intellectual capital can be cultivated, monetized and instantaneously distributed across the globe.

Intellectual capital has become the new currency of business and finance, and the promise of brain power to move people from poverty to prosperity in one generation has never been more possible. Technology, the world that I live in, is creating a whole new set of on-ramps to the 21st century economy and together we will help assure that the African-American community will acquire the tech skills and be the beneficiaries in a sector that is being automated.

Black men understand that securing the bag just is the beginning, that success is only real if our community is protected, our potential is realized, and if our most valuable assets, our people, find strength in owning the businesses that provide economic stability in our community.

This is your moment, graduates. Between doubt and destiny is action. Between our community and the American dream is leadership. That’s your leadership, that’s your destiny.

This doesn’t mean ignoring injustice; it means using your strength to write order. And when you are confronted with racism, listen to the words of Guy Johnson, the son of Maya Angelou who once wrote: “Racism was like gravity. You got to just keep pushing again against it without spending too much time thinking about it.”

SO HOW DO YOU SEIZE YOUR AMERICAN DREAM?

Let me get specific and give you a few rules to live by because I understand that once you cross a stage, we may not be able to tell you much.

RULE 1: NOTHING REPLACES ACTUALLY DOING THE WORK

Rule number one: You need to know that nothing replaces actually doing the work.

Whenever young person tells me they aspire to be an entrepreneur, the first question I ask him is why. For many they think it’s a great way to get rich quick. I’m going to write an app, I’m going to build a company, make a few million dollars before I’m 25. Look that can happen but frankly that’s awfully rare.

The usual scenario is that successful entrepreneurs spend endless hours, days, years, toiling away for little time, little pay and zero glamor. And in all honesty, that’s where the joy of success actually resides.

Before I ever got into private equity, I was a chemical engineer. And I spent pretty much every waking hour in windowless labs during the work that helped me become an expert in my field. It was only after I put in the time to develop this expertise and the discipline of the scientific process that I was able to apply my knowledge beyond the lab.

Greatness is born out of the grind, so embrace the grind. A thoughtful and intentional approach to the grind will help you become an expert in your craft.

When I meet a black man or woman who’s at the top of their field, I see the highest form of execution. That’s no accident. There’s a good chance it took that black leader a whole lot more grinding to get them where they are today. I look at the current and former black CEOs who inspired my life. I have to tell you they blow me away every time I meet with them. People like Bernard Tyson, Ken Frazier, Ken Chenault, Dick Parsons, Ursula Burns and the late Barry Rand.

They may not have attended Morehouse but they had the Morehouse spirit. They knew that being the best meant grinding every single day. It means putting in the 10,000 hours necessary to become a master of your craft and I’ll tell you one of the great leaders of our time Muhammad Ali once said:

“I hated every minute of training but I thought to myself suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”

So grind it out and live your life as a champion.

RULE 2: TAKE THOUGHTFUL RISKS

My next rule is to take thoughtful risks. My granddad took a particular interest in my career. He couldn’t have been prouder when I had a stable job at Kraft General Foods as an engineer, because for him they had that kind of job security of my age was a dream come true.

When I was — when I told him I was thinking about leaving to go to grad school, he frankly was worried. Then you can imagine how worried he became so many years later when I told him I was leaving Goldman Sachs. I said “I’m going to start my own private equity firm, granddad, to focus on enterprise software.”

He thought I’d gone crazy. But I respected my granddad and his wisdom and his thoughtfulness and frankly his protectiveness over me. But I’d done my homework, I calculated the risks and I importantly knew that I was going to invest in one of the most important things and gather the fundamental design point of the American dream and that was to be a business owner.

So I decided with confidence I was going to make a one big bet on the asset that I knew best: myself. There are always reasons to be risk averse. As you know graduating from Morehouse can make you risk-averse. The path that you’re on, if you just take a conservative path, your outcomes and choices would probably be pretty good. But that doesn’t mean that you should gamble with your career or couriering from job to job frankly because it looks — the grass always looks a little greener; it does mean that you should evaluate your options.

You should be taking business and career risks, do the analysis and most importantly trust your instincts. When you bet on yourself, that’s likely a good bet.

RULE 3: BE INTENTIONAL ABOUT THE WORDS YOU CHOOSE

My third rule is always be intentional about the words you choose.

I know Morehouse has taught you all that what you say matters and what you say carries with it enormous power. Be intentional about the words you speak, how you define yourself, what you call each other, the people you spend time with and the love you create. This all matters immensely, it will define you.

RULE 4: YOU ARE ENOUGH

My fourth rule, which is actually my favorite, is to always know that you are enough. I mentioned that before going to investment banking at Goldman Sachs, I was working as an engineer at Kraft General Foods. One day I was at a meeting with the number of my department heads going through our divisional strategy and sitting around a conference table lining up what were the most important strategic imperatives.

When I looked at those six initiatives, I was leading five of them. I was half the age of everybody in that room and I know making a third of everybody in that room. And I said to myself I’m either doing something really right or really wrong. And frankly it was a little bit of both.

So that became a lesson to me in realizing my worth and self-worth. It isn’t just about salary, although that does matter. It’s about demanding respect from others and from yourself. A realization and respect for all the skills and talents you bring to the table. When you have confidence in your own worth, you’ll become the one to raise your hand for that next assignment and it may be hard. That made me putting in time on nights and weekends and it also means you’ll be gaining incremental skills and experiences that enhance your craftsmanship and earn your respect through your body of work.

Let the quality of your work products speak of your capabilities. Know that you are only bound by the limits of your own conviction because you are Morehouse man. There is no room on this earth you can’t enter without your head held high. You will encounter people in your life, as I have, who will want to make you feel like you don’t belong. But when you respect your own body of work, that’s all the respect you need.

In the words of the great Quincy Jones and Ray Charles:

“Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me.”

You are enough.

RULE 5: WE ALL HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY TO LIBERATE OTHERS

The fifth and final lesson for you all today is as follows. We all have the responsibility to liberate others so that they can become their best selves in human rights, the arts and business and in life. The fact is as the next generation of African-American leaders, you don’t want to just be on the bus. You want to own it, you want to drive it and you want to pick up as many people along the way as you can.

Because I will tell you more than the money, the awards, the recognition, and the titles, we will all be measured by how much we contribute to the success of the people around us. How many people will you get on your Bus Number 13?

We need you to become the elected leaders who step up and fix the laws that engender discrimination and set a tone of respect in our public discourse. We need you to become the C-suite executives who change corporate culture, build sustainable business models and make diversity and inclusion a core and unshakeable value.

We need you to become the entrepreneurs who will innovate inclusively, expand wages for all Americans and lower the unemployment rate in our communities. We need you to be the educators who set the standards and demand the resources to deliver on those standards and inspire the next generation and we need you to invest the real estate and businesses in our communities and create value for all of us in those communities.

No matter what profession you choose, each of you must become a community builder. No matter how far you travel you can’t ever forget where you came from. You’re responsible for building strong safe places where our young brothers and sisters can raise children and grow in confidence. Watch and learn from positive role models and they believe that they too are entitled to the American Dream.

You men of Morehouse are already doing this. I know your own student government, in fact, send students on a bus to underserved communities to actually empower young black men and women to seize their own narrative and find their own power in their own voice. This is exactly the kind of leadership I’m talking about.

Remember that building a community doesn’t always have to be about sweeping change either but it does have to be intentional. You just can’t be a role model sometimes.

I’m cognizant of the fact that every time I’m in public, people are observing my actions. The same goes for you. Building community can’t be insular. The world has never been smaller but we need to make and help our communities think bigger.

I’ve invested particularly in internship programs because I’ve observed the power of exposing young minds to opportunities that work in their neighborhoods so they can see what they can become.

Help those around you see the beauty of this vast world. Help them believe that they too can capture that dream. And remember community can be anywhere. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, community was a few blocks around where I grew up. Today we — you can create communities of people all around the world.

Merging the physical and digital communities will be one of the great opportunities that you have and you will have in these years going forward. And finally, don’t forget that communities thrive in the smallest of gestures. Be the first to congratulate a friend on their new job. Buy their new product posted on social media and tell everybody how great it is and be the first to console them when they face adversity.

Treat all people with dignity even if you can’t see how they’re going to help you. And most important of all whatever it takes, never ever forget to call your mother. And I do mean call, don’t text. Texts don’t count.

So speaking of mothers, let me allow me a point of personal privilege to end with a story that speaks volumes about mine.

Summer 1963, when I was just 9 months old, my mother picked me and my brother up and hauled 1700 miles away from Denver to Washington DC so we could be there for a Morehouse Man speech. My mother knew that her boys were too young to remember that speech but she believed that the history that we witnessed that day would forever resonate and become part of the men that we would one day become.

My mom was right as usual. I still feel that day in my bones and it echoes around us here at Morehouse. Decades after that cross-country trip I had the privilege to take my granddad to the opposite side of the National Mall to celebrate the inauguration of the first African-American President.

As we sat in that audience in that cold morning, he pointed to a window just behind the flag in the Capitol Building, he said, “You know grandson, when I was a teenager I used to work in that room right there. It’s the Senate Lounge, I used to serve coffee and tea and take hats and coats for the Senators.” He said “I recall looking out that window during Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration.” He said “Son, I did not see one black face in the crowd that day.” He said “So here we are, you and I watching this.” He said “Grandson, you can see how America can change when people have the will to make a change.”

The beautiful symmetry of our return to the nation’s capital under such different circumstances were not lost on us. The poetry of time and soul that Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory resonated in both of our hearts. You cannot be a witness to history as I have or walk the halls of Morehouse as you have without profound respect for the unsung everyday heroes who generation after generation little by little nudged, shoved and ultimately bent that arc of the moral universe a little closer to justice.

This is a history and the heritage you inherit. This is a responsibility that now lies upon your broad shoulders. True wealth comes from contributing to the liberation of people and the liberation of communities we come from depends upon the grit and the determination and the greatness inside of you, using your skills and your knowledge and your instincts to serve to change the world in only the way that you can.

You great Morehouse men are bound again only by your limits of your own convictions and creativity. You have the power within to be great, be you, be unstoppable, be undeniable and accomplish the things that people thought you never would. I’m counting on you to load up your bus and share that journey.

Now let’s not forget what Dr. King said in his final moments in his famous sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church: “I want to be on your right side and on your left side, in love and in justice, in truth and in commitment so that we can make this old world a new world.”

So graduates, look to your right, look to your left. Actually take a moment; stand up. Give each other a hug. I’m going to wait.

Men of Morehouse, you are surrounded by a community of people who have helped you arrive at the sacred place and on this sacred day. On behalf of the eight generations of my family who have been in this country, we’re going to put a little fuel in your bus.

Now I’ve got the Alumni over there, and this is the challenge to you Alumni. This is my class, 2019.

And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans.

Now I know my class will make sure they pay this forward, and I want my class to look at these alumnus, these beautiful Morehouse brothers and let’s make sure every class has the same opportunity going forward.

Because we are enough to take care of our own community. We are enough to ensure we have all the opportunities of the American Dream and we will show it to each other through our actions and through our words and through our deeds.

So Class of 2019, may the Sun always shine upon you. May the wind always be at your back. And may God always hold you in the cradle of her hand.

Tim Cook: ' If you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos', Stanford University - 2019

Speech commences on video at 1:12:30

16 June 2019, Stanford University, Stanford, California

Good morning, Class of 2019!

Thank you, President Tessier-Lavigne, for that generous introduction. I’ll do my best to earn it.

Before I begin, I want to recognize everyone whose hard work made this celebration possible, including the groundskeepers, ushers, volunteers and crew. Thank you.

I’m honored and frankly a little astonished to be invited to join you for this most meaningful of occasions.

Graduates, this is your day. But you didn’t get here alone.

Family and friends, teachers, mentors, loved ones, and, of course, your parents, all worked together to make you possible and they share your joy today. Here on Father’s Day, let’s give the dads in particular a round of applause.

Stanford is near to my heart, not least because I live just a mile and a half from here.

