Jill Abramson: 'Get on with your knitting', Wake Forest - 2014

19 May 2014, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA

In the days before, Jill Abramson was sacked as editor of the New York Times. She refused to describe it as a resignation. This became a focus for her speech.

I think the only real news here today is your graduation from this great university. First of all, congratulations. I’m impressed that your achievements have attracted so much media attention. As well they should.

I’m so happy to be here to share this important day. My own college graduation is still a thrilling memory. In fact, I had breakfast this morning with one of my college classmates, Barclay Rives, now a proud parent of graduate sitting out here. One of my favorite family photos is of my busting-with-pride father at Harvard. A college dropout, he never got to wear his own cap and gown. So he crammed his 6-foot self into mine. He looked silly but radiant. I hope all of you in the Class of 2014 are lucky enough to have at least one parent or someone who helped raise you here today. A shout-out to all the parents, grandparents and others in the audience. My own children are recent college grads, so I know how full your hearts are today because your kids have worked so hard and achieved so much.

President Hatch suggested that I speak to you today about resilience, and I’m going to take his wise counsel. But I’m not quite finished with the parents part.

Very early last Thursday, my sister called me and she said, ‘I know dad would be as proud of you today as he was the day you became executive editor of the New York Times. I had been fired the previous day, so I knew what she was trying to say. It meant more to our father to see us deal with a setback and try to bounce back than to watch how we handled our successes. “Show what you are made of,” he would say.

Graduating from Wake Forest means you have experienced success already. And some of you – and now I’m talking to anyone who has been dumped – have not gotten the job you really wanted or have received those horrible rejection letters from grad school. You know the disappointment of losing or not getting something you badly want. When that happens, show what you are made of.

I was in China recently, and some of you know the New York Times website has been blocked by censors there for more than a year. That means in China that citizens cannot read the most authoritative coverage of their country. Every time I reflexively tried to open the New York Times website, I got the message that said, “Safari cannot open the page,” which made me become more and more furious.

While I was I Beijing, one of our Chinese journalists, Patrick Song, was detained for hours by authorities. The government meant to scare and intimidate him. Why was he detained? Simply because he worked as a truthful journalist. So what did he do? He came right back to work and quietly got on with things. “I did what I believe, and that makes me fearless,” Patrick told me after his ordeal.

You know, New York Times journalists risk their lives frequently to bring you the best report in the world. That’s why it is such an important and irreplaceable institution. And it was the honor of my life to lead the newsroom.

A couple of students I was talking to last night after I arrived, they know that I have some tattoos. One of them asked me, “Are you gonna get that Times ‘T’ that you have tattooed on your back removed?” Not a chance.

I faced a little challenge of my own not long ago. I got run over and almost killed by a truck in Times Square. You may begin to call me Calamity Jill, but stay with me here. But with the seventh anniversary of that accident approaching, I wrote an article about the risk to pedestrians with three Times colleagues who had also been struck and hurt. We mentioned a 9-year-old boy in the top of our story who had been hit and killed by a cab early in the year. A few days after the story was published, I got an email from Dana Lerner. It began, “Thank you for the article you wrote in last Sunday’s Times. The boy you mentioned was my son, Cooper Stock.” I met with Dana last Thursday and, you know, Cooper was just killed in January, but Dana, her husband and others are already working on a new law to make the streets safer. She is taking an unimaginable loss and already trying to do something constructive.

We human beings are a lot more resilient than we often realize. Resilient and perseverant. And there are so many examples of this. For me professionally, my heroes are Nan Robertson, a ground-breaking reporter at the New York Times, and Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, which broke the Watergate story. They both faced discrimination in a much tougher, more male-dominated newspaper industry and they went on to win Pulitzer Prizes.

My colleague Jim Risen, who is standing up against an unfair Washington leak investigation, is another hero.

I co-authored a book about Anita Hill, who testified about sexual harassment before an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s. The Senators portrayed her as being – as one of her detractors so delicately put it – “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” She turned that potential humiliation into a great career teaching at Brandeis University and writing books that tell truth to power. Anita was one of the many people who wrote me last week to say they are proud of me. Those messages are so appreciated.

Some of you have faced danger or even a soul-scorching loss, but most of you haven’t. And leaving the protective cocoon of school for the working world must seem scary. You will have a dozen different jobs and will try different things. Sure, losing a job you love hurts, but the work I revere, journalism that holds powerful institutions and people accountable, is what makes our democracy so resilient. And this is the work I will remain very much a part of.

My only reluctance in showing up today was that the small media circus following me would detract attention away from you, the fabulous Class of 2014. What total knockouts you are.

What’s next for me? I don’t know. So I’m in exactly the same boat as many of you. And like you, I’m a little scared but also excited. You know, I don’t really think Coach Manning could find as much use much use for me, but right after this speech, I have booked a private session with Andy Chan, whose career-counseling operation is a model for universities around the world.

