Arianna Huffington: 'Don't be so connected to everybody that you're not truly connected to anybody', Vassar College - 2015

November 18, 2015

Video embedded here

1 June 2015, Vassar College, Hudson Valley, New York, USA

Thank you so much, President Hill, Members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished alumni, members of the faculty, devoted parents and friends, and especially the fabulous Vassar College Class of 2015. I am deeply grateful to have been invited to be part of such a special moment in your lives. Commencement is one of my favorite rituals -- coming together for one last time, dressed alike before you head off into your singular and unique lives. When I was deciding what to wear under my gown, I asked Siri what the weather was in Poughkeepsie. And Siri responded with a list of mixed drinks with whiskey. I think I'm going to wait until Siri comes up with an update for Greek accents.

Today is the culmination of your time at Vassar. And it's also a mini-culmination for me. Because I've spent a lot of time in recent weeks getting to know you -- following you and your activities on social media, on Vassar's website, in The Miscellany News, and in other ways I'm not prepared to disclose that will remain between me and the folks at the NSA. It feels a little like I've been checking out your online dating profile, and now we're finally meeting. And when I saw you walk in, all 611 of you, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Because let's face it, you look fantastic. If we were on Tinder, I would definitely be ready to swipe right. Or is it left? Actually, at my age, it doesn't matter, as long as you're swiping.

One of the things I learned from my cyber-stalking is that the Vassar College seal shows the goddess Athena in front of the Parthenon, which I love. Though it occurs to me that I'm probably here because Athena couldn't be booked, so you settled for another Greek lady from Athens. And to really sell it, I'll be delivering my speech in a thick, sometimes- hard-to-understand Greek accent, instead of the crystal clear, accentless voice I use at all other times. In my private detective work, I also learned that your former motto "purity and wisdom" was abandoned in 1930, which was probably a good idea given that when The Miscellany News -- or the Misc as I understand you call it -- sent out an email to seniors asking what was on their bucket list, most of the answers had to do with sex. One replied, "Have sex under the sex tree!" Another said, "Have sex in the circle couches near the Art Library." A third wrote back, "Sex in the meditation room or the roof of the library." Aren't you glad I'm not disclosing your names in front of your parents? You owe me!

What was clear from all my private detective work is that you belong to a community. And for the rest of your lives, you'll essentially have a language you speak that no one else understands...sort of a more fun version of how I've been feeling my whole life. Chili Wednesdays at The Retreat. The Bell Ringing. Founder's Day. Mug Nights. A Quidditch team, The Butterbeer Brooers. The Deece. Running naked through the library the night before final exams. The Vassar Devil, which I understand to be some sort of ice cream sensation I'm definitely planning to sample before I leave. The a cappella groups -- all 3,475 of them.

And what a treasure trove of stories you're leaving Vassar with. Not just from your years here but from Vassar's incredibly colorful past: Way back in the 1880s, you invented fudge -- maybe. Some of you actually believe that the squirrels around campus are the slightly deranged reincarnations of English majors who couldn't get jobs after graduation. But, hey, at least the squirrels aren't living at home, right mom and dad? And here is my favorite: before your time, Vassar students were given the emblem of an acorn to display on their doors when they did not wish to be disturbed. The custom was apparently discontinued, but I want to urge you to revive it as something to use physically and spiritually for the rest of your lives. It's actually central to the three relationships I want to talk to you about today. And those are: your relationship with technology, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with the world.

Let's start with your relationship with technology. No generation has been as liberated and as connected by technology as yours. But also, no generation has been as enslaved and as distracted by technology. So bring on that acorn because as the writer Eric Barker said, "Those who can sit in a chair, undistracted for hours, mastering subjects and creating things will rule the world -- while the rest of us frantically and futilely try to keep up with texts, tweets and other incessant interruptions." Sadly, we have become not just distracted by our devices, our texts, emails, constant notifications, and social media, but addicted to them. And when it comes to social media, let me break it to you: our addiction is not a bug, but a feature. This isn't some unforeseen side effect, it was always the intention, that social media would consume as much of our time and attention -- as much of our lives -- as possible.

To your credit, many of you have already recognized this and have taken steps to curb this addiction. As senior Justin Mitchell told the Misc, "I was mindlessly going through people's profiles and being an idiot. So I cut it out. There's just not enough time to do that with school." And having graduated just a few years before you, I can tell you there is even less time to do that with life.

But the addiction is so powerful that, according to a recent survey, 20 percent of millennials actually use their smartphones during sex. Maybe I should have read the instructions on my phone more carefully, but I'm not even sure what that means. Indeed, a recent study shows that more than half of women would rather go a month with no sex than a month with no smartphone -- although I am sure this survey did not include any women with access to the Vassar Sex Tree.

Contrary to what many of you may think, not only is multitasking not very efficient, it doesn't actually exist. It's actually rapid task switching -- instead of doing two things at once, we simply switch between doing two things badly. It's one of the most stressful ways we can use our time, and it robs us of our capacity to notice and appreciate every moment of our lives. I live in New York, and you hardly ever see anybody simply walking down the street who's not also staring at a screen, talking on the phone, or, even worse, texting while walking. It's like being in a really boring zombie movie. I used to be exactly like that myself. I remember one day, I left my apartment with a friend. I looked up and said, "What a gorgeous building! I wonder when that went up?" "1890" my friend said. I'd never noticed it. As Vassar alum Mary Oliver put it, "Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be Astonished. Tell about it." And by the way, when you do, please tell about it on The Huffington Post. I'm going to make it super easy for you by giving you my email so you can bypass the growing HuffPost blogging bureaucracy: arianna@huffingtonpost.com.

As someone who runs a 24/7 digital media company and who uses every form of social media ever invented, I hope I have some street cred when I urge you to build boundaries, introduce digital detoxes into your life, and learn to regularly disconnect from the jumble and the cacophony and make time to reconnect with yourself. There will be many profound and fulfilling relationships ahead of you, but the relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you'll ever have. And, like any relationship, it can't be taken for granted -- without care and attention, it will atrophy and, ultimately, break down.

If there is one thing I wish I knew when I was sitting where you are today -- and by the way, there are many -- it's that the Delphic admonition "Know Thyself" and Socrates' admonition that "the unexamined life is not worth living" are not ancient philosophical platitudes, but in fact the most relevant and important guiding truths for our lives. In the well-earned rush and excitement of your new life that's about to begin, it's remarkably easy to forget that most important relationship. That's because the ever-increasing creep of technology -- into our bedrooms, our brains, and our lives -- makes it much harder to connect with ourselves.

Indeed, for so many of us, connecting with ourselves has been so neglected that we will do anything to avoid it. Researchers from Harvard and the University of Virginia did an experiment in which they gave people a choice to be alone in a room, without anything -- no devices, no papers, no phones -- or get an electric shock. A whopping 67 percent of men chose the electric shock. I'm very happy to say that only 25 percent of women chose the shock. Seriously guys -- and a quarter of women -- what is wrong with you? It's not like you have to go shopping with your own thoughts or move in with them and pick out drapes, just be alone with them for fifteen minutes. Is it that bad?

In fact most of us actually know more about the state of our smartphones than we do about the state of ourselves. I bet pretty much everyone here knows approximately how much battery remains in your smartphone right now. And when it gets below 20%, giving us the dreaded red low power alert, we begin to get anxious and desperately look around for one of the little recharging shrines we meticulously maintain everywhere around us, lest anything should happen to our precious phone. But how much do you know, how aware are you, how mindful are you, of the state of your own being? Of your own energy and alertness and reserves? How quickly do you spring into action when you go into the low power zone?

I was fascinated to read about Vassar's Maria Mitchell, America's first female astronomer, and to see the gorgeous building that used to house her observatory. And while I completely understand the sense of wonder that has led men and women through the ages to explore outer space, I'm personally much more fascinated with exploring inner space. As Thomas Merton put it, "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous." In other words, it's the quality of our inner journeys that allows us to make sense of our outer journeys.

There is now a collective longing to stop living in the shallows and recognize that life is actually shaped from the inside out -- a truth that has been celebrated by spiritual teachers, poets and philosophers throughout the ages and has now been unambiguously validated by modern science. And you, Vassar graduates, can lead the way, and chart a new path forward. You're the first generation born into the digital world. And you can be the first generation to master it, to make it serve you, instead of the other way around. And when you do, you'll find that you have the wind at your back because that's what the times are calling for.

One of the things that's so special about Vassar is that at the heart of your education is a deep and profound sense of responsibility for the world and those around us. You've been taught to use your considerable talents, and your drive and your dedication to make a difference in the world. I was moved and inspired by all the projects you've started and been involved in: The Vassar Prison Initiative, The Vassar Haiti Project, The College Committee on Sustainability, Operation Donation, etc., etc. You've already made a difference in the world you're about to enter.

And it's no accident that Vassar has recognized the crisis of growing inequality in our country. In fact, congratulations for being the number one college to enroll high-performing, low-income students and support them through successful graduation. The concern about growing inequality has become almost universal -- transcending political parties and ideologies. The statistics are staggering: Student loan debt is at 1.2 trillion dollars, the number of Americans in poverty has grown by 15 million since 2000, the number of high-poverty neighborhoods has tripled since 1970, while America is now home to more prisoners than any other country in the world, with more than 2 million people behind bars.

As we see this happening, I keep being reminded of my visit to Pompeii, whose people were wiped out in the first century by a violent volcanic eruption. There had been many warning signs, including a severe earthquake, tremors, springs and wells that dried up, dogs that ran away, and birds that no longer sang. And then the most obvious warning sign: columns of smoke belching out of Mount Vesuvius before the volcano blew its top, burying the city and its inhabitants under sixty feet of ash and volcanic rock. But the warning signs had been dismissed as "not particularly alarming." The warning signs are all around us today, too, pointing out the gulf between what we know we should be doing and what we're choosing to do instead.

It's not that we don't have enough data -- in fact, we're drowning in data. What we're lacking is wisdom. Indeed ninety percent of the data now available to us has been created in the last two years. But how much of our collective wisdom has been made available in that time? That's what's missing from our leaders and from our public discourse. Could our political debate, dominated as it is by meaningless head-to-head polls, manufactured controversies, horse-race sound-bites, and news of Hillary Clinton asking for extra guacamole at Chipotle and Ted Cruz suddenly liking country music after 9/11 -- be any more trivialized?