Of course, if my accent hasn’t given it away, for the first part of my life I had to admire this place from a distance.

I went to school on the other side of the country, at Auburn University, in the heart of landlocked Eastern Alabama.

You may not know this, but I was on the sailing team all four years.

It wasn’t easy. Back then, the closest marina was a three-hour drive away. For practice, most of the time we had to wait for a heavy rainstorm to flood the football field. And tying knots is hard! Who knew?

Yet somehow, against all odds, we managed to beat Stanford every time. We must have gotten lucky with the wind.

Kidding aside, I know the real reason I’m here, and I don’t take it lightly.

Stanford and Silicon Valley’s roots are woven together. We’re part of the same ecosystem. It was true when Steve stood on this stage 14 years ago, it’s true today, and, presumably, it’ll be true for a while longer still.

The past few decades have lifted us together. But today we gather at a moment that demands some reflection.

Fueled by caffeine and code, optimism and idealism, conviction and creativity, generations of Stanford graduates (and dropouts) have used technology to remake our society.

But I think you would agree that, lately, the results haven’t been neat or straightforward.

In just the four years that you’ve been here at the Farm, things feel like they have taken a sharp turn.

Crisis has tempered optimism. Consequences have challenged idealism. And reality has shaken blind faith.

And yet we are all still drawn here.

For good reason.

Big dreams live here, as do the genius and passion to make them real. In an age of cynicism, this place still believes that the human capacity to solve problems is boundless.

But so, it seems, is our potential to create them.

That’s what I’m interested in talking about today. Because if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that technology doesn’t change who we are, it magnifies who we are, the good and the bad.

Our problems – in technology, in politics, wherever – are human problems. From the Garden of Eden to today, it’s our humanity that got us into this mess, and it’s our humanity that’s going to have to get us out.

If you want credit for the good, take responsibility for the bad

First things first, here’s a plain fact.

Silicon Valley is responsible for some of the most revolutionary inventions in modern history.

From the first oscillator built in the Hewlett-Packard garage to the iPhones that I know you’re holding in your hands.

Social media, shareable video, snaps and stories that connect half the people on Earth. They all trace their roots to Stanford’s backyard.

But lately, it seems, this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation: the belief that you can claim credit without accepting responsibility.

We see it every day now, with every data breach, every privacy violation, every blind eye turned to hate speech. Fake news poisoning our national conversation. The false promise of miracles in exchange for a single drop of your blood. Too many seem to think that good intentions excuse away harmful outcomes.

But whether you like it or not, what you build and what you create define who you are.

It feels a bit crazy that anyone should have to say this. But if you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos. Taking responsibility means having the courage to think things through.

And there are few areas where this is more important than privacy.

If we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated, sold, or even leaked in the event of a hack, then we lose so much more than data.

We lose the freedom to be human.

Think about what’s at stake. Everything you write, everything you say, every topic of curiosity, every stray thought, every impulsive purchase, every moment of frustration or weakness, every gripe or complaint, every secret shared in confidence.

In a world without digital privacy, even if you have done nothing wrong other than think differently, you begin to censor yourself. Not entirely at first. Just a little, bit by bit. To risk less, to hope less, to imagine less, to dare less, to create less, to try less, to talk less, to think less. The chilling effect of digital surveillance is profound, and it touches everything.

What a small, unimaginative world we would end up with. Not entirely at first. Just a little, bit by bit. Ironically, it’s the kind of environment that would have stopped Silicon Valley before it had even gotten started.

We deserve better. You deserve better.

If we believe that freedom means an environment where great ideas can take root, where they can grow and be nurtured without fear of irrational restrictions or burdens, then it’s our duty to change course, because your generation ought to have the same freedom to shape the future as the generation that came before.

Graduates, at the very least, learn from these mistakes. If you want to take credit, first learn to take responsibility.

Be a builder

Now, a lot of you – the vast majority – won’t find yourselves in tech at all. That’s as it should be. We need your minds at work far and wide, because our challenges are great, and they can’t be solved by any single industry.

No matter where you go, no matter what you do, I know you will be ambitious. You wouldn’t be here today if you weren’t. Match that ambition with humility – a humility of purpose.

That doesn’t mean being tamer, being smaller, being less in what you do. It’s the opposite, it’s about serving something greater. The author Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.”

In other words, whatever you do with your life, be a builder.

You don’t have to start from scratch to build something monumental. And, conversely, the best founders – the ones whose creations last and whose reputations grow rather than shrink with passing time – they spend most of their time building, piece by piece.

Builders are comfortable in the belief that their life’s work will one day be bigger than them – bigger than any one person. They’re mindful that its effects will span generations. That’s not an accident. In a way, it’s the whole point.

In a few days we will mark the 50th anniversary of the riots at Stonewall.

When the patrons of the Stonewall Inn showed up that night – people of all races, gay and transgender, young and old – they had no idea what history had in store for them. It would have seemed foolish to dream it.

When the door was busted open by police, it was not the knock of opportunity or the call of destiny. It was just another instance of the world telling them that they ought to feel worthless for being different.

But the group gathered there felt something strengthen in them. A conviction that they deserved something better than the shadows, and better than oblivion.

And if it wasn’t going to be given, then they were going to have to build it themselves.

I was 8 years old and a thousand miles away when Stonewall happened. There were no news alerts, no way for photos to go viral, no mechanism for a kid on the Gulf Coast to hear these unlikely heroes tell their stories.

Greenwich Village may as well have been a different planet, though I can tell you that the slurs and hatreds were the same.

What I would not know, for a long time, was what I owed to a group of people I never knew in a place I’d never been.

Yet I will never stop being grateful for what they had the courage to build.

Graduates, being a builder is about believing that you cannot possibly be the greatest cause on this Earth, because you aren’t built to last. It’s about making peace with the fact that you won’t be there for the end of the story.

You won’t be ready

That brings me to my last bit of advice.

Fourteen years ago, Steve stood on this stage and told your predecessors: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Here’s my corollary: “Your mentors may leave you prepared, but they can’t leave you ready.”

When Steve got sick, I had hardwired my thinking to the belief that he would get better. I not only thought he would hold on, I was convinced, down to my core, that he’d still be guiding Apple long after I, myself, was gone.

Then, one day, he called me over to his house and told me that it wasn’t going to be that way.

Even then, I was convinced he would stay on as chairman. That he’d step back from the day to day but always be there as a sounding board.

But there was no reason to believe that. I never should have thought it. The facts were all there.

And when he was gone, truly gone, I learned the real, visceral difference between preparation and readiness.

It was the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life. By an order of magnitude. It was one of those moments where you can be surrounded by people, yet you don’t really see, hear or even feel them. But I could sense their expectations.

When the dust settled, all I knew was that I was going to have to be the best version of myself that I could be.

I knew that if you got out of bed every morning and set your watch by what other people expect or demand, it’ll drive you crazy.

So what was true then is true now. Don’t waste your time living someone else’s life. Don’t try to emulate the people who came before you to the exclusion of everything else, contorting into a shape that doesn’t fit.

It takes too much mental effort – effort that should be dedicated to creating and building. You’ll waste precious time trying to rewire your every thought, and, in the mean time, you won’t be fooling anybody.

Graduates, the fact is, when your time comes, and it will, you’ll never be ready.

But you’re not supposed to be. Find the hope in the unexpected. Find the courage in the challenge. Find your vision on the solitary road.

Don’t get distracted.

There are too many people who want credit without responsibility.

Too many who show up for the ribbon cutting without building anything worth a damn.

Be different. Leave something worthy.

And always remember that you can’t take it with you. You’re going to have to pass it on.

Thank you very much. And Congratulations to the Class of 2019!

Viola Davis: 'Living life for something bigger than yourself is a hero’s journey', Barnard College - 2019

20 May 2019, Barnard College, New York City, New York, USA

[Someone shouts, "I love you!"]

Thank you. I love you, too. And I’m going to show you how much I love you. This speech, these pages have all of my breakfast items on it. Avocado toast, jelly, everything. [Laughs]

President Beilock, distinguished faculty, alumnae, family, friends, the 657 or so sisters in the audience, graduating class. I’m going to make it plain: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry history with us. We are our history.”

In other words: You’re a product of your environment. Now that term is usually relegated to people from low-income, crime-infested areas…but why? We all are a product of our environment.

Your existence is an amalgamation of every triumph, every hard-won battle, every woman who had an idea and massaged it, and had the courage to use it to change the world. Every person who survived slavery, Jim Crow and the black codes, to the Trail of Tears, wars…and passed their dreams on to you—of love, of hate. Yup, you are also the product of the other: Of silence, of apathy, a school built on stolen ground. Of women, a parent, grandparent, ancestor who suppressed dreams and ideas, who died with lost potential and horrific memories of sexual assault, mental illness, who didn’t feel good enough, or pretty enough or ENOUGH. Even your anxiety is part of your history…and yet here you are. Privileged, blessed…to do…what?

There are two roads that I see that people usually take: The choice to think that your path is all about you and your success, how high you can climb in your career and your status. Or, the so-called “save the world” approach, where you have a vision for the world and, by God, you will change it because you’re different. The first road requires you to mistake your presence for the event, to be in complete denial; and, the second requires you only to deny the really bad stuff. It requires you to forget racism, not see color, intersectionality, poverty… “but maybe I’ll take the sexism because it pertains to me.” Forget any evidence in my family of mental illness, of violence. Forget anything in me that will get in the way. Forget my fear, my pain. BOTH dead end. Both result in well-intentioned, very bright, enthusiastic people doing NOTHING.

How about this as a novel idea: How about owning it? Owning ALL of it—the good and the bad. Own the fact that the 39 delegates who wrote the greatest document, with the greatest mission statement, wrote it when slavery was an institution, Native Americans were being slaughtered and women were fighting for their lives. Own the 100 years of Jim Crow that were implemented after the 13th Amendment, restricting the rights of people who were a quarter black, an eighth black, black-black, Native Americans, Malays, Hispanics, Jews. Own every gun-toting, violent, hate-filled shooter. And own the fact that THAT is America. Own every heroic deed, great idea. Own the mission statement of THIS school. Own all of your memories and experiences, even if they were traumatic. Own it! Own IT! The world is broken because we’re broken. There are too many of us who want to forget. Who said that all of who you are has to be good? All of who you are is who you are. It hurts, you rage, battle it out, ask, “Why?” Then you forgive, reconcile and use your heart, your courage and vision to fix, to heal and then, ultimately, to connect, to empathize. And that empathy creates a passion for people and it all is the fuel of the warrior—a brave, experienced soldier or fighter.

It’s like Thomas Merton said, “If you want to study the social and political history of modern times, study hell.” Power concedes nothing without a demand. Know what that means? Women are under siege: suicide rates have skyrocketed, our reproductive rights are seriously in jeopardy, as is our pay, our healthcare, our safety, our worth. Sex trafficking has risen by 846 percent in the last five years and three-quarters of the victims are women of color. And in the greatest country in the world, we’ve seen a 26.6 percent increase in women dying during childbirth, and a 243 percent increase amongst black women.

You are graduating from a school whose mission it is to not just hand you a diploma, but a sword. You either start wielding it or you put it away as a conversation piece. Because there is a cap to success. Now everybody tells you that’s what you got to hit, that’s the best of the best that you can have in life. And then you hit it and then comes disillusionment, exhaustion, isolation, the imposter syndrome and a loss of passion. Because no one talks about the real final cap, the real ceiling—and that’s significance.

That living life for something bigger than yourself is a hero’s journey. That answer to your call, to adventure and journeying forth with mentors and allies, and facing your greatest fears, where you either die or your life as you know it will never be the same. And then you seize the sword, the insight, the treasure. The hero at that stage must put all celebrations aside to prepare for the final battle. The road back. The road back is the moment where the hero goes back to the ordinary world, where she must choose between her own personal objective and that of a higher cause. The reward? Your gift to the ordinary world? [sighs] That is the Holy Grail, the elixir.

