Randy Pausch: 'We don’t beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the reaper by living more fully', Carnegie Mellon - 2008

18 May 2008, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

I’m glad to be here today. Hell, I’m glad to be anywhere today. President Cohen asked me to come and give the charge to the graduates. I assure you it’s nothing compared to the charge you have just given me. This is an incredible place. I’ve seen it through so many lenses. I saw it when I was a graduate student that didn’t get admitted and then somebody invited me back and said that “Okay, we’ll change our mind.” I saw it as a place that hired me back to be on the faculty many years later and then gave me the chance to do what anybody wants to do which is follow their passion follow their heart and do the things they’re excited about. The great thing about this university unlike almost all of the other ones I know of is that nobody gets in your way when you try to do it and that’s just fantastic. To the degree that a human being can love an institution I love this place and I love all of the people and I’m very grateful to Jerry Cohen and everyone else for all the kindness that has been shown to me.

Last August I was told it was likely that I had three to six months to live. I’m on month nine now and I’m not going to get down and do any pushups but there will be a short pickup basketball game later. Somebody said to me, in light of those numbers, “Wow, so you’re really beating the Grimm Reaper.” and what I said without even thinking about it is that we don’t beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what we will do between the time we’re born and the time he shows up, because when he shows up it’s too late to do all the things that you always want to kind of get around to.

I think the only advice I can give you on how to live your life well is first off remember, it’s a cliché but I love clichés, it is not the things we do in live that we regret on our deathbed. It is the things we do not. I assure you I’ve done a lot of really stupid things and none of them bother me. All of the mistakes and all of the dopey things and all of the times I was embarrassed, they don’t matter. What matters is that I can look back and say pretty much anytime I got a chance to do something cool I tried to grab for it. That’s where my solace comes from.

The second thing that I would add to that and I didn’t coordinate on the subject of this word, but I think it’s the right word that comes up, is passion. You will need to find your passion. Many of you have already done it. Many of you will later. Many of you may take until your 30’s or 40’s but don’t give up on finding it because then all you’re doing is waiting on the Reaper. Find your passion and follow it. If there is anything I have learned in my life you will not find that passion in things and you will not find that passion in money because the more things and the more money you have the more you will just look around and use that as the metric and there will always be someone with more.

Your passion must come from the things that fill you from the inside. Honors and awards are nice things but only to the extent that they regard the real respect from your peers. To be thought well of by other people that you think even more highly of is a tremendous honor that I’ve been granted.

Find your passion, and in my experience, no matter what you do at work or what you do in official settings that passion will be grounded in people. It will be grounded in the relationships you have with people and what they think of you when your time comes. If you can gain the respect of those around you and the passion and the true love, and I’ve said this before, I waited until 39 to get married because I had to wait that long to find someone whose happiness was more important than mine. If nothing else I hope that all of you can find that kind of passion and that kind of love in your life. Thank you.

Angela Merkel: 'Letting go of the old is part of a new beginning', Harvard University - 2019

President Bacow, Fellows of the Corporation, Members of the Board of Overseers, Members of the Alumni Board, Members of the Faculty, Proud Parents, and Graduates:

Today is a day of joy. It's your day. Many congratulations. I am delighted to be here today and would like to tell you about some of my own experiences. This ceremony marks the end of an intensive and, probably also, hard chapter in your lives. Now the door to a new life is opening. That's exciting and inspiring.

The German writer Hermann Hesse had some wonderful words for such a situation in life. I'd like to quote him and then continue in my native language. Hermann Hesse wrote:

In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

These words by Hermann Hesse inspired me when I completed my physics degree at the age of 24. That was back in the year 1978.

The world was divided into East and West. It was during of the Cold War. I grew up in East Germany, in the GDR, at a time when that part of my homeland was not free, in a dictatorship. People were oppressed and monitored by the state. Political opponents were persecuted. The government of the GDR was afraid that the people would run away to freedom. And that's why the Berlin Wall was built. It was made of concrete and steel. Anyone who was discovered trying to overcome it was arrested or shot. This wall in the middle of Berlin divided a people -- and it divided families. My family was divided too.

My first job after graduation was as a physicist in East Berlin at the Academy of Sciences. I lived near the Berlin Wall. On the way home from my institute I walked past it every day. Behind it lay West Berlin, freedom. And every day, when I was very close to the wall, I had to turn away at the last moment -- and head towards my apartment. Every day I had to turn away from freedom at the last minute. I don't know how many times I thought, I couldn't stand it anymore. It was really frustrating.

I was not a dissident. I did not run up and bang against the wall, but neither did I deny its existence because I did not want to lie to myself. The Berlin Wall limited my possibilities. It was literally in my way. But one thing that this wall could not do in all these years: It could not impose limits on my own inner thoughts. My personality, my imagination, my yearnings -- these could not be limited by prohibitions and coercion.