In fact, at The Huffington Post we've started a "Who Cares?" section to cover all these non-issues and hopefully leave more room for the real ones. And for those of you going into journalism, our goal at HuffPost is to reimagine the craft. There's an old saying in the news business, one that's guided editorial thinking for decades: "If it bleeds, it leads." But it turns out this is just lousy journalism. As journalists, our job is to provide an accurate picture -- and that means the full picture -- of what's going on in the world. Just showing tragedy, violence, and mayhem -- just focusing on what's broken and what's not working -- misses too much of what is really happening all around us. What about how people are responding to these challenges, how they're coming together, even in the midst of violence, poverty and loss? And what about all the stories of innovation, creativity, ingenuity, compassion and grace? By shining a light on these stories, we can scale up these solutions and create a positive contagion that can expand and broaden their reach. Instead of just producing copycat crimes, we can start to produce copycat solutions.

And you can be a part of those solutions. There is an invisible but very real and inescapable connection between our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with the world. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, "If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?" I know everyone here wants to help put the world to rights. But please remember, it begins with yourself... as they say on airplanes, secure your own oxygen mask first.

So regularly hang that virtual acorn on your door because while the world will provide plenty of insistent, pleading, flashing, high-volume signals directing you to distract yourself, to not be in the moment, to burn out in order to climb higher up the ladder of what the world defines as success, there will be almost no worldly signals reminding you to stay connected to the essence of who you are, to pause to wonder, and to connect to that place of wisdom in you -- that place from which everything is possible. The world will keep coming at you with its incessant demands, beeps, blinking lights, and alerts. "Every day," Iain Thomas wrote, "the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, 'This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And This! And This!' And each day, it's up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, 'No. This is what's important.'"

It's from this sacred place that life is transformed from struggle to grace, from information to wisdom. We have, if we're lucky, about 30,000 days to play the game of life. And trust me, that's not morbid. In fact, it's wisdom that will put all the inevitable failures and rejections and disappointments and heartbreaks into perspective. Because as the great Onion headline summed it up, "Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%" So let's stop sweeping it under the rug. That's a modern impulse. Ancient Romans would carve "MM," Memento Mori, Remember Death, on statues and trees -- to put every victory and every defeat into its proper perspective. I'm not sure if you want to carve it on the sex tree, though, because things could get weird.

And if you've been to a memorial service recently, you'll have noticed that our eulogies have very little to do with our resumes and our LinkedIn profiles. For instance, here's the sort of thing you don't hear in a eulogy: "George was amazing, he increased market share by one-third." Or, "her PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared." Or, "she ate lunch at her desk every single day." Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. So why do we spend so much of our lives chasing things we don't value and that don't ultimately matter?

As you leave this magical campus, don't let technology wrap you up in a perpetually harried existence. Don't be so connected to everybody that you're not truly connected to anybody. Or to yourself. And don't get so caught up in your busy life that life's mystery passes you by. Bring joy and gratitude into every moment -- even the tough ones -- and start displaying that acorn on your door. Thank you so much.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huff...

Greil Marcus: 'I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art are false', School of Visual Arts - 2013

November 18, 2015

2013 SVA Commencement Address. Transcript, highlights, and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/13/greil-marcus-sva-commencement-address/

13 May 2013, School of Visual Arts, New York, USA

Speech excerpts contained at Brain Pickings

I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called “sanctified culture,” and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but really ought to be called “everyday culture” — the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music I listen to, the movies you see, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so thrilling, so moving — I’ve always believed that these divisions are false. And, as a result of trying to make that argument over the years, I’ve also come to believe that these divisions are permanent — they can be denied, but they can never go away.

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I couldn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now, why George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips, or the comic books by anonymous artists and inkers and graphics people, were lesser art — really, why whey weren’t better art, the real art — than the pop art classic that Philip Guston and Roy Lichtenstein had made of them. Nearly everything I’ve written is based on the conviction — the experience — that there are depths and satisfactions in blues, rock & roll, detective stories, movies, television, as rich and as profound as those that can be found anywhere else. Who, really, could argue that the sense of transportation, even in the religious sense — taking of oneself out of oneself, connecting oneself to something greater, something you know in the moment, in your heart, that every person who was ever born must experience or their life is going to be poor — who can argue that that sense of transportation is not as present in The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” … as in the art most exalted in motive, most revered in history?

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What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.

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I think we all have this little theatre on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inevitably mixed. What makes each one of us unique, is the potency of the individual mix.

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That’s what art does, that’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head by something you weren’t prepared for — by a work, by a play, a song, a scene in a movie, a painting, a collage, a cartoon, an advertisement — something that has the power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person standing next to you, or even anyone else on Earth — art that produces a revelation that you might not be able to explain or pass on to anyone else, a revolution that you desperately try to share in your own words, in your own work.

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What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”

Source: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/13/g...

Judith Butler: 'What value do the humanities have?' McGill University - 2013

November 18, 2015

30 May 2013, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

I’m most honored to be here and would like to thank McGill University for conferring on me this honor. Je suis tres vraiment heureuse aujourd’hui d’etre a Montreal sur cette occasion. I come here thinking about you. Some of you are completing your education at this time, on the threshold of entering a new life or, at least, a different world. So it may well be a moment to reflect upon the importance of the kind of education you have received, and how you will bring it forward into the world you find and the world you help to make. I remember when I was in your position, I was always asked what good it would do to have majored in philosophy and to have spent all that other time studying literature. And now, most certainly, there are new voices of skepticism asking, What value do the humanities have? Are they useful? Can we measure their impact, their output, their profits?

I want to suggest to you that both of us are very lucky to have been able to take such courses, to learn to read carefully, with appreciation, and with a critical eye. To find ourselves unexpectedly in the middle of the ancient texts we read, but also to find ways of living, thinking, acting, and reflecting that belong to times and spaces we have never known. The humanities give us a chance to read across languages and cultural differences in order to understand the vast range of perspectives in and on this world. How else can we imagine living together without this ability to see beyond where we are, to find ourselves linked with others we have never directly known, and to understand that, in some abiding and urgent sense, we share a world?

Perhaps what we ourselves share today is a sense of the enduring value of careful interpretation and critical thinking, of backing up our claims with evidence, but also, perhaps, to become dislocated from our own cultural and historical perspectives only to return to them enriched by an understanding of other lives, with greater clarity and with knowledge of why and how people seek to know and make the world as they do. Ideally, we lose ourselves in what we read only to return to ourselves transformed, and part of a more expansive world. In short, we become more critical and more capacious in our thinking and in our acting.

It may not be altogether clear that studying the humanities and critical thinking has something to do with becoming a citizen, or becoming publicly engaged, or learning how best to change and to preserve this world. Yet these are precisely the immeasurable values that critical thinking brings to the university. We cannot quantify such knowledge without losing the very value that such knowledge has for us. Learning what it means to practice citizenship, and learning what it means to be without rights of citizenship, either having lost them, or never having been granted them in part or in full; learning, in other words, what it means to live in the shattered world of non-recognition, and how best to counter it, ethically, legally, and politically. As we know, an active and sensate democracy requires that we learn how to read well, not just texts, but images and sounds, to translate across languages, across forms of media, ways of performing, listening, acting, making art and theory. We have to continue to shake off what we sometimes think we know in order to lend our imaginations to vibrant and sometimes agonistic spectrums of experience: this is one part of the way toward understanding the global complexity of who we are.

This means, I think, that even as we seek to affirm ways of acting and transforming the world, we also have to affirm ways of being thoughtful, ways of reading, listening, learning: to continue learning, even as we leave the university, and to take those critical practices with us onto the street, into those spaces of work and love, and into our public lives. For as important as freedom of expression is—and it most surely is—so too it is important to know what it is we want to express, and why. And as important as freedom of assembly is—and it most surely is, as we saw so dramatically in Montreal’s student movement last year—it remains equally important to know why it is we assemble, and for what purpose. This means that even in the space of activism, there has to be time for reflection. And in the world of practical matters, there has to be a way to consider what we do, and why, and how it affects our world.

As much as the university is inevitably politicized—and we can think of many political issues: effective policies on sexual and racial harassment, funding for the study of native peoples, investment policies that damage the environment or contribute to the subjugation of others—the university is also a place where we can actually learn about gender, sexuality, the environment, race, indigeneity, economics and justice, to name but a few of those issues. I am made hopeful by the fact that you had this quite marvelous chance to take this time to learn, to question, and to discover, and that you could actually take the time to consider this world in which you live, and for which you now assume a rather awesome and exciting responsibility. You will need all those skills as you move forward, affirming this earth, our ethical obligations to live among those who are invariably different from ourselves, to demand recognition for our histories and our struggles at the same time that we lend that to others, to live our passions without causing harm to others, and to know the difference between raw prejudice and distortion, and sound critical judgment. The first steps toward non-violence, which is surely an absolute obligation we all bear, is to begin to think carefully and to ask others to do the same.

I thank you for your time, your willingness to hear, and for this great honor to be among you today on this special occasion. Je vous souhaite un avenir vivant et transformatrice. Merci bien pour votre patience. Merci.

Source: http://hours.tumblr.com/post/52701843800/j...

Mindy Kaling: 'I do know a ton about the law because I sue everyone', Harvard Law School, 2014

September 8, 2015

2014 Harvard Law School, USA

Graduates, parents, faculty, this is really such a remarkable day—obviously for you, but also for me, because after spending a life obsessing over true crime, the impossible happened: I was asked to speak at the Harvard Law commencement and accept an honorary legal degree. Yes, isn’t that the American dream? Me, Mindy Kaling—

[Kaling is interrupted, and informed that she was misinformed.]

OK, um, so apparently there was a little miscommunication. I am no longer Mindy Kaling, esquire-attorney-at-law-comedian-actress. That’s cool, I’m just supposed to stand up here and give funny remarks, and then I’m supposed to sit down… That doesn’t seem fair, but that’s OK, I’ll do that.