What’s your elixir?

You know, my testimony is one of poverty. You know, you heard I grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. And let me tell you something about poverty: You’re invisible. Nobody sees the poor. You have access to nothing. You’re no one’s demographic. You know what my “a-ha” moment was? I had a memory when I was nine years old, and I remember my parents fighting in the middle of the night. It was so bad that I started screaming at the top of my lungs, and I couldn’t stop. My older sister Dianne told me to go in the house or people would hear me. I ran in the house. I ran to the bathroom, screaming still, just couldn’t stop. And got down on my knees, and closed my eyes, I put my hands together and said, “GOD! If you exist, if you love me, you’ll take me away from this life! Now I’m going to count to 10 and when I open my eyes, I want to be gone! You hear me?!” And I put my hands together and I was really believing it. “One!” And then I got to eight. “Nine! 10!” And I opened my eyes … and I was still there. But, He did take my life. He left me right there so when I gained vision, and strength, and forgiveness, I could remember what it means to be a child who was hungry. I could remember what it means to be in trauma. I could remember poverty, alcoholism. I could remember what it means to be a child who dreams and sees no physical manifestation of it. I could remember because I lived it! I was there! And that has been my biggest gift in serving.

“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”

And you know what? In the words of Joseph Campbell, you have not even to risk the adventure alone, because the heroes of all time have gone before you. The labyrinth is fully known; you have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where you had thought to find an abomination, you shall find a god. And where you had thought to slay another, you shall slay yourself. And where you had thought to journey outward, you shall come to the center of your own existence. And where you had thought to be alone, you shall come to be with all the world.

Now, you know, I jumped out of a plane recently—lost my mind for half an hour. But, you know, when you’re flying up in the plane, you’re anticipating the jump, your heart is beating, you’re praying, you’re doing everything possible and then your instructor says, “It’s time.” And this is usually my Wakanda salute to my sisters, okay? [Puts both hands up in front of her and keeps them up for the remainder of the speech.] So, this is how I’m going to end it: when you put your legs outside of that plane, he tells you to “put your hands up, put your head back, and then you fall.” So with my hands up, what I’m saying is that on this day of your genesis, your leap, your commencement, your mark in your history, perhaps your elixir is simply this: that you can either leave something for people or you can leave something in people. Thank you.

Hazel Edwards: 'Have patience, in time even an egg will walk', Monash University - 1998

16 April 1998, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Hazel Edwards O.A.M. is the bestselling author of ‘There is a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake’, an Australian classic. This is a rerecording of her Graduation Occasional Address to Monash University in 1998 .

Hazel Edwards O.A.M. writes quirky, thought-provoking fiction and fact for adults and children. Celebrant Sleuth is her latest for adults. Check out her website. www.hazeledwards.com

Tara Westover: 'Your avatar isn't real, it isn't terribly far from a lie', The Un-Instagrammable Self, Northeastern University - 2019

3 May 2019, Northeastern University, Massachusetts, USA

Hello and good morning. President Aoun, members of the board, faculty, staff, and of course, graduates: it’s an honor to be with you this morning to celebrate this milestone. This huge achievement. For you graduates, it’s a celebration of the last several years and all the work you put in. For your parents, it’s a celebration of work put in your whole lives. Maybe even before your lives. Let’s take a moment, and thank them for that.

First, I’d just like to say, that my being awarded this degree for a few minutes of public speaking in no way diminishes the many years of hard work that you had to put in to get yours.

Actually, I’ve never given a commencement speech before. In fact, this is the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to, by about ten times. You can imagine, then, that I was a little tense about it. I’m not all that much older than you, ten years maybe, and this is a scary gig. So what I did is, I looked up last year’s commencement speaker to see how I would measure up. I’m a published author, with a book on the New York Times list, so, you know, I thought would measure up pretty well.

Welll….Here is what I found. Last year’s speaker was an Emmy-nominated actor. Okay, that’s okay I thought. Then I kept reading. She is also a sprinter, who broke several world records. Wait for it. She is also a double-below-the-knee amputee (just wait, there’s more) who pioneered the technology for her own prosthesis. Which of course is now the international standard for prosthetics. It also casually mentioned that she’s a runway model and was recently inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

If I were going to tailor-make a nightmare act to follow, she would be it.

I, in contrast, am not a model. I’ve overcome no major surgeries, and I’ve developed no technology to help others. My athletic abilities are pitiable, but probably better than my acting skills. Still, here I am. And you’re stuck with me for the next 15 minutes.

So. Looking out at you all in your black caps and gowns, I’m reminded of my own graduation, which wasn’t that long ago. I was twenty-one years old. I remember that back then I was an avid Facebook user, and that like everyone, when the ceremony ended, I uploaded photos to my page. Specifically, I uploaded three photos. One of me, standing alone, in my cap and gown. Another of me with my mother, and a third of me with both my mother and father.

There was nothing unusual about the photos. In them we were smiling, or near enough to it. In them I was just another happy graduate full of promise, embracing my happy parents. But this was a fiction, and I knew it. In fact, it was because the photos were untrue, and not in spite of it, that I wanted them online. Because they showed my life as I wanted it to be, rather than as it was.

Here are four things that I remember about that day. Four things you can’t see in the photos, but that tell the real story.

Number one. That it was my first graduation ceremony. That unlike my classmates, I had neither a high-school diploma, nor a GED. I’d been raised in the mountains of Idaho by parents whose radicals beliefs meant that I had never been allowed to go to school. (I was sort of the equivalent of a kindergarten dropout.) It was a miracle that I’d made it to that university at all, let alone that I was leaving with a degree.

Number two. That although I was graduating from a Mormon university, I no longer believed in Mormonism. All of the previous year, I had struggled to hold on to the beliefs of my childhood—to the faith I shared with my parents as well as with every other person I cared about, every brother, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin. I was, at the moment I walked across the stage to get my diploma, still wondering what the loss of my faith would mean. Could I be a good person, even without my faith? It sounds strange now, but I really did think that without Mormonism, I might turn out to be an ass.

Number three. That I was alone. Although my parents are standing next to me in the picture, they had not been at the graduation ceremony. At least, I don’t think they were there. I had quarreled with my father some weeks before on some point of ideology, and he had declared that he wasn’t coming. That morning he had changed his mind, and he and my mother had raced down from Idaho, but they were too late. They missed the ceremony, and were, in fact, only present for the photo.

Number four. That my apartment was empty. I’d been up all of the previous night packing every item I owned either into boxes for storage or suitcases, which now sat packed by the door. I was leaving that night for the University of Cambridge in England, a country about which I knew very little.

Adding these four things together, I don’t believe there was any part of my life that I felt secure in, or proud of. The prospect of Cambridge terrified me. I’d grown up in a junkyard; I felt deeply that I didn’t belong in that place.

Faith was the rock I’d built my life on, and now that rock was turning to sand before my eyes.

My family was a tangle of love and radicalism and what I now suspect was mental illness. The love was real, but so were the other things, and I didn’t yet know how I was going to navigate them.

That was who I was, but that is not who I uploaded to Facebook. I uploaded a happy woman, a woman who was all joy and smiles. Who was “fun.” Even though I was terrified. Even though I spent most of that day just trying to get through it, and wishing it was over.

Something strange happened in the weeks and years that followed my graduation. Something bizarre. Which is that I came to think of my graduation photos as my graduation. I came to identify more with the woman in those pictures than I did with my actual self.

We humans have always struggled with two identities. There has always been a difference between who we are when we are with ourselves and who we are when we are with others. But now we have a third self: The virtual avatar we create and share with the world.

For most people, “sharing themselves” online means carefully curating an identity that exaggerates some qualities while repressing others that they consider to be undesirable. Online, no one has acne or dark circles or a temper; no one washes dishes, does laundry or scrubs toilets. Mostly, we brunch. And we take exotic, rarified vacations. We pet sea turtles. We throw ourselves from airplanes.

They are beautiful, unblemished lives. But sometimes I think that when we deny what is worst about ourselves, we also deny what is best. We repress our ignorance, and thus we deny our capacity to learn. We repress our faults, and thus we deny our capacity to change. We forget that it is our flawed human self, and not our avatar, who creates things and reconsiders and forgives and shows mercy.

But ultimately the real problem, as the writer Zadie Smith has pointed out, is that sharing a self is not the same thing as having a self. Your avatar isn’t real. It’s a projection. It’s not terribly far from a lie. And like all of the lies that we tell, the real danger isn’t that others will believe it but that we will come to believe it ourselves. That we will come to identify with our virtual self (who looks so beguiling in photographs, whose life is bright and free and literally filtered).

In this way we become alien to ourselves. Who is this person who spends so much time studying? Washing dishes? Taking care of grandma? This is not how I see myself.

I learned at my own graduation that over identifying with your idealized self is a deeply alienating experience. It is a form of self-rejection. Because what you are saying to yourself is: I’m not good enough the way I am.

So today, I would like to pause for a moment to appreciate the parts of you that you don’t put online. I would like to mount a defense of them. Of your boring, internal, book-reading, dishwashing, thought-having life. Of the parts of you that can’t be captured by any technological medium. It’s a concept that I’m going to call “the un-instagramable self.”

Here’s something I truly believe: everything of any significance that you will do in your life will be done by your un-instagramable self. It is, for example, your un-instagramable self who is graduating today. I say this with confidence because I’ve yet to see a Facebook or Instagram account which is dedicated to photos of someone studying or attending lectures or writing essays.

All of the most substantive experiences that you will have in your life will be had by the boorish slob you are trying to edit out of existence. The you who falls in love at your dingy entry-level job will not be the glamorous and airbrushed you who will appear in your wedding photos. And parenting will be nothing like you will represent it to be online. For one thing, there will a lot more actual shit than you will ever post on Instagram. There will be sleep deprivation and petty standoffs and moments of self-doubt. But the moments of love and tenderness and belonging will touch you more deeply than anything you will find in the virtual world.

You will look wonderful in the photos you will post of you and your children. You will look wonderful because you will make sure that you look wonderful, and you will delete the ones in which you look harassed and depleted because your five-year-old woke screaming from a nightmare at 3am. You will not look wonderful as you crouch on your hall floor in stretched-out pajamas and rock your child back to sleep. You will look like hell. But you will remember the weight of your son on your chest long after the perfectly staged portraits have faded from all relevance.

And in twenty-five or thirty years, when your daughter graduates from a university, and she is sitting where you are now, and some random commencement speaker tells her to thank her Mom and Dad, she will not be thinking of your avatar—of the carefully chosen cover photo that obscures the lines in your face and the grey in your hair. She will be thinking of you. Creased and sweaty, with thinning hair and warts and liver spots and whatever other signs of decay that you’ve got going on by then.

So. Class of 2019. March up here, and claim your degree, and give the camera your best smile. But tonight, as you upload that photograph, take a moment to check in with your un-instagramable self—and thank them for getting you this far, and for taking you the rest of the way.

Thank you.

Hillary Clinton: 'It's not easy to wade back into the fitght every day', Yale University - 2018

23 May 2018, Yale Class Day, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Oh, that was great. Oh, nice one. Thank you, thank you. Hello. Thank you very much. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Wow, I am so delighted to be here. Sorry we're not outside, but this makes it kind of cosy.

I want to thank President Salovey and Dean Chun. Thank you Alex, a Razorback fan from Little Rock, Arkansas for getting us started on such a high note. Thanks to Alexis and Josh for your comments and your introduction. Thanks to all of the family and friends here today for allowing me to share this happy occasion, and good afternoon to everyone joining us by livestream from around campus. But most of all, congratulations to the class of 2018. I am thrilled for all of you, even the three of you who live in Michigan and didn't request your absentee ballots in time.

But before I go any further, I just want to be sure, did the students from the new colleges make it here? I worried that your flights might be delayed. Sorry Franklin and Pauli Murray, I heard you had a great first year and I am honoured that this class has invited me to be your speaker. Now I see, looking out at you that you are following the tradition of over-the-top hats so I brought a hat too. A Russian hat. Right? Look, I mean, if you can't beat them, join them.