When I was leaving my office for the last time, I grabbed a book off my shelf, Robert Frost Speaking on Campus. In closing, I’m going to leave you with some wisdom from the Colby College commencement speech the great poet gave in 1956. He described life after graduating as piece of knitting to go on with. What he meant is that life is always unfinished business, like the bits of knitting women used to carry around with them, to be picked up in different intervals. And for those of you who have never knitted, think of it as akin to your Tumblr: something you can pick up from time to time. My mother was a great knitter and she made some really magnificent things. But she also made a few itchy and frankly hideous sweaters for me. She left some things unfinished. So today you gorgeous, brilliant people, get on with your knitting.

Anna Quindlen: 'I’m afraid of living a life that seems more like a resume than an adventure story', Washington University - 2017

19 May 2017, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri, USA

Thank you, Chancellor Wrighton, and thank you so much for the profound honor of addressing the Washington University community on this very special day.

Commencement speeches are very difficult to craft, even in a year when the country doesn’t seem to be going through a nervous breakdown. After all, no one is here to hear me. Everyone is here for the sake of just a few words; the name of someone they love, or their own name. It’s almost the only thing I remember from my own commencement, even though the legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead was the commencement speaker. I don’t even remember the weather, although you probably won’t forget yours. I remember these three words:  “Anna Marie Quindlen,” and the look on my father’s face.

But it’s particularly hard to craft a message for people like you. Because you’re receiving a degree today from Washington University, I know this about all of you: You are what my grandmother used to call “The smart ones.” The children of the 99th percentile, the men and women of the top decile, accustomed to high test scores and high hopes. You are the people who make the checklists, who come up with plans, who are invested always in the right answer.

I know this, because I am one of you. And this is what I’ve learned, often with great difficulty: The checklist should be honored mostly in the breach. The plans are a tiny box that, followed slavishly, will smother you, and the right answer is sometimes the wrong answer.

What are the public names you recall sitting there of those people who did exactly what was considered the right thing, who followed the template, who met expectations? You cannot come up with one of them, because the people we know, the people we admire, the people whose names we carve into the cornices of buildings and see on the cover of books are deviants in the best sense of that term.

Jane Austen threw out the plan for a well‑read regency‑era woman. Frank Lloyd Wright threw out the plan for a young architect of his time. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Enrico Fermi, Lin‑Manuel Miranda, Martin Luther King, Marie Curie, Pablo Picasso, Toni Morrison, they all threw out the plan. The right answer was safe; the wrong answer, the one no one else came up with or followed or believed in, was transformational.

Ah, you say to yourself sitting there, “I cannot expect to be Jane Austen or Frank Lloyd Wright,” but what you can embrace is a life that feels like it belongs to you, not one made up of tiny fragments of the expectations of a society that, frankly, in most of its expectations, is not worthy of you. And that requires courage, not compliance; passion in lieu of simply plans.

Smart is good. Smart and hardworking is really good. Smart, hardworking and fearless, that’s the hat trick. You possess an invaluable credential that will soon be ratified here, but are you strong and smart enough to become who you might be were you not afraid? That’s the problem, isn’t it?

We slavishly seek what is correct because we are afraid. Caution is nothing but fear dressed up as common sense. Coloring books have come back into vogue for adults because there’s nothing quite so soothing as coloring inside the lines.

“The Road Less Traveled,” popular poem, unpopular life choice. The well‑trod road is so much safer.  But I tell you absolutely that the most terrifying choices I made in my life and the ones that other people saw as most foolhardy are the ones that brought greatest rewards. Because of some strange little voice inside, I zigged where I was expected to zag. I traded more good jobs than most people had ever had for new roles I thought were even scarier and chancier and potentially more rewarding. I took the ultimate flying leap in life and had three children in five years while my career was at its very peak.

Five years in, I left the op‑ed page of The New York Times to become a full‑time novelist. The publisher told me that I was the first person to willingly give up a Times column. Someone wrote that my decision showed that women are afraid of success. But I’m not afraid of success. I’m afraid of living a life that seems more like a resume than an adventure story, that doesn’t feel as though it belongs to me, a life full of dreams deferred until they evaporate entirely with the call of custom.

None of you want to have that sort of life, so you can’t let fear rule you. For your own sake and for the sake of this great nation, fear is what has poisoned our culture, our community and our character. The very worst things in this country are done out of fear. Homophobia, sexism, racism, religious bigotry, xenophobia, the embrace of demagogues, they all arise out of fear of that which is unknown or different.

Our political leaders don’t actually lead when they are afraid of being thrown out of office. Our corporations resist real innovation because they’re afraid of taking a chance.

In my former business, the news business, which I was proud and continue to be proud to call home, fear is the greatest of enemies. Without fear or favor, the business has to provide readers, listeners and viewers with searching stories, even if those are stories the powerful do not want you to hear or believe and do not want us to publish or disseminate, even if they are stories that offend and rage and distress the very readers we are bound to inform.

What is the point of free speech if we are always afraid to speak freely or if we embrace an echo chamber?