I know what you’re probably thinking: Mindy Kaling, why did they ask her? She’s just a pretty Hollywood starlet. What does that quadruple threat know about the law?

Sure, she seems really down to earth and pretty in a totally accessible way. And, yeah, she was on People magazine’s Most Beautiful People list this year—and also in 2008—but what intelligent remarks could she possibly make about the law? She’s probably too busy doing shampoo commercials.

But I’m not too busy. In fact, I would kill to do a shampoo commercial. So if anyone from L’Oreal is out there, please just Snapchat me after this.

But, I'll have you know, I do know a ton about the law because I sue everyone. And excuse me, there is a burger named after me at Bartley's and they have guaranteed me that it is going to be there until another tertiary member of the cast of the office get their own tv show. And they don't just name burgers after anyone. Noted chef Guy Fieri has one, noted drunk driver Justin Bieber has one, ok, so that's pretty good company, thank you.

Look, on the surface, I get that it would appear that I am an unconventional choice to speak here today. To be honest, I don't know much about the law.

I graduated in 2001 from Dartmouth College, an academic institution located in lawless rural New Hampshire, where when you arrive, you are given a flask of moonshine and a box of fireworks, and you are told simply to, quote, “Go to town”—except there is no town, there is only a forest and a row of frat houses that smell like urine.

Actually, little known fact, Dartmouth has a law school—it’s just one semester, and its coursework is entirely centered on how to beat a DUI.

But I am not here to extoll the virtues of the Dartmouth Red Bull School of Law. I'm here to talk to you. So, even though I have no idea why I was asked to speak here today, I prepared a speech very carefully the way that any good Dartmouth-educated graduate would. I drank a 40 of Jagermeister. I called my dad to see if he would get me out of it—he could not… I tried to hire a college freshman to write it for me in exchange for a $200 gift card to Newbury Comics—that didn’t work out.

Finally, seeing that I absolutely had to do this and could not get out of it, I rolled up my sleeves, sat down at my computer, and tried to buy a commencement address off of movingcommencementspeeches.com. My credit card was declined.

There are many many distinguished speakers who has spoken here. I am sharing a stage with Preet Bharara. We've all heard what a great guy he is. In 2012, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 101 most influential people in the world. Which apparently, they're just giving out.

According to Time, Bharara has battled terrorism, as evidenced by the conviction of the Times Square bomber. He has crippled international arms dealers, drug traffickers, and dealt with financial fraud. Clearly, Harvard wanted you to see the full range of what India can produce here.

Mr. Bharara fights finance criminals and terrorism. I meet handsome men in cute and unusual ways on television. And next season my character might get a pet puppy!

So, is one more important than the other? Who can say.

This group before me is bristling with ambitious young people, many of whom have already started charities and philanthropic organizations.

With this diploma in hand, most of you will go on to the noblest of pursuits, like helping a cable company acquire a telecom company.

You will defend BP from birds.

You will spend hours arguing that the well water was contaminated well before the fracking occurred.

One of you will sort out the details of my prenup.

A dozen of you will help me with my acrimonious divorce.

And one of you will fall in love in the process—I’m talkin’ to you, Noah Feldman.

And let’s be honest, Harvard Law is the best of the Harvard graduate programs, ok, I can say this, we're amongst friends. The Business School is full of crooks, the Divinity School is just a bunch of weird virgins, the School of Design is like European burnouts, and don’t even get me started on the Kennedy School. What kind of degree do you get from there, Public Policy? You mean a Masters in Boring Me to Death at a Dinner Party, I'm sorry. The med school is just a bunch of nerdy Indians—I can say that! Preet can say that. The rest of you, you are out of line—that is racial, how dare you.

But I digress, again. I'm just really excited to be here. I am obsessed with justice. Actually, in my mind, law is that pesky thing that often gets in the way of justice. I believe in the Clint Eastwood School of the Law. An eye for an eye? I don’t think so. That solves nothing. You take my eye, I take your life, my friend, in a duel, Aaron Burr-style. I don't want your stupid eye, for what? My eye collection? You're dead.

Duels are the first thing you learn when you enter my graduate program, the Harvard School of Vengeance.

But again, that's not what I came here to talk about. The Harvard Law School crest has the word “Veritas”, which means truth in Latin. I know that because it's too boring to make up.

And if you look at the crest, you'll notice under this hallowed word, there are three bunches of asparagus. Because asparagus is the tallest and the proudest of the vegetables, the pillar of the vegetable kingdom, and it’s like, it’s like, OK, that is not asparagus, that is wheat, which makes also not a ton of sense either. OK, that was three pages of my speech, that's a callback to asparagus. I'm going to move past trying to make sense of your crest which makes no sense.

Harvard Law has an incredible number of illustrious alumni.

President Barack Obama attended Harvard Law—OR SO HE SAYS!

Elle Woods went here, from the trenchant documentary Legally Blonde. It’s a very moving film. Dean Minow, you should check it out after you read my book.

Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are graduates of Harvard Law, the other three—I don’t know where they went, I think it was University of Phoenix, not sure.

No, no, no—as we all know, they attended your friendly rival, Yale Law School.

Ok, let's just take a moment to talk about this rivalry. I know that you have a chip on your shoulder. Yale Law is always number one, and you are always number two. Sometimes Stanford comes in there, bumps you down to number three, but listen, let me tell you something—from where I stand, from an outsider’s perspective, here’s the truth: you are ALL nerds.

Except here’s the difference: you are the nerds who are going to make some serious bank, which is why I’m here today—to marry the best-looking amongst you.

Back to this beautiful diploma, it's not just a law degree, you can do whatever you want now, and this institution will follow you everywhere.

If you kill someone, you are the “Harvard Law Murderer.”

If you are caught in a lewd act in a public restroom, you’re the “Harvard Law Pervert,” my friend. And then you can represent yourself, and you’ll probably get acquitted because you went to Harvard.

In fact, the only downside of this degree is when you run for Senate, you will have to distance yourself from it to seem more like a regular person. You'll tuck in your flannel shirt into your freshly pressed jeans (that you just bought). And still, this institution is going to haunt you. No matter how many diners you eat at. No matter how many guitar solos you do with Rascal Flats, you are Harvard to the grave. You won't be able to buy enough rusty pick up truck enough to distance yourself from this place. Mitt Romney? He preferred to be known as “The Mormon Guy” to distract himself from his Harvard past.

Now I'd like to get a little serious. I am an American of Indian origin whose parents were raised in India, met in Africa, and move to America, and now I am the star and creator of my own network television program. The continents traveled, the languages mastered, the standardized tests taken over and over again, and the cultures navigated are amazing even to me. My family's dream about a future unfettered by limitations dependent only on "what you know" and not by "who you know" was possible only in America. Their romance with this country is more romantic than any romantic comedy I could ever write.

And it's all because they believed, as I do, about the concept of the inherent fairness that is alive in America. And that here, you could aspire and succeed. And that, my parents believed, their children could aspire and succeed to levels that could not have happened anywhere else in the world.

And that fairness that my parents and I take for granted, that many Americans take for granted, is in many ways resting on your shoulders to uphold. You represent those who will make laws and affect change. And that is truly an amazing thing. And more than any other group graduating today from Harvard, the laws that you write in the next five to ten years will affect this country in a fundamental way.

And now, the part of my speech where I am supposed to give you advice. And I thought, what advice could I give you guys? Celebrities give too much advice and people listen to it too much. In Hollywood, we all think we are these wise advice givers and most of us have no education whatsoever. Actors can become governors, pundits, or even high ranking officials in religions made up sixty years ago.

Well then, who should be giving advice and the answer is people like you. You are better educated and you are going to go out into the world and people are going to listen to what you say, whether you are good or evil, and that probably scares you because some of you look really young. And I’m afraid a couple of you probably are evil. That’s just the odds.

And to be honest, it scares me because you look like a bunch of tweens. So please, just try to be the kind of people that give advice to celebrities, not the other way around. You are entering a profession where, no matter how bad the crime or the criminal, you have to defend the alleged perpetrator. Across the campus, Harvard Business School graduates are receiving diplomas, and you will need to defend them—for insider trading or narcotics, or maybe both if Wolf of Wall Street is to be believed.

The thing I find the most fascinating, is that you are responsible for the language of justice, for the careful and precise wording in all those boring contracts that I sign while I watch Real Housewives.

You wrote the Terms and Conditions that I scroll through quickly while I download the update for Candy Crush. Terms and Conditions are the only things keeping us from the purge, everybody. I don’t read them—I just hit Accept. iTunes may own my ovaries for all I know.

“Employees must wash their hands before returning to work.” A lawyer wrote that.

“You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” A lawyer wrote that.

“Mindy Kaling may not come within 1,000 feet of Professor Noah Feldman.” A lawyer wrote that.

These are protections that we take for granted. Your dedication to meticulous reading is a tedium that I find so admirable. You take words and you turn them into the infrastructure that keeps our world stable.

The seductive southern lawyers from John Grisham novels get all the glory, the Noah Feldmans, but the rest of you form the foundation for our day to day lives. It's backbreaking and often, there is not much glory. And in that way, a lot of you will become the quiet heros of our country. And those of you that go on to work for big pharma and Phillip Morris, you will become the loud anti-heros and someone is certain to make an AMC series glamorizing you.

Either way, you can't go wrong. I look at you and see our nation's future. Attorneys, corporate lawyers, public prosecutors, judges, politicians, maybe even the President of the United States. Those are all positions of such great influence. Understand that one day you will have the power to make a difference.

So use it well. Thank you graduates, thank you faculty, thank you parents, thank you movinggraduationspeeches.com.

Congratulations.

Source: http://genius.com/Mindy-kaling-speech-at-h...

Marcus Westbury: 'How to fail and why it's important' - 2013

August 13, 2015

24 April, 2013, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria

I was asked to give a commencement address at Deakin University today. For various reasons (mainly because i’ve never actually finished Uni myself) it felt like kind of a big deal to me. What follows below is my notes of more or less what i said. I kind of winged it in person…

Deputy Chancellor Meehan, Vice‐Chancellor, Professor Jane den Hollander; academic staff, distinguished guests, graduates, family and friends.