Being here with you brings back a flood of memories. I remember the first time I arrived on campus as an incoming law student in the fall of 1969 wearing my bell-bottoms, driving a beat up old car with a mattress tied to the roof. I had no idea what to expect. Now to be honest, I had had some trouble making up my mind between Yale and Harvard Law Schools. Then one day while we were still in that period of decision making, I was invited to a cocktail party at Harvard for potentially incoming law students where I met a famous law professor.

A friend of mine, a male law student, introduced me to this famous law professor. I mean truly, big three piece suit, watch chain, and my friend said, "Professor, this is Hillary Rodham. She's trying to decide whether to come here next year or sign up with our closest competitor." Now the great man gave me a cool dismissive look and said, "Well, first of all, we don't have any close competitors. And secondly, we don't need any more women at Harvard."

Now I was leaning toward Yale anyway but that pretty much sealed the deal, and when I came to Yale I was one of 27 women out of 235 law students. It was the first year women were admitted to the college, and as that first class of women prepared to graduate four years later, The New York Times reported on Yale's foray into co-education, noting that the women "worked harder and got somewhat better grades than the 940 men graduating with them. A fact," they went on to say, "that some of the men apparently found threatening." Well, I was shocked.

But over the years Yale has been a home away from home for me, a place I've returned to time and again. I spoke to class day back in 2001 on the 300th anniversary of the university, and I hope that that will be the case for many of you as well. This school has been responsible for some of my most treasured friends and colleagues, people like Jake Sullivan and Harold Koh, and I've watched some of you grow up, like Rebecca Shaw, who's graduating today and you'll hear from shortly. And I've been honoured to serve over the last year or two, working with some of the Yale Law School faculty including the new Dean, Heather Gerkin.

Now Yale grads, many of whom are also here today, have worked for me in the United States Senate, the State Department, on my presidential campaigns, and I have been so well-served. I have a very dedicated campaign intern here graduating, David Shimer, the class of 2018.

But I have to confess, of all the formative experiences I had at Yale, perhaps none was more significant than the day during my second year when I was cutting through what was then the student lounge with some friends, and I saw this tall, handsome guy with a beard who looked like a viking. I said to my friend, "Well, who is that?" And she said, "Well, that's Bill Clinton. He's from Arkansas and that's all he ever talks about." And then as if on cue, I hear him saying, "And not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world." And I was like, "Who is this person?" But he kept looking at me and I kept looking back.

So we were in the Law Library one night, I was studying but I couldn't help but see occasionally as I lifted my head up that he was, again, looking at me. So finally I thought, "This is ridiculous," so I got up, went over to him, and I said, "If you're going to keep looking at me and I'm going to keep looking back, we at least ought to be introduced. I'm Hillary Rodham. Who are you?" And that started a conversation that continues to this day.

Now it was also here at Yale that I saw a flyer in the Law School on a bulletin board that changed my life. Now some of your parents and grandparents may remember flyers and bulletin boards. For the rest of you, suffice it to say, that was how we got information. It was like Facebook but the bulletin board didn't steal your personal information. So one day I saw a note about a woman named Marian Wright Edelman, a Yale Law School graduate, civil rights activist who would go on to found The Children's Defence Fund.

Marian was coming back to campus to give a lecture. I went, I was captivated to hear her talk about using her Yale education to create a Head Start programme in rural Mississippi. And I wound up working for her that summer, and the experience opened my eyes to the ways that the law can protect children or come up short. Because like many of you, I learned just as much outside the four walls of the classroom as I did sitting in a lecture hall, and I discovered a passion that has animated my life and my work ever since.

Now a lot has changed since I was here. In 2019 Yale will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the matriculation of women at the college, and the 150th anniversary of the first women graduate students at Yale. And I heard that Yale officially changed the term freshman to first year. I also heard, amazingly, that The Duke's Men and the Whiffenpoofs have started welcoming women. Now as for my long lost Whiffs audition tape, I have buried it so deep not even Wikileaks will be able to find it, because if you thought my emails were scandalous you should hear my singing voice.

I find it very exciting that today's graduates hail from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and 56 other countries. And in your four years on campus, you've survived late nights in the Bass cubicles and early mornings in the Sterling stacks, you've trekked up Science Hill, maybe you've even found love at The Last Chance Dance, and now you're ready to take on your next adventure. But maybe some of you are reluctant to leave. I understand that. It's possible to feel both because the class of 2018 is graduating at one of the most tumultuous times int he history of our country, and I say that as someone who graduated in the sixties.

I recently went back and looked up those famous lines from Charles Dickens in A Tale of two Cities because I usually end after saying, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." But it goes on, "It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

Now Dickens was writing about the years leading up to the French Revolution, but he could have been describing the ricocheting highs and lows of this moment in America. We're living through a time when fundamental rights, civic virtue, freedom of the press, even facts and reason are under assault like never before. But we are also witnessing an era of new moral conviction, civic engagement, and a sense of devotion to our democracy and country. So here's the good news. If any group were ever prepared to rise to the occasion, it is you, the class of 2018. You've already demonstrated the character and courage that will help you navigate this tumultuous moment, and most of all, you've demonstrated resilience.

Now that's a word that's been on my mind a lot recently. One of my personal heroes, Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself I have lived through this horror, I can take the next thing that comes along." Well, that's resilience and it's so important because everyone, everyone gets knocked down. What matters is whether you get back up and keep going. This may be hard for a group of Yale soon-to-be graduates to accept, but yes, you will make mistakes in life. You will even fail. It happens to all of us, no matter how qualified or capable we are. Take it from me.

I remember those first months after that 2016 election were not easy. We all had our own methods of coping. I went for long walks in the woods, Yale students went for long walks in East Rock Park. I spent hours going down a Twitter rabbit hole, you spend hours in the Yale Memes Group. I had my fair share of Chardonnay, you had penny drinks at Woads. I practised yoga and alternate nostril breathing, you took Psych and the Good Life.

And let me just get this out of the way, no, I'm not over it. I still think about the 2016 election. I still regret the mistakes I made. I still think though, that understanding what happened in such a weird and wild election in American history will help us defend our democracy in the future. Whether you're right, left, centre, Republican, Democrat, independent, vegetarian, whatever, we all have stake in that. So today as a person, I'm okay. But as an American, I'm concerned.

Personal resilience is important but it's not the only form of resilience we need right now. We also need community resilience. That's something that this class has embodied during your time on campus. Literally, at times, like in the March of Resilience your sophomore year. It was the biggest demonstration in the history of the school. That's 300+ years. Led by women of colour, supported by students and faculty determined to make Yale a more just, equitable, and safe place for everyone. Many of you have said that march was a defining moment in your college experience, and that says something about this class and your values. Because the truth is, our country is more polarised than ever.

We have sorted ourselves into opposing camps and that divides how we see the world. The data backs this up. There are more Liberals and Conservatives than there used to be and fewer Centrists. Our political parties are more ideologically and geographically consistent, which means there are fewer northern Republicans and fewer southern Democrats. And the divides on race and religion are starker than ever before. And as the middle shrank, partisan animosity grew. Now I'm not going to get political here, but this isn't simply a both sides problem. The radicalization of American politics hasn't been symmetrical. There are leaders in our country who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric, who fear change, who see the world in zero sum terms, so that if others are gaining, well, they must be losing. That's a recipe for polarisation and conflict.

Our social fabric is fraying and the bonds of community that hold us together are fractured. This isn't just a problem because it leads to unpleasant conversations over the Thanksgiving dinner table, it's a problem because it undermines the civic spirit that makes democracy possible. The habits of the heart that de Tocqueville found so unique in the American character. I believe healing our country is going to take what I call radical empathy. As hard as it is, this is a moment to reach across divide of race, class, and politics, to try to see the world through the eyes of people very different from ourselves and to return to rational debate. To find a way to disagree without being disagreeable, to try to recapture a sense of community and common humanity.

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can't just ask, "Am I better off than I was two years or four years ago?" We have to ask, "Are we all better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?" That's something you've done here at Yale. You've learned that you don't need to be an immigrant to be outraged when a classmate's father, a human being who contributes to his family and his country is unjustly deported. You don't need to be a person of colour to understand that when black students feel singled out and targeted, we still have work to do. And you don't need to experience gun violence to know that when a teenager in Texas who just survived a mass shooting says she's not surprised by what happened at her school because, and I quote, "I've always felt like eventually it was going to happen here too." We are failing our children. So enough is enough, we need to come together and we certainly need common sense gun safety legislation as soon as we can get it.

Now empathy should not only be at the centre of our individual lives, our families, and our communities, it should be at the centre of our public life, our policies, and our politics. I know we don't always think of politics and empathy as going hand in hand, but they can, and more than that, they must. As former secretary Madeleine Albright writes in her terrific new book, Fascism: A Warning, she says, "This generosity of spirit, this caring about others and about the proposition that we are created equal is the single most effective antidote to the self-centred moral numbness that allows fascism to thrive." And of course, Madeleine had personal experience fleeing the Nazis in Czechoslovakia as a baby, returning after the wall, feeling the communists as a young girl.

Now that brings me to one more form of resilience that's been on my mind over the last year, democratic resilience. In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, who by the way received an honorary degree from Yale, was asked by a woman in the street outside Independence Hall, "Well doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy? And Franklin answered, "A republic, if you can keep it." Right now we're living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy. Now there are not tanks in the streets, but what's happening right now goes to the heart of who we are as a nation.

And I say this not as a democrat who lost an election, but as an American afraid of losing a country. There are certain things that are so essential, they should transcend politics. Waging a war on the rule of law and a free press, delegitimizing elections, perpetrating shameless corruption, and rejecting the idea that our leaders should be public servants undermines our national unity. And attacking truth and reason, evidence and facts should alarm us all.

You and your parents have just paid for a first class, world class education, and as Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book, On Tyranny, "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." I think Professor Snyder, both in that book and in his new one, The Road to Unfreedom, is sounding the alarm as loudly as he can. Because attempting to erase the line between fact and fiction, truth and reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. The goal is to make us question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on, our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, even ourselves.

Just this week, former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson said, "If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom. Perhaps a tad late, but he's absolutely right. So how do we build democratic resilience? I think it starts with standing up for truth, facts, and reason, not just in the classroom and on campus but every day in our lives. It means speaking out about the vital role of higher education in our society, to create opportunity and equality. It means calling out actual fake news when we see it and supporting brave journalists and their reporting, maybe even by subscribing to a newspaper. Now most of all, as obvious as it seems, it means voting. In every election, not just the presidential ones. So yes, these are challenging times for America but we've come through challenging times before.

I think back to the night Barrack Obama was elected president. Many of us, so many of us were jubilant. Even I, who had once hoped to beat him, was ecstatic. It was such a hopeful moment, and yet in some ways this moment feels even more hopeful, because this is a battle-hardened hope, tempered by loss, and clear-eyed about the stakes. We are standing up to policies that hurt people. We are standing up for all people being treated with dignity. We are doing the work to translate those feelings into action. And the fact that some days it is really hard to keep at it just makes it that much more remarkable that so many of us are, in fact, keeping at it.

It's not easy to wade back into the fight every day, but we're doing it. And that's why I am optimistic, because of how unbelievably tough Americans are proving to be. I've encountered lots of people in recent months who give me hope. The Parkland students who endured unthinkable tragedy and have responded with courage and resolve. The leaders and groups I've gotten to know through Onward Together, an organisation I started after the election to encourage the outpouring of grassroots engagement that we're seeing. Everyone who is marching, registering voters, and diving into the issues facing us like never before, some for the very first time in their lives. And I find hope in the wave of women running for office, and winning. And hope in the women and men who are dismantling the notion that women should have to endure harassment and violence as a part of our lives.