If we embrace an echo chamber in which liberals talk only to other liberals and conservatives only to other conservatives, and moderates feel as though no one is talking to them, as an opinion columnist nothing was more important to me before I wrote on any issue than to listen to those people who were in opposition to my position.

You cannot marshal a cogent argument without knowing the counterpoint. Yet, too often we fall silent, becoming our own censors out of fear. If we fail to allow the unpopular or even the unacceptable to be heard because of some sense of plain vanilla civility, it’s not civility at all. It is a denigration of the human capacity for thought, the suggestion that we are incapable of disagreement, argument or intellectual combat. It is the denial of everything this university stands for.

We parents sitting out there have known fear on your behalf. Make no mistake. We grew up with a simple equation. Our children would do better than we had. In my father’s Irish Catholic household, it was a simple equation. Ditch digger to cop to lawyer to judge in four generations. My mother’s Italian immigrant parents barely spoke English. Their granddaughter is a novelist. That’s the American story.

Many of my generation fear that doing better is not in the cards for you. We feel chagrined that you won’t inherit the SUV, the McMansion, the corner office, that you won’t do better than we did, but you are going to define what doing better means and do it better than we did. Because if you are people who see race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity as attributes not stereotypes, you will have done better than us.

If those of you who are male recognize in every way that those of us who are female are capable, equal and human and live that in the way you behave every day, you will have done better than us.

And on a more personal level, if you as a group ditch what has somehow become the 80‑hour work week and return us to a sane investment in our personal and professional lives, you will have done better than us.

Those of us of my generation have worked hard to pass on a better world, but we sometimes made a grave mistake in thinking that doing better was mathematical when it’s actually spiritual. Perhaps my favorite quote and the one I evoke most often is from the great writer Henry James. “Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”

If you follow those words in public service and private life, you will have done better, because we have today a world with too much of the kindness leached out of it, that is too often mean‑spirited, that seems to have lost track of the most valuable verse from the New Testament, the one about loving your neighbor.  Perhaps that’s because we’ve forgotten how to be kind to ourselves.

The right answer about how we should be, how we should behave is today so often a punitive one. We should be thinner, richer, slicker, surer, we should be tougher, harder. That’s all nonsense. I can assure you that when I look back over my life, “thin” and “rich” will be two of the last things I really care about.

Loving kindness, as Buddhism calls it, that’s what matters. That’s what lasts. That, and giving up on the right answer. In my line of work, the honorable creative failure is infinitely more important and more useful than the careful, little, connect‑the‑dots paragraph.  You have to have the courage to frighten yourself with what you attempt, whether it is a start‑up or a family, a novel or a marriage.

You’re lucky people, all of you. Most Americans will never get the kind of education you’ve earned here. In a culture in which knowledge seems to be moving at the speed of sound, the one thing that’s never obsolete is a world‑class university education.

In a recent interview, the CEO of Logitech said he loves hiring English majors. And I don’t just mention that because I was an English major. Critical thinking is a skill that never goes out of style, but being the lucky ones confers great responsibility and even a moral obligation. It is to model a particular kind of life, a life of audacity. America is greatest when it is audacious.

Never forget that this is a nation built on non‑compliance, begun with righteous resistance against the despotism of the privileged class. It is called the American Revolution, not the American Compromise. It is audacious to come here from another country without language or means and add to the fabric of this polyglot place.

It is audacious to send your child off to college when no one in your family has ever been before.

It is audacious to work to overturn laws and customs that for centuries have held fellow citizens as less than.

It is audacious to invent and it is audacious to dare and it is audacious to care and to live that caring conspicuously. Playing it safe is a slog. Taking a chance is getting on a skateboard.  When you come up with a checklist — job, check; spouse, check; home, check — don’t forget to ask yourself, “Are these the things I really want or is each of them what I assume I ought to want?” The difference between those two is the difference between a life and an existence.

T. S. Eliot, “Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” George Eliot, or as it’s now safe to call her, Mary Anne Evans, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  It is never too early, either.

The status quo, business as usual, the way things have always been done, even, if you will, the right answer has failed us in nearly every area of life. Fear of setting a foot wrong, of criticism and judgment and even failure is unworthy of people like you.

The voice you should sometimes heed is the one that tells you you can’t, you shouldn’t, it’s too much, it’s too chancy. Don’t heed the fear. The fear a young English woman in a parsonage more than 200 years ago refused to acknowledge when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice.” The fear a neophyte architect refused to let steer his vision as he created uncommon buildings.

When I send a gift to a newborn, I always include the message, “Welcome to the world.”  Today I offer you a variation:  “Welcome to my world.”  It’s a world of achievers, planners, list makers, but it is greatest when it is the world that says, “Be brave. Take the leap. Do it.  Dare it. Courage.”

Congratulations.

Anna Quindlen has delivered many great commencements. Perhaps her most famous is Villanova in 2000, also on Speakola. She was our guest on episode 9 of the podcast.