I am not sure why I was invited to be here. Let’s just say there are probably a fair few people far more famous and qualified than me who are otherwise engaged today.

I am sure that at least 80% of you don’t have any idea who I am. So a quick introduction. My name is Marcus. I’m 39 years old. I grew up in Newcastle – a place quite a lot like Geelong I reckon. I live in Melbourne. I have a beautiful wife and an adorable two and half year old son.

Over the course of the last decade I have done everything from run a few major-ish festivals, had a weekly column in a major newspaper for a bit, the ABC gave me a chance to write and present my own TV series. I even got to go to The Logies once.

A few years ago I accidentally started Renew Newcastle, a low budget cultural and creative project that borrows empty buildings and lends them to artists in my home town of Newcastle. It has become a model that has been picked up, adapted, and emulated in cities across Australia and around the world.

I feel lucky now. My life gives me the opportunity to travel. My work seems to have mostly earned the respect of colleagues and communities whose respect I personally value. I am, for the most part, a man who is I content in who I am and who enjoys what I do.

The interesting part is that I got here. I only got to anything like contentment through a process of almost continual failure.

Unlike those of you I am privileged to address today, I have never actually graduated from university. The only thing I feel qualified to talk to about today is failure.

Newcastle in the 1980s and 1990s was itself failing. Unemployment in my age group was more than 40%.

My own father’s business failed, and ultimately through no fault of their own my parents’ expectations for their own lives failed. They didn’t expect it and didnt handle it well. By the time that I was in my early 20s both my parents had killed themselves needlessly and way too young.

As you can imagine it had a profound effect on me.

At the time that I was attempting to study at university. On the upside I had a great time, it kept me distracted engaged and amused and I somehow managed to get sidetracked in every project and every initiative that wasn’t my study from the student paper and student politics to the uni bar. On the downside I was kicked out of my university degree.

I spent about three years unemployed.

It is customary for people at events like this to tell you how they never stopped pursuing their dream. How they had a vision and never let go of it. I didn’t. I actually stopped a lot. I gave up a lot. I went backwards quite a few times. And, truth be told, there never has actually been a big overarching vision. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

Yet somewhere, in the story of why I failed university there is a hint to how i ended up being good at something else. I responded to adversity not always by doing the best, or the right thing, but mostly by doing something.

In those years of unemployment my friends and I experimented in all manner of things. We took on spaces we couldn’t afford to try projects we hadn’t defined, and chase visions we hadn’t particularly thought through. I put on gigs and ultimately started festivals. We didn’t get grants — we didn’t know they existed — we mostly just got our mates and their mates to do stuff, joined it up and called it a festival.

Many of those early projects were terrible. They failed. Many of the gigs lost money. My idea for a small bar failed spectacularly. My events got shut down by over zealous authorities. I made many mistakes costly in coin and reputation.

But every time I stuffed something up I learnt something and became better at it.

Eventually, I made every mistake at everything I wanted to try my hand at and, as a result, I started to become good at it. I became uniquely and particualry good at some things because i was the only one stupid and persistent enough to keep doing them.

Understanding my own mistakes evolved into an understanding of the mistakes and the assumptions of the system i was operating in. Learning why I was failing taught me why others might be failing too. Renew Newcastle, which has now opened more than 100 creative projects in more than 50 empty buildings in that city, at its core is an exercise in removing the very same barriers that I have tripped over myself countless times. I have built on my own mistakes so that others can do what they want to try. Ironically, the main reason I started it was a failed idea for a TV show that never actually happened.

There is a Silicon Valley venture capital cliche that entrepreneurs should “Fail fast, fail cheap, and fail often.” Nothing quite so pithy was ever in my mind in Newcastle in 1995 but failing cheap and often has been one of the few constants in my life.

What are your horizons from today? Who knows? I could not have forseen where I ended up and I actually still have no idea where I’m going.

The only useful observation i can make is that it is not only possible but inevitable, that in order to do most things worth doing you will fail and flail along the way. It is ok. It is important.

The advice from me today is not so much to fail but dont be afraid to fail.

As as you do remember the golden rules of making mistakes: Own them and learn from them; Have another go; and, most importantly. NEVER REPEAT YOUR MISTAKES.

Congratulations to you all on achieving something I haven’t. I wish you well and I hope you find contentment and success.

I hope there is something useful that you can take away my words from today. If not, I’m certain I will be better at it next time.

Source: http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2013/04/24/h...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'A World Split Apart', Harvard - 1978

August 4, 2015

8 June 1978, Harvard University

I am sincerely happy to be here on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and most prestigious university. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates.

Harvard's motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my today's speech too, but I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary, but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said.

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception: that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much [more] profound [one] and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.

There is the concept of Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient and deeply rooted, autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units.

For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. It may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West. I am no judge here. But as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it's been the part from the western world, in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small, new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people's approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success. There were no geographic frontiers [limits] to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the 20th century came the discovery of its fragility and friability.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious -- and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of subservience, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.

However, it is a conception which develops out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side's defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world's rifts, I would have concentrated on the East's calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

When the modern Western states were created, the principle was proclaimed that governments are meant to serve man and man lives to be free and to pursue happiness. See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence. Now, at last, during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness -- in the morally inferior sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.

The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed. The majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about. It has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leaving them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money, and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this? Why? And for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country? Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes based, I would say, one the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in interpreting and manipulating law. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

In today's Western society the inequality has been revealed [in] freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly. There are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him; parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that each single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually, an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself. From the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus, mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and in fact it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It's time, in the West -- It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say criminality as such? Legal frames, especially in the United States, are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist's civil rights. There are many such cases.

Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.

The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?

Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history -- or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may -- One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none -- and none of them will ever be rectified; they will stay on in the readers' memories. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press -- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters pertaining to one's nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East, where the press is rigorously unified. One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment; there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspaper[s] mostly develop stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.

I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world. The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a review, to look into the influence of these Western characteristics on important aspects of a nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities and art.

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced -- Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France -- Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in the United States.

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being.

Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: We cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus, we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and meaning of events.

In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is. There have been naive predictions by some American experts who believed that Angola would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam or that Cuban expeditions in Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba. Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Kremlin officials laugh at your political wizards. As to Fidel Castro, he frankly scorns the United States, sending his troops to distant adventures from his country right next to yours.

However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?

The American Intelligentsia lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

I have had occasion already to say that in the 20th century Western democracy has not won any major war without help and protection from a powerful continental ally whose philosophy and ideology it did not question. In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning that war with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy grew and cultivated another enemy who would prove worse, as Hitler never had so many resources and so many people, nor did he offer any attractive ideas, or have a large number of supporters in the West as the Soviet Union. At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one. In this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the in Cambodia in our days.

And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. Thus at the shameful Belgrade conference free Western diplomats in their weakness surrendered the line where enslaved members of Helsinki Watchgroups are sacrificing their lives.

Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.

Facing such a danger, with such splendid historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were -- State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century.

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. This is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century and of Marxism. Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive, and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. And when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging everything on earth -- imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible -- The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times. Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward.

Source: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/a...

Al Gore: 'The Hard Right and the Easy Wrong', UT - 2010

August 4, 2015

May 2010, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

Well thank you very much. I am so thrilled by that and I appreciate the opportunity to come here and, not just to receive that, but to say congratulations to all of you. This is your day.

I gave a commencement speech one year at MIT and in doing research for it, I found that in their early years, their commencement speaker dropped dead right in the middle of the speech. Since it was more than 100 years ago, I figured it was okay to joke about it.I told them I was only the second stiffest commencement speaker that they had ever had.

You’d be surprised if I didn’t make at least brief mention of the one problem that I think is the biggest item of unfinished business on our agenda and that is the climate crisis. Just 40 miles west of here, I passed by there on the way up here yesterday from Middle Tennessee. You remember that coal ash spill? What it has in common with the spill in the Gulf of Mexico is it’s connected to our dependence on carbon-based fuels.

The biggest uncontrolled gusher of pollution, by far, is the global warming pollution we’re putting up there all the time at the rate of 90 million tons per day.

Your generation is going to be the generation that succeeds in completing this transition.

I remember as a very young boy, 13 years old, when I heard a challenge issued to our country by President John F. Kennedy calling for us to put a person on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. I remember how many people said, “That’s impossible to do. He shouldn’t have made that pledge.” but eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the surface of the moon. The day they did, a great cheering went up in Houston, Texas at mission control and the average age of those systems engineers cheering in Houston was 26, which means their average age when they heard that challenge was 18.

This university’s motto, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” The truth can be, indeed, inconvenient, but the single most important choice that any of us make as individuals and as a society is between the hard right and the easy wrong.

I believe in my heart that we are going to solve this crisis. I believe that this is the greatest opportunity that our society has ever had and I’m excited about the fact that from this day forward, you’re going to be a part of all of the great work that that our society is doing.

I say congratulations to you and thank you again for having me here. We’ve got everything we need to succeed, with the possible exception of political will but in the United States of America, political will is a renewable resource. Thank you and congratulations.

Source: http://gradspeeches.com/2010/university-of...

Tony Wilson: "You don’t owe it to anybody to be miserable", University of Melbourne Law School - 1998

August 4, 2015

12 November 1998, St Kilda Town Hall, Melbourne, Australia

Justice Cummins, Professor Crommelin, faculty staff, guests, graduating students and last but not least, people who just rooted up their Equity exam and will be back again next year.

Let me start by saying that as an alumni speaker, I feel I have an underlying obligation to be boring. After all, I am if nothing else a traditionalist, and figure that if it was good enough for my year to sit through a meandering fifteen minute anecdote about an amusing water cooler incident in 1963, it’s good enough for you guys.

The year was 1963. I was 9 years from being born. There was this water cooler. It contained water. The water was wet and cold. When applied to people nearby the water could make people wet and cold. People got wet … and cold.

That’s not quite word perfect in the sense that there are about eight and a half thousand of them missing, but you get the idea. What I’m trying to say is that except for some wonderful, inspiring exceptions, all of whom have shown up to the dinner tonight, old people are irrelevant and boring.