So we have a long way to go. There are many fights to fight and more seem to arise every day. It will take work to keep up the pressure, to stay vigilant, to neither close our eyes, nor numb our hearts, or throw up our hands and say, "Someone else take over from here." Because at this moment in our history our country depends on every citizen believing in the power of their actions, even when that power is invisible and their efforts feel like an uphill battle. Of every citizen voting in every election, even when your side loses. It is a matter of infinite faith, this faith we have in the ability to govern ourselves, to come together to make honourable, practical compromise in the pursuit of ends that will lift us all up and move us forward.

So yes, we need to pace ourselves but also lean on each other. Look for the good wherever we can. Celebrate heroes, encourage children, find ways to disagree respectfully. We need to be ready to lose some fights, because we will. As John McCain recently reminded us, "No just cause is futile, even if it's lost." What matters is to keep going no matter what, keep going.

The Yale you're graduating from is very different from the Yale I graduated from. It's different even from the Yale that welcomed you four years ago. Four years ago, not one of Yale's colleges was named after a woman. Today students are carrying on the legacy of a trailblazing LGBT civil rights activist at Pauli Murray College and celebrating one of Yale's own hidden figures at Grace Hopper College, named after the naval officer who happened to be one of the first computer programmers in America.

Those changes didn't happen on their own, you made them possible. You kept fighting, you kept the faith. And because of that, in the end, you changed Yale as much as Yale changed you. And now it's time for you to make your mark on the world. I know the best. The best for you, for Yale, and for America is yet to come, and you each will have a role to play and a contribution to make. Thank you and congratulations to the class of 2018.

Tim Minchin: 'Being an artist requires massive reserves of self-belief', WAAPA - 2019

21 March 2019, WAAPA, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

I am hugely grateful and more than a little embarrassed to be honoured like this. This institution puts out proper extraordinary artists. I was only here for two years, and yet my contemporaries include Graeme Blevins and Tommy O’Halloran and Ben Vanderwal and Libby Hammer and Troy Roberts and James Sandon and Grant Windsor and these incredible people who’ve found a level of craft I wouldn’t be able to approach in my wildest dreams. In this tent alone, there are artists who I swear you’ve put here just to make me feel like the hack that I am. I feel the same as I did when the jazz students used to come and watch our “commercial music” ensemble performances: mildly embarrassed and very threatened. And then the added cruelty of holding the event in a circular room full of mirrors: I’m not much good with the piano but I’m very good with subtext, you bastards, I know you’re telling me to take a good hard look at myself.

With a head like mine, you learn to try not to.

So this week I’m staying at the Crown Metropole hotel. It’s not my usual vibe, but the theatre I’m playing in is right there, and besides if I stay with my parents, the kettle wakes me up at half past six and I’m not having that. Anyway, presumably because my tour is attracting punters, the hotel management upgraded me, so I’m staying in some kind of penthouse suite thing. It’s about the size of my house, and feels like I’m living in an Italian furniture show room. There are just so many couches. I’m staying there on my own, yet I counted, and you could have 90 people comfortably sitting in my hotel room. I don’t know what it’s for. It’s a room built for the sole purpose of making Wankers feel like Legends. Trump would love it, you know.

When you first walk into a room like that, you initially feel really excited, but it is genuinely gross and quite miserable to stay there. That’s worth knowing, I guess, if your plan is to be a Rockstar or a famous actor. It’s not only lonely at the top, but populated by unnecessary chairs. Put that on a fridge magnet.

My time here at WAAPA was quite hard actually. Being an artist requires massive reserves of self-belief, and coming to a place like this is incredibly testing. Of course, I know now that the 2 years I spent here feeling unbelievably bad about myself were simply training for the subsequent 8 years where I felt even worse. Watching beautiful beautiful Graham Wood play piano and just wanting to give up… wanting to cut my fingers off and feed them to a swan, taught me… well, not to. I guess. It was the beginning of a lesson I’m still trying to learn: that comparing yourself to others, in any area of your life, is poison.

It was also hard here because I had really good friends in the acting course, and they were all wandering around in black tights and shagging each other and looking fabulously sweaty, while I was wandering around with the other pianist in my year, who was a sweet guy, but deeply depressed, and every day just reminded me how we were going to be poor for life and that there was no point.

And it was hard because – like you – I was making coffees and pouring beers to pay my rent.

But mostly, it was hard because music had always just been fun to me. Music was a thing you did at parties to pick up girls. It was something I did when I was stressed or sad. It was an escape; I could – and still can – fall asleep playing the piano, and wake up seconds later wondering how my fingers got to where they’d got. And coming here, it was work, suddenly. I had to practice. (The first year I was here remains the only year I ever actually practiced piano. Russell Holmes will confirm I certainly didn’t do any practice in second year. Somewhere a few weeks in it became clear we both preferred just hanging out and chatting.)

But I am so grateful for the two years I spent here. It is impossible to measure the value of what that diploma gave me. Much of what they were teaching me I couldn’t get at the time, but unconsciously, I put the info on some shelf in my brain to be picked up and properly examined later, when I had more time and was feeling less stubborn. I learned musical tools, performance tools, I learned to respect time, I learned to listen, I learned resilience. I learned that dominant 13th shape that is also a minor 6/9 and a dominant 7 sharp 5 sharp 9 and a major 7 sharp 11 and it’s the best shape in the world and Matilda is built on it. I never learned to read music. I don’t know whose failure that is. I’m gonna say Paul Pooley. Is he here?

I guess I’m trying to say to the students here: I know these places can be hard, but keep going. You won’t actually know what you’re really learning until years later. Just listen, keep your humility and stay tough.

Right, if this were a graduation ceremony, my role here would be to give career advice to the graduates. It’s not, but I guess I’ll try to give advice anyway, because I’m quite old now, and giving unsolicited advice is what old white guys are supposed to do. I’m gonna mansplain the arts to you.

It’s actually surprising to me how often I get asked for career advice. Young musos and actors, and parents of stagey little kids… they go, “how do you get a career like you?” And I mean, I get it. I so clearly remember in my teens and twenties thinking, what’s the trick? There must be a trick. But it still takes me aback that they ask me, because my career is so clearly such an absurd fluke. I mean, I simply got lucky. And not lucky like, I was on the bus and I got my umbrella confused with the umbrella of a guy who turned out to be the husband of a record company exec… There was no single moment of luck, nor a series of lucky events. I mean, it’s a fluke because it turned out that having my weird combination of attributes allowed me to make some stuff that happened to find an audience in a particular place and time.

And that’s the short and long of my advice really: there is no trick. You can’t have a career like mine. It’s mine. You have to have your career.

To expand upon that platitude, I’ll tell you three things I reckon are important if you’re serious about a career in music or theatre or dance or film. All three of these are total clichés, but perhaps worth reiterating.

Firstly: you have to get good. Get really good. No short-cut, no business technique, no amount of self-promotion or nice business cards, none of it means anything, really. You just have to be really, really good at what you do. Ideally, be the best. And that takes hours and hours and hours. Time when your mates are taking pills or smoking cones, time when other people are having holidays. You don’t get to have a good work-life balance. It means being a bit obsessed. And if you’re lucky, it won’t suck because you love it. And if you don’t love it, stop now. Don’t do it as a job. There are many more important jobs than being a muso or an actor, or at least as important, get one of those and play music as a hobby.

But if you’re going to do it, you simply have to spend all your time and all your energy and all your money getting good. Sorry.

There is however, a little loophole in this advice. Which is that how you define ‘what you do’ is up to you. I am the best in the world at what I do. Without a doubt. And I can say that confidently, because the number of people I’m competing with is zero. The thing I am best in the world at, is being a science-obsessed, uber-rhymey polemicist pianist singer satirist wanker. I am really, really good at that job. I am the king of Minchinland, population: this idiot.

So be really, really good at what you do. And figuring out what that is also takes hours and hours and hours. I’m sorry.

And this is related to my second bit of advice, which is:

You have to be authentic. Actors, you might authentically look like a Hemsworth and authentically love going to the gym. But I promise, as someone who has been involved in casting on both sides of the couch: all anyone wants to see is you. We want to see how you play the character, how you bring you into a character.

My career began in my late twenties when I finally stopped trying to be what I thought other people wanted from me. I was trying to get acting agents, getting headshots and cutting my hair, changing my name to Timothy, as if that crap ever changed anything. I was trying to get the silliness out of my songs in the hope that I could get a record deal. I was separating all the things I am, because I had identified what I thought was the marketplace available to me, and was trying to be various products that might be consumable. The minute, the minute, I stuck everything I am on the stage… the moment I wore what I wanted, said what I wanted, put together a show that had me doing weird poems and monologues and playing jazz and pop and rock, the moment I got authentic, my life changed.

I’m an odd example, obviously, because I’ve always been obsessed by trying to do lots of different things. But the lesson stands anyway. Your career, whether you wanna be a triple threat on the west end, or a film actor, or a session percussionist: don’t make the mistake of thinking that little old you is not interesting to the world. You have lived a unique life, consumed a unique suite of ideas, marinated in a unique combination of songs and artists and influences. You will have something that no one else has, and identifying that is your key to a beautiful career. And that career might mean you are dirt poor your whole life, or it might mean you get to be a massive star. But it won’t matter, because you won’t be trying to be something that you’re not.

And the third bit of advice: Be kind. Just be kind. To everyone. Always. (Actually you don’t have to always be kind upwards. You’ll come across people above you – a director or producer, a studio boss, an A&R dude – who are arseholes. You’re allowed to tell them to f-off.) But basically you should always be kind. It seems so obvious, but it’s amazing how many people fail to understand its importance. Be kind to the monitor guys, be kind to the fly-mech, be kind to the ushers and the merch people, the gaffers, the make-up artists, be kind to your fellow performers. Whatever happens. Even if there is feedback screaming in your in-ears, even if the air-con doesn’t work in your trailer and you’re freezing, even if you’re under huge pressure and you’re under-slept and working days and gigging nights and you haven’t written a speech you have to write and you’re starving and all you want is some poached eggs and a flat white delivered to your furniture store hotel room but you’ve accidentally left your “do not disturb” sign on the door so the waiter just doesn’t deliver your breakfast for an hour and then when he does, he spills your flat white onto your poached eggs… even then, be kind. If in doubt, double down and be kinder. Not only will it make your life better, but it is really good career advice. The musicians I’m working with on this tour are some of the best players in the country, but that’s only half the reason we sought them out. They are just really, really lovely people. So just be kind. It will bite you on the ass if you’re not. And yes, there are successful arseholes – I’ve worked with a couple of the most famous of them – but, who wants to be one of them? It’s gross.

Music is not magic to me. Being a musician is not particularly romantic. Songwriting is a craft you get better at by doing it over and over again, just like cooking or surgery or painting or sex or handstands. Our ability to make art that resonates correlates very closely to our experience in life. I’m back at authenticity now. We carry our scars and our defeats and victories into how we express ourself. We bring all our experience, all our hours, all our self-loathing and self-love into our craft. At least we should.

Thank you so much for having me.

Gregory Boyle: 'You stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless', Seaver College Pepperdine - 2018

28 April 2018, Seaver College, Malibu, Los Angeles, USA

Rev Gregory Boyle is the author of The New York Times bestselling book, "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

Thank you very much for this kind and generous honor. President Benton called me some months ago and he said, "Greg, do you believe in free speech?", and I said yes, and he said, "Good, you're giving one on April 28th." If I could, how do the kids call it? Give a shout out to Will Carjoley. He is the sixth of his siblings, the last of the six to graduate from Pepperdine, which is a huge accomplishment, and also a whole lot of tuition.

I'm an expert on nothing, but for 34 years I've worked with gang members, and apparently President Benton thought that made me eminently suited to address the class of 2018.

You know what Martin Luther King says about church could well be said about your time here at Pepperdine. ‘It's not the place you've come to, it's the place you go from’, and you go from here to create a community of kinship such that, God in fact, might recognize it. In fact, that is God's dream come true. No us and them, just us. And you imagine with God a circle of compassion, and then you imagine nobody standing outside that circle, and you know that God does not share in the demonizing in which we all engage in.