Then came the year 1989. Throughout Europe, the shared will for freedom unleashed incredible powers. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. The people demonstrated and brought down the wall. What many people had not thought possible -- even me -- became reality. Where once there had been a dark wall, a door suddenly opened. The moment had come for me, too, to step through that door. I did not have to turn away from freedom at the last minute any longer. I could cross that line and venture out into the great, wide open.

During these months, 30 years ago, I personally experienced that nothing has to remain as it is. This experience, dear graduates, is the first thought I would like to share with you today for your future: What seems fixed and unchanging can in fact change.

And in matters both large and small, every change begins in the mind. The generation of my parents had to learn this most painfully. My father and mother were born in 1926 and 1928. When they were as old as most of you here today, the rupture of civilization that was the Shoa [Holocaust] and the Second World War had just ended. My country, Germany, had brought unimaginable suffering upon Europe and the world. How likely would it have been for the victors and the vanquished to remain irreconcilable for many years? But instead, Europe overcame centuries of conflict. The result was a peaceful order based on common values rather than supposed national strength.

Notwithstanding all the discussions and temporary setbacks, I am firmly convinced that we Europeans have united for the better. And the relationship between Germans and Americans shows how former enemies in war can become friends.

It was George Marshall who gave a significant contribution to this with the plan which he proclaimed in this very place at a Commencement Address in 1947. The transatlantic partnership with our values of democracy and human rights has given us a time of peace and prosperity to the benefit of all that has lasted for over 70 years. And today? It will not be long now before the politicians of my generation are no longer subject to the program of "Exercising Leadership," but at most will be dealt with in "Leadership in History."

Dear Harvard Class of 2019: Your generation will face the challenges of the 21st century in the coming decades. You are among those who will lead us into the future. Protectionism and trade conflicts endanger free world trade and thus the foundations of our prosperity. The digital transformation covers all areas of our lives. Wars and terrorism lead to displacement and forced migration. Climate change threatens our planet's natural resources. It and the resulting crises are caused by humans. So we can and must do everything humanly possible to really get this challenge to humanity under control. This is still possible. But everyone has to do their part and -- I say this self-critically -- get better. Therefore, I will do my utmost to ensure that Germany, my country, will reach the goal of climate neutrality by 2050.

Change for the better is possible if we tackle it together. Going it alone, we will not succeed. And so this is my second thought for you: More than ever we have to think and act multilaterally instead of unilaterally, global instead of national, cosmopolitan rather than isolationist. In short, together instead of alone.

You, dear graduates, will in the future have quite different opportunities for this than my generation did. After all, your smartphone probably has far more computing power than the IBM mainframe replicated by the Soviet Union, which I was allowed to use in 1986 for my dissertation in the GDR.

Today, we use Artificial Intelligence to scan millions of images for symptoms of disease -- for example, to better diagnose cancer. In the future, empathic robots could help doctors and caregivers to focus on the individual needs of individual patients. We can not say what applications will be possible, but the opportunities that come with [AI] are truly breathtaking.

Class of 2019, it is essentially up to you as to how we will take advantage of these opportunities. It will be you who will decide how our way of working, communicating, moving, and even developing our way of life will evolve.

As Federal Chancellor, I often have to ask myself: Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing something because it is right, or just because it's possible? You should ask yourself that again and again -- and that is my third thought for you today: Do we set the rules of technology or does technology determine how we interact? Do we focus on people with their dignity in all its many facets, or do we only see the customer, the data sources, the objects of surveillance?

These are difficult questions. I have learned that answers to difficult questions can be found if we always see the world through the eyes of others; if we respect the history, tradition, religion, and identity of others; if we firmly stand by our inalienable values and act accordingly; and if we do not always follow our initial impulses, even with all the pressure to make snap decisions, but instead stop for a moment, keep quiet, think, take a break.

Of course, that takes a lot of courage. Above all, it requires being truthful to others and perhaps most importantly to ourselves. Where better to begin with it than here, in this place, where so many young people from all over the world come to learn under the motto of Truth -- to do research, and discuss the questions of our time? This implies that we do not describe lies as truth and truth as lies.2 As well, it implies that we do not accept grievances as our normality.

But what, dear graduates, could stop you -- what could hinder us from doing that? Again, there are walls: walls in the mind, walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They exist between members of a family as well as between social groups, between those of different skin colors, peoples, religions.3 I would like us to break down these walls -- walls that repeatedly prevent us from communicating about the world in which we want to live together.

Whether we succeed is up to us. Therefore, dear graduates, my fourth thought is this: Take nothing for granted. Our individual freedoms are not self-evident; democracy is not self-evident; neither is peace nor prosperity.

But if we tear down the walls4 that restrict us, if we open the door and embrace new beginnings, then everything is possible. Walls can collapse. Dictatorships can disappear. We can stop global warming. We can overcome hunger. We can eradicate diseases. We can give people, especially girls, access to education. We can fight the causes of displacement and forced migration. We can do all this.