One of the things I wish people had told me when I finished my degree is that until I actually received my degree certificate, I was a graduand. Given the short period of life spent as a graduand, I think it’s important at least to know that you are one. If only to use the word graduand as often as possible in social situations.

‘Are you a student?’

‘No, I’m a graduand.’

‘A graduand?’

‘Yes, a graduand.’

If you haven’t been punched in the face by this point, go on to explain that graduand is the gerund adjective form of graduate, and means ‘about to graduate’. This should put the question of whether or not you get punched in the face beyond any doubt.

I won’t actually express an opinion as to whether you should invest 60-odd dollars in attending your graduation or whether you should wait for your days as a graduand to expire by post. What I will express an opinion on is whether or not you should buy the video on sale afterwards. Don’t buy the video. The video is seriously, seriously slow. It opens well with a wide shot which does a reasonable job of capturing Wilson Hall in all its vinyled glory, but then hits some problems, failing to move from that wide shot for two and half hours. The centrepiece of the film is undoubtedly the stairs up to the stage, as about three hundred people, thrown together because they’re names fall in the same half of the alphabet, trudge up and down these stairs.

I was actually tempted to grab a copy of the video, just for the sort of fun I could have with it should I ever have kids in future years:

‘Dad, can we get a video’

‘Yeah, no worries. Why don’t we watch Graduation 95 again.’

‘Awww Dad!’

Although it’s not my habit to tell the end of movies, I will say that in the tense last moments of ‘Graduation 95’, the Zeds do get to graduate.

I’ve decided to perform somewhat of a community service tonight, and share with you a story from my first week as an articled clerk at Minter Ellison. I’m doing so because if things are looking a bit desperate in those first few days in March next year, you might be able to look back at this and say to yourself ‘well at least I haven’t attempted to impersonate a statutory authority’.

It happened like this. I was about six days into articles when a solicitor asked me to find out whether two properties registered in identical names were in fact owned by the same person. I asked how I should do this, and she told me to ‘use my initiative’. This was her first big mistake.

I decided that I would call both residences and listen to the voices at the end of the phone. If the voices were the same, I figured that I could conclude the same person owned the properties. Stage one went well. I got an answering machine, and after ringing it seven times, figured I had a good handle on what voice number one sounded like.

Stage two went less well. Whereas many people might have pretended to be a radio disc jockey or a wrong number, I decided that the way to go would be to pretend to be from the Australian Electoral Commission, and conduct an impromptu survey on postal voting at the recent council elections.

‘Hi, I’m Tony Wilson,’ I said.

I’ve since learned from friends in the espionage game, that when involved in a covert operation, it is unusual for someone to give his or her real name.

‘Yeah’ he replied.

‘Sir I was wondering if you would mind answering a few questions in relation to postal voting at the recent council elections.’

‘OK, if it’s quick.’ he said.

‘Well sir, could you start by telling me what electorate you belong to’.

He paused for a moment or two.

‘Mate, if you were really from the Australian Electoral Commission wouldn’t you know that?

It was my turn to pause.

‘Yes, I suppose I would’

He then hung up, and I realised that amidst my bungling, I’d not even managed to work out if his voice was the same as the one on the answering machine. An hour or so later, the slow moving cogs of the Wilson brain had cranked over, and I decided to actually call the Australian Electoral Commission myself to work out whether the name in question was duplicated on the electoral roll. I made the call, and was on hold at the Commission when my secretary walked into my office,

‘The Australian Electoral Commission is on line 2,’ she said.

‘No, I have the Australian Electoral Commission on line 1, I replied.

Once we determined that the Australian Electoral Commission was on both line 2 and line 1, I realised I was in some significant trouble. I hung up from my hold music to face some music of a different kind.

‘Hello, are you Tony Wilson,’

I explained that I was.

‘Mr Wilson, we’ve received a complaint from a gentleman who says that you have recently attempted to impersonate an officer of the Australian Electoral Commission. Is that true?’

There was no point lying, just as there’d been no point in impersonating a statutory authority in the first place.

‘Nooo.’

Ten minutes later, on my sixth day of articles, I found myself choking back tears and telling the whole story to my supervising partner. I even suffered the embarrassment of having to write the whole everything down in a memo. Still a lesson was learned that day, and in the two years that followed, there was a tacit understanding between the partners that I was not under any circumstances to be called upon to use my initiative again.

By August of last year I knew that I wasn’t going to cope with a lifetime of being a solicitor in a big firm. To borrow an analogy from Forrest Gump’s mother, life was indeed turning out to be a box of chocolates, but the pricks had only remembered to include the Turkish Delights. I reflected upon my first eighteen months at Minters, and realised that the standout moment had been mobilising thirteen angry articled clerks to smash up a photocopier with a sledge-hammer for the annual mid-year video. I had to face facts. The law was not for me. My calling was elsewhere.

I initially thought it might have lain in smashing up other large inanimate objects, so I spent August and the early part of September walking around the streets at night with a sledge-hammer. But then I re-watched the mid-year video, and decided that what had made me happy was the process of making it. Selecting camera angles. Choosing music. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was a film-maker trapped in a Nino Cerruti suit, and that the sooner I found some tight black T-shirts and began experimenting with facial hair, the sooner I could start sitting around in cafés calling myself a film-maker.

By September 1997, I was calling myself a film-maker. By October, I decided that it was about time to borrow a camera and actually film something. Race Around the World applications were due around then, and Rita Zammit, a Minters colleague recommended I make a film about the coach of her son’s under-7 soccer team. The coach’s name was Paolo, he was Italian and couldn’t speak a word of English. He therefore coached his six-year-old charges through an interpreter, driving them with the zeal of a man with his sights set on a World Cup. Despite the fact many of the boys couldn’t read, they had to sit through blackboard sessions where Paolo explained tactics. The players’ diets were monitored, with Paolo adamant that the boys should have ‘tea and dry-biscuits at least two hours before the game and nothing else’. One boy was berated for staying up too late the night before watching TV.

Needless to say, the boys were hopeless, and got thumped week in, week out. It was pure gold.

As I watched all this unfold before me, Rita, who was translating, asked what I would do if I was selected as a racer on the back of her story. ‘I’ll buy you a ticket to Rome,’ I said. Rita and I are currently in discussion as to what I could have possibly meant by ‘I’ll buy you a ticket to Rome’. Rita is of the opinion that I meant that I would buy her a ticket to Rome, whereas I’m taking a less literal approach, and am arguing that although she may have thought I meant Rome, I did in fact mean Bayswater. The battle is pretty much ongoing, and the latest update is that Rita wants to know that if I did mean Bayswater, why the hell hasn’t she seen a ticket to Bayswater either. She may have a point.

Once my application video was submitted, I slipped into a state that can only be described as Race obsession. My files were given a well-deserved Christmas break, and I became the second least productive member of the legal profession in the world, behind only Ally McBeal.

It was announced on the radio that at exactly 5.30 on December 19th, the 36 people who were still in contention would be contacted and given an interview time. That day I left work early, because if the call didn’t come, I wanted to be able to peacefully pass away in my own bed. Once home, I passed a solid hour rubbing steel wool slowly over the surface of a griller, staring into the metal in the hope it might magically reveal my future, praying that the phone would ring. And then at 5.30, with the griller looking as clean as it has ever looked, it rang.

When I look back now I feel a bit sorry for Don - after all he was just asking about renting a room we’d advertised. Poor Lauren, who also rang about the room at 5.43 didn’t fare much better, and on hanging up from her I collapsed on the couch, opened a beer, and commenced watching my application film one last time. And then, barely before Paolo had uttered his first profanity, the phone was ringing again. This time it was Polly, beautiful Polly who I’ve never met before or since, who offered me an interview, and an eight in 36 chance to race around the world.

My interview went well, and on February 6th I was one of 13 selected for the four-week finalist course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. It was a harrowing four weeks - a bit like a summer clerkship on speed. The thirteen of us were pushed together 16 hours per day, and nobody wanted to be the one in the group ‘who couldn’t get along with the others’. So we all became best friends, but best friends with a twist, in the sense that we also wouldn’t have minded if a couple of the other 12 keeled over and died.

There were some sickening moments in those four weeks. The worst was perhaps when I realised that I was the only one of the thirteen who didn’t own a CD called ‘The Rebirth of Cool Volume 5’. The very fact there was a volume 5 meant that cool had probably been reborn for some time, but they just hadn’t published the birth notice in the Law Institute Journal. I spent the first week feeling like I was standing on the edge of a very happening dance-floor, quietly sipping a beer, waiting for the DJ to play something by Bonnie Tyler.

Still, it turned out that the selection panel (or the jury as they called themselves) were looking for diversity, and when they asked me in my final interview why they should pick me, I said they should pick me to represent footballers, young professionals and everyone who didn’t own ‘The Rebirth of Cool Volume 5’.

It must have worked, because on March 13, Friday the 13th, I was picked as a racer.

My brother asked me yesterday why law students would want to hear a speech at the valedictory dinner from somebody who is no longer a lawyer. I explained to him that they didn’t, that nobody ever wants to hear a speech, and that these functions work best if everyone just drinks beer and sleaze dances. But as I’m already up here, and have the opportunity to inflict further pain on those of you who have needed to go to the toilet for more than an hour, I do want to leave you with three pieces of advice:

The first relates to Lord Wilberforce’s ‘but for’ test. You should use it freely and enthusiastically. For with his deceptively simple ‘but for’ test, his worship gave us a special gift. After all, but for the ‘but for’ test, how would we ever be able to tell when stuff is causing stuff?

Secondly, you don’t owe it to anybody to be miserable. Many of you will love the law, some of you won’t. I was always worried that if I quit being a solicitor, I’d feel I’d wasted seven years of my life. The truth is that this is a fabulous degree, and when people find out you have one they think you can do all sorts of things. So if you wake up one morning feeling miserable about your job, do what I did, which was whinge for about 18 months, then spend 6 months talking very seriously about getting out and doing something, and then finally throw every ounce of energy into something that’s about as likely as winning Tattslotto.

The truth is that I was extraordinarily lucky, but the point still holds - don’t sit around waiting for things to get better, because sometimes they just don’t. To continue the box of chocolates analogy, whilst life doesn’t always have to serve up something off the top shelf at Haig’s, it’s time to act if you’ve let things slip below the quality of, say, a family-sized block of ‘Snack’.