And so, you choose to go from here, and you dismantle the barriers that exclude, and you go out to the margins, because that's the only way they'll get erased, if you stand out at them, and you stand with the poor, and the powerless, and the voiceless, and you stand with those whose dignity has been denied, and you stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear, and every one of the graduates here has had an exquisite mutual experience of knowing what it's like to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out.

You go from here to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop, and you stand with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. For no kinship, no peace, no kinship, no justice, no kinship, no equality. You go to the margins not to make a difference, because then that's about you. You go to the margin so that the folks at the margins make you different.

It's the privilege of my life for 30 years to have been taught everything of value by gang members, and in the last few years they've taught me how to text, and so, I'm really grateful to them, because I find it sure beats the heck out of actually talking to people. And I'm pretty dextrous at it, LOL and OMG, and BTW, and the homies have taught me a new one, OHN, which apparently stands for, "Oh hell no," and I've been using that one quite a bit lately.

I know I can't be alone in being vexed by this autocorrect thing. I had a homegirl, kind of a tough cookie named Bertha, and she texted me on a Sunday, "Where are you at?" And I said, "I'm about to speak to a room full of monjas and monjas is Spanish for nuns, sisters, religious women. "I'm about to speak to a room full of monjas. I pushed send, autocorrect told her I was about to speak to a room full of ninjas, which she thought was pretty darn interesting.

The homies, their hair is always on fire, and they always need money to finish off the rent, or to pay their light bill or something, and a homie texted me once, he just needed $100 to finish off his rent, and I just didn't have it, so I texted him, "Things are tight," and I pushed send and autocorrect told him, "Thongs are tight." He said, "Sorry to hear that. What about my rent?"

So there I am in a car with two older [inaudible 00:00:04:46], [Manuel and Poncho and they do a variety of things at Homeboy. They're going to help me give a talk at a high school, and Manuel's in the front seat and we're 15 minutes on the road, when Manuel gets an incoming text, he reads it to himself and he chuckles, and I said, "What is it?" He goes, "Oh, it's dumb. It's from Snoopy back at the office." Well, I'd just seen Snoopy. Snoopy gave me a big embarcio as the day was beginning. Snoopy and Manuel work together in the clock in room, where they clock in hundreds and hundreds of gang members who work there. I would not want this job. This may come as a surprise, gang members can occasionally be attitudinal. So I said, "Well, what's it say?" And Manuel said, "Oh, it's dumb. Let me find it. Oh, here it is. Hey dawg, it's me, Snoops. Yeah, they got my ass locked up in county jail. They're charging me with being the ugliest vato in America. You have to come down right now, show them they got the wrong guy." Well, we died laughing, and I nearly drove into oncoming traffic, and then I realized that Manuel and Snoopy are enemies. They're from rival gangs. They used to shoot bullets at each other, because I remember.

Now they shoot text messages, and there's a word for that, and the word is kinship.

How do we obliterate once and for all the illusion that we are separate? All of you go from Pepperdine to choose to become enlightened witnesses, people who, through your kindness and tenderness, and focused, attentive love, returned people to themselves. And in the process, we're all returned to our dignity and to our truth, that we are exactly what God had in mind when God made us.

It occurs to university sometimes to force their students to read my book against their will, and I'm not complaining, but my alma mater at Gonzaga University called me and said they had forced the incoming freshmen class to read Tattoos on the Heart, and so I said sure, and they said, "Can you bring two homies with you?" And I said, sure, and they were going to have a big talk on a Tuesday night with a thousand people. And so, I always invite homies in the same way I pick homies who are enemies, rivals, who work together at Homeboy, just that they have to share a hotel room, just to mess with them. And I always pick homies who have never flown before, just for the thrill of seeing gang members panicked in the sky.

Once I had two homies, we were flying to D.C., and older guys, and one guy said to me, "Hey, are we flying Virgin Airlines? Because it's our first time." I said, "Well yes, it's a requirement. We'll come home on American." So I picked these two guys, Bobby, an African American gang member who worked in the bakery, and Mario, who worked in our merchandise store. I've done this hundreds and hundreds of times with men and women. I've never picked anybody more terrified to flying than this guy Mario. He was just absolutely petrified. In fact, he was hyperventilating, and we hadn't even boarded the plane yet.

And so, we're at Burbank Airport, and the big bay windows, and Southwest Airlines, and they don't have that hermetically sealed chute where you walk onto the plane, you walk out onto the tarmac like you're the president, and you climb the steps to go to the front of the plane or the back of the plane, they have steps. And so, our plane arrives, it's early morning and I tell Mario, "There's our plane," and [inaudible 00:08:42], and I think, "Wow, he may actually die before we climb those steps." And then our flight crew arrives and I see two flight attendants, females, and they both have very large cups of Starbucks coffee, and they're schlepping up the front steps and Mario goes, "When are we going to board the plane?" I said, "As soon as they sober up the pilots. There they go now.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said that, but I should tell you that Mario, in our 30 year history at Homeboy, is the most tattooed individual who's ever worked there. His arms are all sleeved out, neck blackened with the name of his gang, head shaved covered in tattoos, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyelids that say "the end," so that when he's lying in his coffin, there's no doubt. And so, I'd never been in public with him and we're walking and people are like this, and mothers are clutching their kids more closely, and I'm thinking, wow, isn't that interesting? Because if you were to go to Homeboy on Monday and ask anybody there who's the kindest, most gentle soul who works there, they won't say me, they'll say, Mario. He sells baked goods at the counter at our cafe. He's proof that only the soul that ventilates the world with tenderness has any chance of changing the world.

So we get to Gonzaga, and they don't just have the talk at night, they have all these other talks throughout the day and I tell them, "You get up and give those talks. I'm going to sit in the back of the classroom," and they were terrified, but they did a good job. Stories of terror, and torture, and violence, and abuse of every imaginable kind that led the audience to stand in awe at what these two had carried in their lives, rather than in judgment at how they carried it. And honest to God, if their stories had been flames, you'd have to keep your distance, otherwise you'd get scorched.

So the nighttime talk comes and it's a thousand people, and I invite them up to share their stories in front of all these people for five minutes each, and I do my thing, and then I invite them up for Q and A, and I said, "Yes ma'am," and a woman stands and she says, "Yeah, I got a question. It's for Mario." First question out the gate, and Mario steps up to the microphone. He's a tall drink of water, skinny and clutching the microphone, and he's terrified, "Yes?" And she says, "Well, you say you're a father, and you have a son and a daughter who are about to enter their teenage years. What advice do you give them? What wisdom do you impart to them?

And Mario clutches his microphone, and he's just terrified, and he's trembling, and he's getting a hernia trying to come up with whatever the hell he's going to say, when finally he blurts out, "I just...", and he stops, and he retreats back to his microphone clutching terrified retreat, but he wants to get this whole sentence out. "I just don't want my kids to turn out to be like me."

And there's silence, until the woman who asked the question stands, and now it's her turn to cry, and she says, "Why wouldn't you want your kids to turn out to be like you? You are loving, you are kind, you are gentle, you are wise. I hope your kids turn out to be like you." And a thousand total perfect strangers stand, and they will not stop clapping, and all Mario can do is hold his face in his hands, so overwhelmed with the emotion that this room full of people, strangers, had returned him to himself, and they were returned to themselves, and I think that's the only praise God has any interest in.

No kinship, no peace, no kinship, no justice, no kinship, no equality. Graduates, you go from here to stand at the margins, because that's the only way they get erased, and you brace yourselves, because the world will accuse you of wasting your time. But the prophet Jeremiah writes, "In this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voices of those who sing." Make those voices heard, for you go to the margins, not to make a difference, but so that the folks at the margins make you different. And may God bless you as you go from this place.

Rick Rigsby: 'That third grade drop out was my father', Cal Maritime - 2017

22 April 2017, Cal Maritime, University in Vallejo, California

The wisest person I ever met in my life, a third-grade dropout. Wisest and dropout in the same sentence is rather oxymoronic, like jumbo shrimp. Like Fun Run, ain’t nothing fun about it, like Microsoft Works. You all don’t hear me. I used to say like country music, but I’ve lived in Texas so long, I love country music now. I hunt. I fish. I have cowboy boots and cowboy … You all, I’m a blackneck redneck. Do you hear what I’m saying to you? No longer oxymoronic for me to say country music, and it’s not oxymoronic for me to say third grade and dropout.

That third grade dropout, the wisest person I ever met in my life, who taught me to combine knowledge and wisdom to make an impact, was my father, a simple cook, wisest man I ever met in my life, just a simple cook, left school in the third grade to help out on the family farm, but just because he left school doesn’t mean his education stopped. Mark Twain once said, “I’ve never allowed my schooling to get in the way of my education.” My father taught himself how to read, taught himself how to write, decided in the midst of Jim Crowism, as America was breathing the last gasp of the Civil War, my father decided he was going to stand and be a man, not a black man, not a brown man, not a white man, but a man. He literally challenged himself to be the best that he could all the days of his life.

I have four degrees. My brother is a judge. We’re not the smartest ones in our family. It’s a third grade dropout daddy, a third grade dropout daddy who was quoting Michelangelo, saying to us boys, “I won’t have a problem if you aim high and miss, but I’m gonna have a real issue if you aim low and hit.” A country mother quoting Henry Ford, saying, “If you think you can or if you think you can’t, you’re right.” I learned that from a third grade drop. Simple lessons, lessons like these. “Son, you’d rather be an hour early than a minute late.” We never knew what time it was at my house because the clocks were always ahead. My mother said, for nearly 30 years, my father left the house at 3:45 in the morning, one day, she asked him, “Why, Daddy?” He said, “Maybe one of my boys will catch me in the act of excellence.”

I want to share a few things with you. Aristotle said, “You are what you repeatedly do.” Therefore, excellence ought to be a habit, not an act. Don’t ever forget that. I know you’re tough. I know you’re seaworthy, but always remember to be kind, always. Don’t ever forget that. Never embarrass Mama. Mm-hmm (affirmative). If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. If Daddy ain’t happy, don’t nobody care, but I’m going to tell you.

Next lesson, lesson from a cook over there in the galley. “Son, make sure your servant’s towel is bigger than your ego.” I want to remind you cadets of something as you graduate. Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. You all might have a relative in mind you want to send that to. Let me say it again. Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

John Wooden coached basketball at UCLA for a living, but his calling was to impact people, and with all those national championships, guess what he was found doing in the middle of the week? Going into the cupboard, grabbing a broom and sweeping his own gym floor. You want to make an impact? Find your broom. Every day of your life, you find your broom. You grow your influence that way. That way, you’re attracting people so that you can impact them.

Final lesson. “Son, if you’re going to do a job, do it right.” I’ve always been told how average I can be, always been criticized about being average, but I want to tell you something. I stand here before you before all of these people, not listening to those words, but telling myself every single day to shoot for the stars, to be the best that I can be. Good enough isn’t good enough if it can be better, and better isn’t good enough if it can be best.

Let me close with a very personal story that I think will bring all this into focus. Wisdom will come to you in the unlikeliest of sources, a lot of times through failure. When you hit rock bottom, remember this. While you’re struggling, rock bottom can also be a great foundation on which to build and on which to grow. I’m not worried that you’ll be successful. I’m worried that you won’t fail from time to time. The person that gets up off the canvas and keeps growing, that’s the person that will continue to grow their influence.

Back in the ’70s, to help me make this point, let me introduce you to someone. I met the finest woman I’d ever met in my life. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Back in my day, we’d have called her a brick house. This woman was the finest woman I’d ever seen in my life. There was just one little problem. Back then, ladies didn’t like big old linemen. The Blind Side hadn’t come out yet. They liked quarterbacks and running back. We’re at this dance, and I find out her name is Trina Williams from Lompoc, California. We’re all dancing and we’re just excited. I decide in the middle of dancing with her that I would ask her for her phone number. Trina was the first … Trina was the only woman in college who gave me her real telephone number.