My third piece of advice relates to leaving university. As graduands who are soon to be graduates, you now have an obligation to ram very long, very boring stories down the throats of anyone under eighteen. Repeat after me, these were ‘the best days of your lives’. And remember, the story should not have a beginning, a middle or an end, and should not be in any way relevant to your audience.

As a good case in point, I am going to go out tonight with a tribute to a lecturer from my university days, who I’d like to say helped change my life, but can’t, because he just didn’t. When we first encountered him in 1992, he always taught barefoot, but then in 1993 he fell in love with a psychiatrist and started wearing suits. He was also famous for making every law student in our year pay $50 cash for a case book, written by his good self, consisting of High Court decisions handed down before 1980. He was a legend. He is a legend. The man’s name is Mr Fred Ellinghaus, and the very mention of that name makes me want to sing.

KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH CONTRACTS

We ventured to the lecture

And some were heard to muse

That person teaching ContractS

S’not wearing any shoes

He may have been a genius,

But boy was his class tedious

Running my hair through my fingers

Leaving some drool on the page

Killing me softly with Contracts

Ripping our hears out, with his gags

Killing me softly with Contracts

The casebook was quite yellow

The casebook was quite dear

The casebook had been written

In the latter Whitlam years

But still I went and bought it

Right from the one who taught it

Running my hair through my fingers

Leaving some drool on the page

Killing me softly with Contracts

Ripping our hearts out with his gags

Killing me softly with Contracts

I tried to dig implied terms

I really tried like hell

I even tried to love Dean J’s test for estoppel

What tragic inspiration

Made the bastards teach frustration

Running my hair through my fingers

Leaving some drool on the page

Killing me softly with Contracts

Ripping our hears out, with his gags

Killing me softly with Contracts

Thank you.

Matthew McConaughey: 'One thing you can depend on people being … is people,' University of Houston -2015

May 18, 2015

16 May, 2015, University of Houston, Texas, USA

I have 2 older brothers.

One was in high school in the early 1970s — a time when a high school GED got you a job and college degree was exemplary.

My other brother was in HS in the early 1980s, and by this time the GED wasn’t enough to guarantee employment, you needed a college degree, and if you got one, you had a pretty good chance of getting the kind of job you wanted after you graduated.

Me, I graduated HS in 1988, got my college degree in ’93. That college degree? Didn’t mean as much. No ticket, no voucher, no free pass go to anything.

So, what does your college degree mean?

It means you got an education, means you have more knowledge in a specific subject, vocation, means you may have more expertise in “what your degree” is in.

But what is it worth? In the job market? Today?

We know the market for college graduates is more competitive now than ever.

And some of you already have a job lined up, a path where today’s job can become tomorrow’s career, but for most of you, the future’s probably still pretty fuzzy — you don’t have that job that directly reflects the degree you just got, and many of you don’t even have a job at all. You’ve just completed your scholastic educational curriculum in life — the one you started when you were 5 years old up until now… and your future, your “days to come,” may be no more clear than it was 5 years ago — you don’t have all the answers — and it’s scary.

And that’s OK, because hey, that’s how it is, this is the reality you face — the world we live in…And while I’m not here to discourage you or in any way belittle your accomplishments of which we celebrate tonight…I am here to talk brass tacks, to skip the flattery and the “attaboys” because I DO know this.

The sooner we become LESS IMPRESSED — with our life, our accomplishments, our career, the prospect in front of us. As soon as we become LESS IMPRESSED — and MORE INVOLVED with these things, the sooner we get a whole lot better at doing them.

So, I’m going to talk to you about some things I’ve learned along my journey — most from experience, some I heard in passing, many I’m still practicing, but ALL of them, true.

Yes, they may be truths to me, but don’t think that that makes them MINE… because you can’t own a truth. Think of these as signposts, approaches, paradigms, that give some science to satisfaction. They are yours to steal, to share, to liken to your own lives, and to personally apply in your OWN lives, in your own way, should you choose to.

1.
Life is not easy…

NUMBER 1, LIFE’S NOT EASY…don’t try and make it that way. It’s not fair, it never was, it isn’t now, it won’t ever be. Do not fall into the entitlement trap of feeling you are a victim, you are not. Get over it and get on with it. And yes, most things are more rewarding when you break a sweat to get em.

2.
“Unbelievable” is the stupidest word in the dictionary

It shouldn’t ever come out of our mouths.

To say, “What an unbelievable play!” It was an unbelievable book, film, act of courage…really?

It may be spectacular, phenomenal, most excellent and outstanding… but unbelievable? NO. Give others and yourself more credit. It just happened, you witnessed it, you just did it, believe it.

How about the other side of unbelievable? When we humans “under perform” or act OUT of character? — “man flies a suicide jet into the World Trade Center, millions die from diseases that we have cures for, Bob the builder swears he’ll have your house built by Thanksgiving and you can’t move in ’til Christmas, THE NEXT YEAR…” Our best friend lies to us, and WE, lie to our self, all the time…unbelievable? I don’t think so.. Again, it just happened, and it happens everyday …

NOTHING we homosapien earthlings do is unbelievable — one thing you can depend on people being…is people. So we shouldn’t be surprised, we are the trickiest mammal walking the planet!! (It ain’t the monkeys I’m worried about, it’s you and me.)

Acknowledge acts of greatness as real, and do NOT be naive about mankind’s capacity for evil nor be in denial of our own shortcomings.

NOTHING we do is unbelievable. Stupid word. Un-be-lievably stupid word.

3.
Happiness is different than Joy

“I just want to be happy.” I hear that all the time. But what IS happiness? Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome — If I win I will be happy, if I don’t I won’t. An if-then, cause and effect, quid pro quo standard that we cannot sustain because we immediately raise it every time we attain it. You see, happiness demands a certain outcome, it is result reliant.

If happiness is what you’re after, then you are going to be let down frequently and be unhappy much of your time. Joy, though, is something else. It’s not a choice, not a response to some result, it is a constant. Joy is “the feeling we have from doing what we are fashioned to do,” no matter the outcome.

Personally, as an actor, I started enjoying my work and literally being happier when I stopped trying to make the daily labor a means to a certain end — I need this film to be a box office success, I need my performance to be acknowledged, I need the respect of my peers.

All reasonable aspirations but truth is, as soon as the WORK, the MAKING of the movie, the DOING of the deed became the reward in itself — I got more box-office, more accolades and respect than I’d ever had before. See, JOY is always in process, under construction — it’s in the constant approach, alive and well —in the DOING of what we are fashioned to do… and enJOYing doing it.

4.
Define Success For Yourself

I went to a voodoo shop south of New Orleans a few years back — they had vials of “magic” potions stacked in columns with headings above each defining what they would give you — Fertility, Health, Family, Legal Help, Energy, Forgiveness, Money.

Guess which column was empty? Money. Let’s admit it, “money” is king today, makes the world go round. Money is SUCCESS, the more we have, the more “successful” we are, right?

I’d argue that our cultural values have even been financialized — humility is not in vogue anymore, it’s too passive. It’s a get rich quick on the internet, 15 minutes of fame world we live in. See it every day.

But, we all want to succeed right? Question we have to ask ourselves is, what success is to us, what success is to YOU. More money? OK, I got nothing against money. But maybe it’s a healthy family? A happy marriage? To help others? To be famous? To be spiritually sound? To leave the world a little bit better place than you found it?

Continue to ask yourself that question. Your answer may change over time and that’s fine, but do yourself this favor:

WHATEVER your answer is, DON’T CHOOSE ANYTHING THAT WILL JEOPARDIZE YOUR SOUL. PRIORITIZE WHO YOU ARE, WHO YOU WANT TO BE, AND DON’T SPEND TIME WITH ANYTHING THAT ANTAGONIZES YOUR CHARACTER. DON’T DRINK THE KOOL AID!! It tastes sweet today but it will give you cavities tomorrow. Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill but first, answer the question, “What is my hill?”

How do I define success? For me, it’s a measurement of five things — fatherhood, being a good husband, health, career, friendships. These are what’s important to me in my life.

So, I try to measure these five each day, check in with them, see whether or not I’m in the debit or the credit section with each one. Am I in the red or in the black with each of them?

For instance, sometimes my career is rolling (in the black) but I see how my relationship with my wife could use a little more attention. I gotta pick up the slack on being a better husband, get that one out of the red. Or say my spiritual health could use some maintenance (red) but hey, my friendships and social life are in high gear (black)… I gotta recalibrate, checks and balances, go to church, remember to say thank you more often. I gotta take the tally. Because I want to keep ALL 5 in healthy shape, and I know that if I DON’T take care of them, if I don’t keep up maintenance on them, ONE of them is going to get weak, dip too deep into the debit section, go bankrupt, get sick… die even.

So first, we have to DEFINE success for ourselves, then we have to put in the work to MAINTAIN it — take our daily tally, tend our garden, keep the things that are important to us in good shape.

Let’s admit it, we all got two wolves in us, a good one and a bad one, you know what I’m talking about — and they BOTH wanna eat… We just gotta feed that good wolf a little more than the other one.

5.
Process of elimination is the first step to our identity
( a.k.a where you are NOT is as important as where you are)

In 1992, I got my first job as an actor. Three lines, three days work, in a film called Dazed and Confused. Alright.

Alright, Alright, Alright.

The director, Richard Linklater, kept inviting me back to set each night, putting me in more scenes which led to more lines all of which I happily said YES to. I was having a blast. People said I was good at it, they were writing me a check for $325 a day. I mean hell yeah, give me more scenes, I love this!! And by the end of the shoot those 3 lines had turned into over 3 weeks work and “it was Wooderson’s ’70 Chevelle we went to get Aerosmith tickets in.” Bad ass.

Well, a few years ago I was watching the film again and I noticed two scenes that I really shouldn’t have been in. In one of the scenes, I exited screen left to head somewhere, then re-entered the screen to “double check” if any of the other characters wanted to go with me. Now, in rewatching the film, (and you’ll agree if you know Wooderson), he was not a guy who would ever say, “later,” and then COME BACK to “see if you were sure you didn’t wanna come with him..” No, when Wooderson leaves, Wooderson’s gone, he doesn’t stutter step, flinch, rewind, ask twice, or solicit, right? He just “likes those high school girls cus he gets older and they stay the same age.”

My point is, I should NOT have been in THAT scene, I should have exited screen left and never come back.

But back then, making my first film, getting invited back to set, cashing that check and having a ball, I WANTED more screen time, I WANTED to be in the scene longer and more, and come back into the scene right?

I shouldn’t have been there. Wooderson shouldn’t have been there.

It’s just as important where we are not as it is where we are.

The first step that leads to our identity in life is usually NOT “I know who I am,” but rather “I know who I AM NOT.” Process of elimination.

Defining ourselves by what we are NOT is the first step that leads us to really KNOWING WHO WE ARE.

You know that group of friends you hang out with that really don’t bring out your best? They gossip too much, or they’re kind of shady, and they really aren’t gonna be there for you in a pinch? Or how about that bar we keep going to that we always seem to have the worst hangover from? Or that computer screen that keeps giving us an excuse not to get out of the house and engage with the world and get some HUMAN interaction? Or how about that food we keep eating? Tastes so good going down but makes us feel like crap the next week when we feel lethargic and keep putting on weight?

Those people, those places, those things — STOP giving them your TIME and ENERGY. Don’t GO there, put them DOWN — and when you DO quit giving them your time, you inadvertently find yourself spending MORE time and in more PLACES that are more healthy for YOU, that bring YOU more joy — WHY?

Because you just eliminated the who’s, the where’s, the what’s and the when’s that were keeping you from your identity. Trust me, too many options makes a tyrants of us all. So get rid of the excess, the wasted time, decrease your options… and you will have accidentally, almost innocently, put in front of you, what is important to you by process of elimination.

Knowing who we ARE is hard. Give yourself a break. Eliminate who you are NOT first, and you’ll find yourself where you need to be.

6.
DON’T LEAVE CRUMBS — and the beauty of delayed gratification

What are crumbs? The crumbs I’m talking about are the choice we make that make us have to look over our shoulder in the future.

You didn’t pay that guy back the money you owed him and tonight you just saw him sitting 3 rows behind you…shit…You slept around on your spouse and you just found out that tomorrow, she and the lady you’re having an affair with, are going to be at the same PTA meeting…shit again.. You drank too much last night and you’re too hungover to drive your son to his 8 a.m. Saturday morning baseball practice. THESE ARE CRUMBS! They come in the form of regret, guilt, and remorse — you leave em today, they will cause you more stress tomorrow, and they DISALLOW you from creating a customized future in which you DO NOT have to look over your shoulder.

So…let’s flip the script. Instead of creating outcomes that take FROM us, let’s create MORE outcomes that pay us BACK, fill us up, keep your fire lit, turn you ON, for the most amount of TIME in your future.

These are the choices I speak of and this is the beauty of delayed gratification.

Tee yourself up. Do yourself a favor. Make the choices, the purchase TODAY that PAYS you back TOMORROW. RESIDUALS. In my business, it’s called “mailbox money.” I do my job well today, I get checks in the mailbox five years from now — heck of a deal.

So, whether its prepping the coffee maker the night before so all you gotta do is press the button in the morning, or getting ready for the job interview early so you don’t have to cram the night before, or choosing not to hook up with that married woman because you know you’ll feel horrible about it tomorrow (and her husband carries a gun), or paying your debts on time so when you do see that guy three rows back tonight — you don’t have to hunker down in your seat hoping he don’t see you. Get some R.O.I — RETURN ON INVESTMENT — Your investment. You. You customize your future.

DON’T LEAVE CRUMBS.

7.
DISSECT YOUR SUCCESSES
(and the reciprocity of gratitude)

We so often focus on our FAILURES. We study them. We obsess on them. We DISSECT them. We end up intoxicated with them to the point of disillusion.

When do we write in our diary? When we’re depressed. What do we gossip about? Other people’s flaws and limitations. We can dissect ourselves into self loathing if we’re not careful — and I find that most of the times our obsession with what is wrong just breeds more wrong and more failure.

The easiest way to dissect success is though gratitude. Giving thanks for that which we do have, for what is working, appreciating the simple things we sometimes take for granted. We give thanks for these things and that gratitude reciprocates, creating more to be thankful for. It’s simple, and it works.

I’m not saying be in denial of your failures. No, we can learn from them too, but only if we look at them constructively. As a means to reveal what we are good at, what we can get better at, what we do succeed at.

I’ve read a lot of my bad reviews, and the good “bad reviews,” written by the more talented critics, are constructive. They reveal to me what did translate in my work, what came across, what was seen, or what wasn’t. I don’t obsess on the unfavorable aspect of their review, but I do seek what I can learn from it — Because their displeasure actually uncovers and makes more apparent what I do do well, what I am successful at… and then I dissect that.

Life is a verb. We try our best. We don’t always do our best. Well, architecture is a verb as well. And since we are the architects of our lives, lets study the habits, the practices, the routines we have that lead to and feed our success… our joy, our honest pain, our laughter, our earned tears…Let’s Dissect THAT and give thanks for THOSE things… and when we do that what happens? We get better at them…and have more to dissect.

8.
MAKE VOLUNTARY OBLIGATIONS

Mom and dad teach us things as children. Teachers, mentors, the government and laws all give us guidelines to navigate life, rules to abide by in the name of accountability.

I’m not talking about those obligations. I’m talking about the ones we make with ourselves, with our God, with our own consciousness. I’m talking about the YOU versus YOU obligations. We have to have them. Again, these are not societal laws and expectations that we acknowledge and endow for anyone other than ourselves. These are FAITH based OBLIGATIONS that we make on our own.

Not the lowered insurance rate for a good driving record, you will not be fined or put in jail if you do not gratify the obligations I speak of — no one else governs these but you.

They’re secrets with yourself, private council, personal protocols, and while nobody throws you a party when you abide by them, no one will arrest you when you break them either. Except yourself. Or, some cops who got a “disturbing the peace” call at 2:30 in the morning because you were playing bongos in your birthday suit.

An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind, and when you lay down on the pillow at night, no matter who’s in our bed we ALL sleep alone. — These are your personal jiminy crickets. And there are not enough cops in the entire world to police them — It’s on YOU.

9.
From can to want

1995. I got my first big paycheck as an actor. I think it was 150 grand. The film was Boys on the Side and we’re shooting in Tucson, AZ and I have this sweet little adobe guest house on the edge of the Saguaro National Park. The house came with a maid. My first maid. It was awesome. So, I’ve got a friend over one Friday night and we’re having a good time and I’m telling her about how happy I am with my set up . The house. The maid. Especially, the maid. I’m telling her, “she cleans the place after I go to work, washes my clothes, the dishes, puts fresh water by my bed, leaves me cooked meals sometimes, and SHE EVEN PRESSES MY JEANS!” My friend, she smiles at me, happy for my genuine excitement over this “luxury service” I’m getting, and she says, “Well…that’s great…if you like your jeans pressed.”

I kind of looked at her, kind of stuttered without saying anything, you know, that dumb ass look you can get, and it hit me…

I hate that line going down my jeans! And it was then, for the first time, that I noticed…I’ve never thought about NOT liking that starched line down the front of my jeans!! Because I’d never had a maid to iron my jeans before!! And since she did, now, for the first time in my life, I just liked it because I could get it, I never thought about if I really wanted it there. Well, I did NOT want it there. That line… and that night I learned something.

Just because you CAN?… Nah… It’s not a good enough reason to do something. Even when it means having more, be discerning, choose it, because you WANT it, DO IT because you WANT to.

I’ve never had my jeans pressed since.

10.
A roof is a man made thing

January 3, 1993. NFL playoffs. Your Houston Oilers vs. Buffalo Bills. Oilers up 28–3 at halftime, 35–3 early in the 3rd. Frank Reich and the Bills come back to win 41–38 in overtime for one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history. Yeah, the Bills won, but they didn’t really beat the Oilers. The Oilers lost that game, they beat themselves.

Why? Because at halftime they put a ceiling, a roof, a limit on their belief in themselves, a.k.a the “prevent defense.” Maybe they started thinking about the next opponent at halftime, played on their heels, lost the mental edge the entire 2nd half and voila, they lost. In a mere 2 quarters defensive coordinator Jim Eddy went from being called DC OF THE YEAR and “the man first in line to be a HC next year” to a man without a job in the NFL.

You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth once you got the microphone, had a brain freeze on the exam you were totally prepared for, forgot the punch line to a joke in front of four thousand graduating students at a University of Houston Commencement speech? Or maybe you’ve had that feeling of “Oh my God, life can’t get any better, do I deserve this?”

What happens when we get that feeling? We tense up, we have this outer body experience where we are literally seeing our self in the third person. We realize that the moment just got bigger than us. You ever felt that way? I have.

It’s because we have created a fictitious ceiling, a roof, to our expectations of ourselves, a limit — where we think it’s all too good to be true. BUT IT ISN’T. AND IT’S NOT OUR RIGHT TO SAY OR BELIEVE IT IS.

We shouldn’t create these restrictions on ourselves. A blue ribbon, a statue, a score, a great idea, the love of our life, a euphoric bliss. Who are we to think we don’t deserve or haven’t earned these gifts when we get them?

Not our right.

But if we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren’t thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing the very act we are in the middle of. No, we’re in process, the APPROACH IS THE DESTINATION… and we are NEVER finished.

Bo Jackson ran over the goal line, through the end zone and up the tunnel — the greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it.

We do our best when our destinations are beyond the “measurement,” when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, when we have immortal finish lines.

When we do this, the race is never over. The journey has no port. The adventure never ends because we are always on our way. Do this, and let them tap us on the shoulder and say, “hey, you scored.” Let them tell you “You won.” Let them come tell you, “you can go home now.” Let them say “I love you too.” Let them say “thank you.”

TAKE THE LID OFF THE MAN MADE ROOFS WE PUT ABOVE OURSELVES AND ALWAYS PLAY LIKE AN UNDERDOG.