The next day, we walked to Baskin and Robbins Ice Cream Parlor. My friends couldn’t believe it. This has been 40 years ago, and my friends still can’t believe it. We go on a second date and a third date and a fourth date. Mm-hmm (affirmative). We drive from Chico to Vallejo so that she can meet my parents. My father meets her. My daddy. My hero. He meets her, pulls me to the side and says, “Is she psycho?” Anyway, we go together for a year, two years, three years, four years. By now, Trina’s a senior in college. I’m still a freshman, but I’m working some things out. I’m so glad I graduated in four terms, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan.

Now, it’s time to propose, so I talk to her girlfriends, and it’s California. It’s in the ’70s, so it has to be outside, have to have a candle and you have to some chocolate. Listen, I’m from the hood. I had a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine. That’s what I had. She said, “Yes.” That was the key. I married the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my … You all ever been to a wedding and even before the wedding starts, you hear this? “How in the world?” It was coming from my side of the family. We get married. We have a few children. Our lives are great.

One day, Trina finds a lump in her left breast. Breast cancer. Six years after that diagnosis, me and my two little boys walked up to Mommy’s casket and, for two years, my heart didn’t beat. If it wasn’t for my faith in God, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If it wasn’t for those two little boys, there would have been no reason for which to go on. I was completely lost. That was rock bottom. You know what sustained me? The wisdom of a third grade dropout, the wisdom of a simple cook.

We’re at the casket. I’d never seen my dad cry, but this time I saw my dad cry. That was his daughter. Trina was his daughter, not his daughter-in-law, and I’m right behind my father about to see her for the last time on this Earth, and my father shared three words with me that changed my life right there at the casket. It would be the last lesson he would ever teach me. He said, “Son, just stand. You keep standing. You keep stand … No matter how rough the sea, you keep standing, and I’m not talking about just water. You keep standing. No matter what. You don’t give up.” I learned that lesson from a third grade dropout, and as clearly as I’m talking to you today, these were some of her last words to me. She looked me in the eye and she said, “It doesn’t matter to me any longer how long I live. What matters to me most is how I live.”

I ask you all one question, a question that I was asked all my life by a third grade dropout. How you living? How you living? Every day, ask yourself that question. How you living? Here’s what a cook would suggest you to live, this way, that you would not judge, that you would show up early, that you’d be kind, that you make sure that that servant’s towel is huge and used, that if you’re going to do something, you do it the right way. That cook would tell you this, that it’s never wrong to do the right thing, that how you do anything is how you do everything, and in that way, you will grow your influence to make an impact. In that way, you will honor all those who have gone before you who have invested in you. Look in those unlikeliest places for wisdom. Enhance your life every day by seeking that wisdom and asking yourself every night, “How am I living?” May God richly bless you all. Thank you for having me here.

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Here is the full speech

Jon Fisher: 'How do we sacrifice a lot to save the planet if we can’t even sacrifice a little?', University of San Francisco - 2018

14 December 2014, St Ignatius, University of San Francisco, USA

Thank you very much. My father’s commencement speaker was the great Martin Luther King.

My Father was 20 years old and didn’t show up for that talk so thank you for showing up! Thank you Dean Davis, President Fitzgerald, my friend Dr. Mark Cannice, the rest of the distinguished faculty and invited guests, the families, especially the parents, especially the parents who labored to get here financially, medically...emotionally...and can I get an Amen for the University of San Francisco graduates! I’m honored you graduates would spend such a special moment of your lives with me.

Of course you didn’t really have a choice. I was President Fitzgerald’s decision - a decision by a man who has lived, studied and worked all over the world including Germany, France, Switzerland, Mexico, China and Kenya and who decided I was the one for you to listen to before getting your diplomas.

Really? This Is a question some of those parents who labored to get here may be asking themselves. I mean c’mon, there are 3 other Jon Fishers to choose from in the Bay Area alone and all of them are billionaires!

If it’s any consolation, I don’t think President Fitzgerald was simply inspired in his choice. Some of you graduates attended my lectures at USF - I haunted this university for the last decade banging my fist on chalkboards and desks - pleading with you guys, as you started your projects, your companies, your careers, to marry the right person.

The most traditionally successful people I know were divorced and they told me sacrificing their families wasn’t worth it. Hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are.

I invented something many of you use every day and it doesn’t compare to any day with a happy, healthy child.

Don’t step on anyone’s neck to advance your cause, never sue anyone and try not to get sued - you will sleep better at night. I have never been a party to a lawsuit in my technology career and Amen to that!

My wife and I don’t put work before our daughter or each other. The engineers in my company, with similar families, and I have been together for most of our professional lives. We don't waste time commuting to offices to look over shoulders because we trust each other.

We don’t have a holiday party. We don’t have each other over for dinner. We get it done then we see our families.

We’re like a less good looking, legal, married with children version of the Ocean’s Eleven team.

We build good companies that great companies buy and take around the world as our path of least resistance to contributing to the world. Building smaller companies takes a lot less capital and therefore a lot less risk and therefore less of a personal toll. And this works in other industries - financially, my companies look a lot like Seth Rogen's movies - a strict budget, an acceptably sized audience, although much smaller than a blockbuster. He seems like a pretty happy guy too.

I accepted President Fitzgerald’s invitation because I think you can hear the siren call in your lives without it leading to you crashing against the rocks and I think that’s worth sharing.

Not everything in Silicon Valley or any industry or life for that matter need be portrayed as home runs or strike-outs - success or failure - it’s just what you hear about so often because it's what sells newspapers.

You can have an idea that doesn’t yield a better way to do your job or give rise to a new company but changes your life. What’s that worth?

I agreed to join my primary school board that changed my life. I leaned about parenting and education and philanthropy and what motivates people.

Maybe you’ll have an idea about attacking global warming or hatred or poverty or truth in news reporting and maybe you’ll pursue none of those things except you’ll speak from your heart about them to inspire the person you’re going to marry.

I had the idea to give this speech exactly 7 years ago to the day. I sat in this church right there. It was December 14, 2012 that was the day all those children were lost in the Sandy Hook shooting. I wondered what someone standing up here would say to us that day and then I wondered what I would to say to you that day. I thought in an increasingly unrecognizable world- my life trajectory should be recognizable to you.

You can do it. You can do what I’ve done, that is you can be happy in your career and family

And if you want the world to know your name and you’re willing to risk it all to get there, I applaud you, really, and I wish you every success - just remember my name as your back up plan.

I do hope you return to Saint Ignatius once in awhile as I have. I always walked out of this church on a hill feeling better - even on that Sandy Hook day - feeling at the center of things.

Salesforce built the greatest skyscraper in the land just two miles from here for a reason. My father taught physics at both San Francisco State and Stanford and often it was easier to get the great physicists of the century to speak in San Francisco.

About 80% of you graduating today do not call San Francisco your home city but more of you will stay.

A major wealth manager in San Francisco called me last month specifically to ask for a USF graduate to be his chief of staff - a sensitive position for someone he could really trust. I forwarded to President Fitzgerald, Dean Davis and Dr. Cannice all of whom responded enthusiastically in minutes to try to help you. Dr. Cannice later mentioned you should all not take your first position out there quite so seriously as there will be many opportunities.

Returning again today, I know the opportunity to speak to you in this place and time may be my apex at age 46 for a variety of reasons including both sets of parents are still relatively happy and healthy and get to be a part of this. My family is here today. My mother-in-law is here who believes all of this - career, family, inspiration, all of it, is due to grand design. My mother believes this is all due to chance. I think it’s somewhere in the middle.

By the way, this was also the exact opening of my wedding vows. I continued, promising my wife that I would meet her in the middle of our disagreements whether or not they were about our mothers. And while I think having a loving family creates memorable moments that may result in chemical changes in the brain to make us more creative, I think we should also follow Jack Warner’s advice to Einstein paraphrasing “you have your theory of relatively and I have mine - don’t hire a relative.”

I have a house on a hill now that’s built into a cliff - into the rock. “And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall..." Matthew 7-24. And Amen to that.

I see these guys eulogizing their fathers from time to time on CNN and it’s so tough and my own father is right here. And he is , not was , is a great father. He’s really good guy you know? I aspire to that. I aspire to that first before anything else.

And my mother is great - she literally stood in front of me to protect from the world at times.

And my wife - I couldn’t have imagined winding up with such a loving and patient and good person in my life that she got from her mother. And it with such humility that I witness all of this passed down to our little girl. Maybe you’ll see her at the reception - she shines. I took the only path to see you along Tiburon Blvd where some of the most well meaning and resourceful people in town can’t seem to change daily driving habits to fix the traffic problem.

So it is in most towns. How do we sacrifice a lot to save the planet if we can’t even sacrifice a little?

The Union of concerned scientists just forecasted that nearly 4,400 homes in Marin County will be underwater in less than 30 years because of sea level rise so we’ll have to do something. My generation, yours, we will have to do something. For now, I keep searching for ideas like taking our daughter to school on an electric tandem bike. We count the idling cars we pass in traffic. It’s something.

We named our daughter after Emerson who wrote “do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail"

Your degrees today, your work to come are the means to leave a trail. Your family is another. I will look for you in this church in the years to come as you build and find your happiness.

Thank you USF and Go Dons!

Barbara Walters: 'Your bliss will find you', Yale Class Day - 2012

20 May 2012, Yale, Connecticut, USA

You look absolutely marvellous. What a sight. Good afternoon. Congratulations to this wonderful class of 2012. Exuberant graduates, relieved parents, loving friends and exhausted professors. I am really so honoured that you've given me the privilege to address me in what is so a special a day for you and special to me as well. My hats off to you. I want to tell you first about this hat. When I arrived I was greeted by a most wonderful and welcoming lady master Pamela Laurens and who said to me, "Would you like to go upstairs and wash up?" I said, "I don't think I need to." She said, looking at me, "Yes, you're right. You already are washed up." Where is Pamela? Anyway, she made up for it. This is her hat. As you heard a few years ago I wrote my memoir. It was called audition. To me life has been a continuous audition.

While writing the book I had to do some research on my family including my paternal grandmother Lilly whom I had never met. She was evidently a very elegant and fastidious woman. On her deathbed she turned to her seven children and told them that she was a virgin. They said, "Well, how is that possible. We are here three sons and four daughters. You must have done something with grandpa." She said, "Yes, I did but I never participated." When I was asked if I would come here today if I would talk with you I said to myself, "These kids are smarter than I am. These kids are younger than I am. They are better educated, but by God I am going to participate." It's a daunting task, because I'm used to talking every day on television, usually with four other women who interrupt me all the time. Today it's a great joy to be able to speak uninterrupted. I was trying to think of what I could tell you that's going to make the least bit of difference in your lives, even 10 minutes from now.

When I went to college I went to a very small college called Sarah Lawrence, back in the middle ages. I had a professor who became very well known. His name was Joseph Campbell and he exhorted us all to follow our bliss. Do what you love, follow your bliss and you will truly be successful. It was great advice, except when I graduated from college I hadn't a clue what I really loved. I had no bliss to follow. When I look at all of you today I think many of you do know what your bliss is. Graduate school, or medicine or law or biology, ecology, sociology. How about none of the above? How many of you in this graduating class truly know what your bliss is? Raise your hands. Isn't that interesting. Not that great a number. How many of you do not know what your bliss is? Raise your hands. Don't be afraid. Most of us don't. I didn't find my bliss until I was in my 30s and then by luck. That's another story.

When you walk out of here and everybody, every friend, every family member says, "What are you going to do? What are you going to do?" Just tell them you haven't yet found your bliss. I did finally find my bliss and I have had a professionally blessed life. As you learned I've interviewed every US president and first lady since Abraham Lincoln. The terrible thing is, is that there are some of you out there who really believe that. It's really been since Richard Nixon. I have interviewed world leaders from Fidel Castro to Vladimir Putin and this past December Syria's Bashar Assad. I should know something about leadership and some message that I could give you. I decided that what I could offer you most today is the wisdom and the stories of some of the most thoughtful people that I have been fortunate enough to talk with over the years. I think their words, rather than just mine, may help to answer your own questions and your own quest for bliss.