11.
Turn the page

The late and great University of Texas football coach Daryl Royal was a friend of mine and a good friend to many. A lot of people looked up to him. One was a musician named “Larry.” Now at this time in his life Larry was in the prime of his country music career, had #1 hits and his life was rollin’. He had picked up a habit snortin’ “the white stuff” somewhere along the line and at one particular party after a “bathroom break,” Larry went confidently up to his mentor Daryl and he started telling Coach a story. Coach listened as he always had and when Larry finished his story and was about to walk away, Coach Royal put a gentle hand on his shoulder and very discreetly said, “Larry, you got something on your nose there bud.” Larry immediately hurried to the bathroom mirror where he saw some white powder he hadn’t cleaned off his nose. He was ashamed. He was embarrassed. As much because he felt so disrespectful to Coach Royal, and as much because he’d obviously gotten too comfortable with the drug to even hide as well as he should.

Well, the next day Larry went to coach’s house, rang the doorbell, Coach answered and he said, “Coach, I need to talk to you.” Daryl said, “sure, c’mon in.”

Larry confessed. He purged his sins to Coach. He told him how embarrassed he was, and how he’s “lost his way” in the midst of all the fame and fortune and towards the end of an hour, Larry, in tears, asked Coach, “What do you think I should do?” Now, Coach, being a man of few words, just looked at him and calmly confessed himself. He said, “Larry, I have never had any trouble turning the page in the book of my life.” Larry got sober that day and he has been for the last 40 years.

You ever get in a rut? Stuck on the merry-go-round of a bad habit? I have. You are going to make mistakes — own them, make amends, and move on. Guilt and regret kills many a man before their time. Turn the page, get off the ride. YOU are the author of the book of your life. Turn the page.

12.
Give your obstacles credit

You know these No Fear t-shirts? I don’t get em. Hell, I try to scare myself at least once a day. I get butterflies every morning before I go to work. I was nervous before I got here to speak tonight. I think fear is a good thing. Why? Because it increases our NEED to overcome that fear.

Say your obstacle is fear of rejection. You want to ask her out but you fear she may say “no.” You want to ask for that promotion but you’re scared your boss will think you’re overstepping your bounds.

Well, instead of denying these fears, declare them, say them out loud, admit them, give them the credit they deserve. Don’t get all macho and act like they’re no big deal, and don’t get paralyzed by denying they exist and therefore abandoning your need to overcome them. I mean, I’d subscribe to the belief that we’re all destined to have to do the thing we fear the most anyway.

So, you give your obstacles credit and you will one. Find the courage to overcome them or see clearly that they are not really worth prevailing over.

BE BRAVE, HAVE COURAGE. WHEN YOU DO YOU GET STRONGER, MORE AWARE, AND MORE RESPECTFUL — OF YOURSELF, AND THAT WHICH YOU FEAR.

13.
So how do we know when we cross the truth?

13. Why 13? Unlucky # right?

Well, when did 13 get the bad rap and become the mongrel of numerology? Thirteen’s never done me wrong. In fact, 13 has been a pretty lucky number for me, lemme tell you how:

I’ve always taken these 21 day trips by myself to far off places where I usually don’t know the language and nobody knows my name. They’re adventures and they’re a purge, a cleanse for me. Like a 21 day fast from attention, from all the things I have in my well appointed life. They’re a check OUT, so I can check IN with myself.

See how I’m doing, be forced to be my own and only company, to have a look in MY mirror. And you know what can happen when we do THAT — sometimes we don’t like what we see.

In 1996, right after I got “famous” from a film called A Time to Kill, I headed out on one of these 21-day walkabouts — this time to the jungles and mountains of Peru. The sudden fame I’d just gotten was somewhat unbalancing. My face was everywhere, everyone wanted a piece of me, people I’d never met were swearing they “loved me” — everywhere I went, there I was, on a billboard, a magazine cover. It was just weird. What was this all about? What was reality and what was bullshit? Did I deserve all this?” were all questions I was asking myself.

“Who was I?” was another.

Now, there’s always an initiation period with these trips. An amount of time that it takes for the place to INITIATE the traveler. The time it takes to disconnect from the world we left, and become completely present in the one we are traveling in…For me, that initiation period usually last about thirteen days. Yes. Thirteen hellish days until I’m out of my own way. After that, the trip is smooth sailing.

Well, it was the night of the twelfth day of my 21-day trip. I was settling into camp, I’d already hiked 80 miles to this point and had a three-day trek to Machu Pichu ahead of me.

I was sick of myself. Wrestling with the loss of my anonymity, guilt ridden for sins of my past, full of regret. I was lonely — disgusted with the company I was keeping: MY OWN — and doing a pretty good job of mentally beating the shit out of myself.

Grappling with the demons on this night, I couldn’t sleep. All of these badges and banners and expectations and anxieties I was carrying with me. I needed to free myself from them… Who was I? I asked myself. Not only on this trip but in this life. So I stripped down to nothing. I took off every moniker that gave me pride and confidence, all the window dressings, the packaging around my product (heart). I discarded my lucky and faithful American cap, stripped off my talismans from adventures past. I even discarded my late father’s gold ring he gave to me that was made from a meltdown of he and my mom’s class rings and gold from one of her teeth.

I was naked. Literally and figuratively. And I got sick. Soaked in sweat, I threw up until there was no bile left in my belly, and finally passed out from exhaustion.

A few hours later, I awoke on this thirteenth morning to a rising sun. Surprisingly fresh and energized, I dressed, made some tea and went for a morning walk. Not towards my destination Machu Pichu but rather to nowhere in particular. My gut was still a bit piqued from last night’s purge, yet I curiously felt pretty good: alive, clean, free, light.

Along a muddy path on this walk, I turned a corner and there in the middle of the road was a mirage of the most magnificent pinks and blues and red colors I had ever seen. It was electric, glowing and vibrant, hovering just off the surface, as if it was plugged in to some neon power plant.

I stopped. I stared. There was no way around it: The jungle floor in front of me was actually THOUSANDS OF BUTTERFLIES. There, in my path. It was SPECTACULAR.

I stayed awhile, and somewhere in my captivation, I heard this little voice inside my head say these words, “All I want is what I can see, and what I can see, is in front of me.”

At that moment, for the first time on this trip, I had stopped anticipating what was around the corner, stopped thinking about what was coming up next and what was up ahead. Time slowed down. I was no longer in a rush to get anywhere. My anxieties were eased.

A few hours later I returned to camp and packed for my continued journey onto Machu Pichu. I had a bounce in my step, new energy. The local Sherpas I was traveling with even noticed, calling out to me, “sois luz Mateo, sois luz!!!” — meaning “you are light” in Spanish.

You see, I forgave myself that morning. I let go of the guilt, the weight on my shoulders lifted, my penance paid, and I got back in good graces with God. I shook hands with myself, my best friend, the one we’re all stuck with anyway. From that morning on, the adventure was awesome. I was present, out of my own way, not anticipating next, embracing only what was in front of my eyes, and giving everything the justice it deserved.

You see, I crossed a truth that morning. Did I find it? I don’t know, I think it found me. Why? Because I put myself in a place to be found. I put myself in a place to receive the truth.

So, how do we know when we cross the truth?

I believe the truth is all around us, all the time. The answer, you know, it’s always right there. But we don’t always see it, grasp it, hear it, access it — because we’re not in the right place to.

So what do we do?

First, we have to put ourselves in the place to receive the truth. We live in an extremely noisy world with all kinds of frequencies coming at us — commitments, deadlines, fix this, do that, plans, expectations — and they all make it hard to get clarity and peace of mind. So we have to consciously put ourselves in a place to receive that clarity. Whether that’s prayer, meditation, a walkabout, being in right company, a road trip, whatever it is for you.

Schedule that time to be in a place to receive the truth.

Now, if we hear it, if it becomes clear, a truth that is natural and infinite, then the second part comes…

…which is to PERSONALIZE it. Ask how it works for you, how it applies to you personally, why you need it in your life, specifically.

…If we do THAT, then comes the third part:

….having the patience to internalize it — and get it from our intellectual head and into our bones and soul and our instinct. We can’t rush this part, it takes time.

And if we get that far. We received it, we personalized it, we internalized it. If we make it that far, then comes THE BIGGIE ….

Having the courage to act on it. To actually take it into our daily lives and practice it, to make it an active part of who we are and live it.

If we can do that, then we have what I believe is Heaven on Earth.

The place where what we want is also just what we need. I mean that’s the ticket isn’t it!!? That’s where I want to live!!

So while we’re here, let’s make it a place where we break a sweat, where we believe, where we enjoy the process of succeeding in the places and ways we are fashioned to. Where we don’t have to look over our shoulder because we are too busy doing what we’re good at. Voluntarily keeping our own council because we WANT to. Traveling towards immortal finish lines. We write our book. Overcome our fears. We make friends with ourselves.

That is the place I’m talking about

Kanye West: 'I am a pop artist', Art Institute of Chicago - 2015

May 15, 2015

Listen to Kanye West's speech after receiving an honorary doctorate:

11 May, 2015, Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA

I am a pop artist.

So my medium is public opinion. And the world is my canvas.

I'm sorry is something you can use a lot. it gives you an opportunity to give your opinion, apologise for it, and give your opinion again. People say, 'you should not be sorry for your opinions'.

George Bush has some very cool self portraits., I didn't know he was an artist.

I felt my nerves a bit, and I don't feel that feeling a lot.

The nerves of humility and modesty when being honoured. A humanisation, a reality of being recognised. And all I thought, as I sit here, shaking a bit, is I need to get rid of that feeling. I need to not be nervous.

This honour is going to make your lives easier. Two reasons. You don't have top defend me as much. And I'm going to make all of our lives easier.

And it's these Floyd Mayweather belts that are needed to prove what I've been saying my entire life..

Whether it's the co-sign of Paul McCartney grabbing me and saying, 'It's okay he doesn't bite white people.' Or the New York Times cover. Or the Time 'Most Influential' cover. And now a doctorate at the Art Institute of Chicago. When I was giving a lecture at Oxford I brought up this school because when I went on that mission to create in other spaces, a parallel film, performance, it would have been easier if I could have said I have a degree at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Thank you.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-5-mo...