Much of what I will talk to you about has to do with choices and much of what you will be facing tomorrow and in the years ahead are choices. Let's start at the top with President Barack Obama, as it happens, as you heard, I interviewed him on the view just this past Tuesday. I asked privately if he had followed his bliss. He said yes. He became a community organiser. Then I asked what jobs does he think are available during these tough economic times. He said the best jobs right now are in science and engineering. If that is your bliss you are fortunate. You will be among the few with a job open for you. In the newer interview I asked the president what, as a young man, he thought he would be doing.

This is what he answered; "I had a bunch of different schemes. For a while I thought I might end up being an architect. I like the idea of building buildings. I didn't know what happened to that. I still really admire architects and I love looking at buildings. Then for a while I thought that I might be a basketball player until I realised that I wasn't good enough to be a professional basketball player. I thought I might be a judge, but then I decided after going to law school that I was probably a little too restless to sit on the bench all day long. The one thing I know I didn't expect was that I was going to be president of the United States." I said, "Well, when you've named all the things you couldn't be, the only thing left is to be president. Isn't it?" He said, "Yeah, I guess if you've got to find some use for yourself this isn't a bad way of doing it."

From president to a woman who wanted to be president, one day she still may be, and that is our secretary of state, Hillary Clinton; One of the most admired women in the world and her personal story is very much about choices. At one point in her history she had one of the biggest choices a person could make. A president's fall from grace, a marriage in shambles, a nation embraced. This from an interview with Hillary Clinton in 2005; "You're life has been about taking chances and making choices Mrs. Clinton. What is the biggest choice that you had to make?"

She said, "Staying married to my husband. I'm often asked why Bill and I stayed together. All I know is that nobody understands me better. No one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years he is still the most interesting, energising and fully alive person I have ever met. Everyone has a choice every single day about how to live your life. I know that many people looking at my life would say, 'Oh my goodness. How tough.' I look at it differently. I look at the lessons that I've learned, the opportunities that I've had." I ask, "What's the most important lesson you learned?"

She said that life is a gift and that we learn as we go and that love and hope and faith are truly the most important gifts that we can have and that we can give to one another and that when something difficult happens you have to decide what's important to you, what your priorities are. You have to listen hard to your own heart. There are always going to be people who have different ideas about decisions and choices that you should make, but ultimately we are born alone, we die alone and the life we make, the journey we take is really up to us. From Hillary Clinton to the Dalai Lama. He's one of my all time favourite leaders. A man without a country, a man regarded by many as a God who calls himself a teacher and was given his title when he was two years old, the exiled Dalai Lama of Tibet. I went to talk with him and Dharamsala in India. As you know he's been exiled from Tibet.

I went because we were doing a two hour special called Heaven; Where Is It And How Do We Get There? I talked to a great many religious leaders from the different faiths. Most said the purpose of life is to go to heaven or to paradise. The Dalai Lama, when I asked, said, "The purpose of life is to be happy. How do you get to be happy? Through compassion and warmheartedness. You achieve those qualities in part by abandoning all negative thoughts and feelings of competition." For about three days after the interview I practised what the Dalai Lama had taught me. I practised compassion. I was extremely warm hearted. I was not jealous. I had no negative thinking. I smiled a lot. I was so warmhearted and I was exceedingly boring. In truth, the Dalai Lama did give me a lot to aspire to. His was not a lesson lost. Compassion and warmheartedness. So simple and so hard to do. I've tried to practise both.

While I'm speaking of compassion I want to say a few words to this graduating class about friendship. Look around. Look at the people next to you, the people behind you. The people you say may be the most important take away of your years here. The friends that you have made here at Yale may be the best experience you could have. They will continue to be a part of your life long after you may, heaven forbid, forget the name of your professor and even whatever he taught you. I have little family. I have one daughter. My friends are my family and your friends have been the steady part of your growing experience here at Yale. Treasure them. Make the effort to stay in touch with them beyond Facebook. Treat them with compassion and warm heartedness. Do not lose your friends from your life.

Well, I want to talk now about having it all. Men and women today are faced with choices that a of your parents and grandparents didn't have that is you want to have a private life that's important as well as a career. You want to be involved with your children. You don't want to leave it up to daddy or leave it up to parents. How do you have it all? There are still choices that you will make. One of the greatest problems you will face and one of the greatest joys and perhaps triumphs is balancing this life. The career, the relationship, whatever it may be, the children. I thought what I would do, really because I just love it and it's fun, to tell you about Katharine Hepburn. Do you know who she is? Good. Well, some of you are saying, "Who? Which? What?" She was a great actress. She died in 2003 at the age of 96 and she was a beloved icon, in part because she was so definite about everything. She talked like this and she was very definite.

I remember coming back from the Middle East and we were talking about something. She said, "I see things in black and white. Don't you?" I said, "I've just gotten back from the Middle East. I'm afraid I see things in shades of grey." She said, "Well, I pity you." I talked with her. She had married once very young. Never married again and had a long affair with the actor Spencer Tracy. She had a great career. She never had children and she did not have a great marriage. I said, "Can you have a career and a marriage and children?" She said, "You couldn't when I started. At least you couldn't have a marriage that would please me because the ladies are going to have to be careful that they don't all marry morons." I said, "Why?"

She said, "Well, because they don't deliver the goods as wives. We're very confused. Sexually very confused. Look at the birds and the beast and the male and the female. There are very definite types. We're getting awfully confused. I put on pants 50 years ago and declared a middle road, but I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man." I said, "How so?" She said, "Well, I've just done what I damn well wanted to and I made enough money to support myself and I ain't afraid of being alone." I said, "Is it so hard to have it all? The marriage, the children, the career? I think myself it's very tough. Much of my life has been a balancing act."

She said, "It's impossible. If I were a man I would not marry a woman with a career and I would torture myself as a mother. Suppose little Johnny or little Katie had the mumps and I had an opening night? I'd want to strangle the children. I would really want to strangle the children. I'd be thinking to myself I've got to get into the mood. What's the matter with him. Then out of my way." You see? I said, "If you were a man you would not marry a woman with a career?" She said, "I wouldn't be that big a fool. I'd want her to be interested in me, not a career. A career is fascinating. I don't know what the hell the women are going to do, or the men, so welcome to the life of choices." Then my favourite part of the interview did not have to do with choices.

I said to her, "Do you remember the last time we talked? I did something that I have regretted ever since. We were talking about your getting on and you said, which people don't remember, you said, 'I'm like an old tree.' I said, 'What kind of a tree?' You said, 'I'm like an oak tree.' I said, 'Right, everybody forgets that you said you were like a tree.' On my obituary it's going to say she asked people what kind of tree they want to be. Why did she ask that wonderful Katharine Hepburn what kind of a tree, right?'"

She said, "I wonder what kind of a tree people are all the time. Don't you?" Do you ever wonder what kind of a tree your best friend is?" "Well," she said, "You didn't mean that question? I look out and I know I'm not that damn sycamore in the backyard that drops his branches and is liable to kill people. I'm not a silly piddling little tree. I am a wonderful oak tree. I saw one this big around in the woods. A while oak with branches that go right through the wall. Great like that." Symbolic. That's okay.

Speaker 2: I'll take it off.

Barbara Walters: You'll take it off. We were talking earlier when I was having lunch with some of you about Margaret Thatcher. I didn't write down her interview because I didn't know how many of you would remember her, but then I realised that there was a movie, The Iron Lady. What I learned from Margaret Thatcher was how to live with failure. She had been the first female prime minister, the longest raining prime minister. Then her own party kicked her out. I interviewed her right after she was no longer prime minister. She was in a very depressed stage. She said, "The telephone rings and I think I must answer it and I must go back to Downing Street and then I realise that isn't me." She said it is so important, and you're so young now, and you're just beginning, but you will, I hope not, but you will perhaps have some failure. You will be able to go on, add a new chapter, have a more interesting time even. When I went to ABC to be the first female co-anchor of a network news programme I was a total flop.

The headlines in the paper said, "Barbara Walters, a flop." I was in anguish, but the best thing that happened to me was that I had to work my way back. That's when I did all the interviews that we've talked about. If you have a failure you will rise. You will be fine. You will work your way back. Do not sink into why me, woes me. It's not my fault. To give you an example of that I want to read to you the words of a man named Christopher Reeve. I'm reading this to you because life, sometimes, brings enormous difficulties and challenges that seem just too hard to bear, but bear them you can and bear them you will. Your life can have a purpose. Christopher Reeve's life did. Let me remind you of who he was. He was a fine actor. He was famous for playing Superman in films and he was superb athlete. He sailed, he skiied. Most of all he was a great horseman until 1995 when his horse failed to jump over a hurdle in a riding competition.

The horse fell, he fell with it. He found himself completely paralysed from the neck down, this man who had been this adventurer and actor and athlete. His wife came into him and she said, "Chris, if you want us we will find the way to pull the plug." He was lying in bed with the tubes, completely immobile. She said, "Remember, you are still you." Which had two connotations. You are still you and you are still you. She left the room and a doctor came in, in a white coat with a heavy accent. The doctor said, "I'm a proctologist. Turn over." Reeve looked at this doctor as if he were insane. The doctor said, "I told you. I told you. Turn over." As he was about to try to find some way of getting a nurse, or someone instead of this crazy doctor, he looked up and he realised it was Robin Williams. He had gone to Julliard with Robin Williams and he burst out laughing.

He said, "If I can laugh I can live." These are the words of Christopher Reeve. "You gradually discover, as I'm discovering, that your body is not you. The mind and the spirit must take over. That's the challenge as you move from obsessing about why me and it's not fair and when will I move again, and move into well, what is the potential. Now I see opportunities and potential I wasn't capable of seeing. Every moment is more intense and valuable then it ever was. I've received over 100,000 letters from all over the world. It makes you wonder why do we need disasters to really feel and appreciate each other? I'm overwhelmed by people's support of me. If I can help people understand that this can happen to anybody that's worth it right there, so I really think being in a journey." I said, "Do you think you will walk again?" He said, "I think it's very possible that I will walk again." "And if you don't?"

"Then I won't walk again. As simple as that. Either you do or you don't. It's like a game of cards," he said. "If you think the game is worthwhile then you just play the hand you're dealt. Sometimes you get a lot of face cards and sometimes you don't. I think the game is worthwhile. I really do." He got to the point, after years of doing exercise and experiments where he could breath without a respirator in this throat. For the first time, because he didn't have the tube in his throat, he could smell a rose or taste coffee. That was an enormous accomplishment. He had some feeling in his chest. When I hugged him, the last time I saw him, he could feel the pressure. He could feel the hug. He made a good life, Christopher Reeve did, with his wife Dana and their three children. He lectured, directed films, raised millions of dollars and the consciousness of scientists to promote research into stem cells hoping that he would be able to cure the thousands of people suffering from spinal cord injury.

His life, though very hard, had meaning and purpose. His death in October of 2004 was a great loss. What have I tried to say to you as you enter this brand new chapter of your life and what I hope is going to be a long and fulfilling life with a lot of different hats that you'll be wearing? Don't worry about finding your bliss right now. Not even our president knew what his bliss was, nor did I. One of these days, to your own surprise, your bliss will find you.

No matter what you do don't be like my grandma Lilly. Participate. Be there full force, full heart, full steam ahead. In making choices when in doubt trust your gut. Does this feel right? Does this feel good? Remember the decision is ultimately yours alone to make. Remember this today when you're talking with parents, friends, grandparents. The decision is ultimately yours alone to make. When jealous, angry or afraid try compassion and warmheartedness. Nourish your friends and finally whatever hand you are dealt I hope you will find the game worthwhile. I do. Rarely have I been happier with the hand that I have been dealt then I am today with the honour and pleasure of meeting you. I thank you and I hope that your life will be like a great white oak. I thank you.

Bill Gates: 'How can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have', Harvard University -2007

7 June 2007, Harvard, Massachussets, USA

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.”

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.

Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don’t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.

What for?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.