So let us not ask first what is wrong or what has always been. Let us first ask what is possible and look for something that has never been done before.5

It was these exact words I spoke in 2005 during my very first policy statement, as the newly elected Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, as the first woman in this office, in the German Bundestag, the German Parliament.

And with these words I would like to share with you my fifth thought: Let us surprise ourselves with what is possible -- let us surprise ourselves with what we can do.

In my own life, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that allowed me to step out into the open almost 30 years ago. At that time, I left behind my work as a scientist and went into politics. It was an exciting and magical time, just as your lives will be exciting and full of magic. But I also had moments of doubt and worry. For we all knew what lay behind us, but not what might lie ahead. Perhaps you're feeling a bit like that today amidst all the joy of the occasion.

Therefore, as my sixth thought, I can also tell you this: The moment you stand out in the open is also a moment of risk. Letting go of the old is part of a new beginning. There is no beginning without an end, no day without night, no life without death. Our whole life consists of this difference, the space between the beginning and the ending. What's in between, we call life and experience.

I believe that we must always be ready to finish things to feel the magic of beginnings and to make the most of our opportunities. That was my experience in study, in science, and it's what I have experienced in politics. And who knows what's in store for me after life as a politician? It is completely open. Only one thing is clear: It will again be something different and something new.

That's why I want to leave this wish with you: [1] Tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, for nothing has to stay as it is.

It's six things [to remember]:

[2] Take joint action in the interests of a multilateral global world.
[3] Keep asking yourselves: Am I doing something because it is right or simply because it's possible?
[4] Don't forget that freedom is never something that can be taken for granted.
[5] Surprise yourself with what is possible.
[6] Remember that openness always involves risks. Letting go of the old is part of the new beginning.

And above all, nothing can be taken for granted; everything is possible.

Thank you!

John Krasinski: 'Lean all the way in', Brown University - 2019

25 May 2019, Brown Univeristy, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Guys, this is insane. What is happening? Why am I up here? Truly. No, I'm dead serious, why am I up here? To be asked to come back to this place, to speak to a graduating class of an institution that truly meant the world to me and still is the leading aspect of my entire life and career, it is the cornerstone of my life and career, is an astonishing honor. So thank you for being here, I mean that. I really really do.

It is also an honor that I almost immediately regretted saying yes to. Because look at this. Look at this church. Look at these people. Supposedly there are more people on the green. They only just told me that. Yes. There's people in Solomon? No, no engine 93? Okay. Nothing for Solomon. All right. I love you Solomon. Luckily a few days after I said yes, a rescue call was sent. I was to get on the phone with one of our phenomenal hosts of today's incredible ceremony, the one that only Reverend Janet Cooper Nelson, is down here. Yep. Rockstar, put this all together. Her job was pretty simple, to harness any and all spiritual guidance. Reach out over that phone, metaphorically grabbed me by the hand and weighed me through the rough waters of sheer terror. The end result, she made things way worse.

Janet, I love you, but in attempting to give me advice and pointers on what I should say in my speech, she started referencing these indelible speeches from other people who had already spoken. Yeah. You want to know what you led off with? "I remember when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was here". I don't mind telling you I peed a little. I did. The class of 2002 had a Supreme court justice talk to them. Okay. And as I was checking my pants to see if they need to dry cleaning, I heard her say, or maybe the funniest moment had to be when the Dalai Lama was here, and I blacked out. I mean, full unconscious blacked out. Head hit the table out because let me be honest guys, the Dalai Lama spoke. Okay. I mean, he was the funniest? I can't contend with the Lama on a bad day, but to know that he brought his A game. He had a tight 15 minute comedy set? No. No, thank you.

So I'd like to start here today by addressing the parents of the class of 2019. And to you, I would like to say I hear you. Don't worry. I have already had the T-shirts made up. My kid just graduated from Brown and all I got was the dude from the office. Good. Glad you think that's funny. That's really funny. Let me tell you what's really funny. The Notorious RBG, his holiness, they didn't go to Brown, not smart enough. You know who did go to Brown? The dude from the office. It's me. That's ridiculous. It actually sounded awful just coming out.

And because of that I am specifically and acutely aware of just what an astounding honor it is to be here today. So to the graduates of the class of 2019 tomorrow, I say thank you. Thank you for letting me be here today. Truly thank you for letting me be a part of your day. This is your day and you are graduating tomorrow. How cray is that? Does anyone say cray anymore? Okay. I'm ancient. Who's nervous? Let me see a show of hands of people in the ... Really? A lot of outliers here. Well, I look forward to your world domination. I was terrified because all the people came up to me and said, the future belongs to you. Whoa. What! I am currently searching for an apartment trying to keep the number of roommates in single digit. Literally nothing belongs to me.

Take a deep breath. Let's all take a breath. Wow, you actually did it. You're going to be great. There are many sides to being nervous and a whole lot of them are wildly useful and for the ones that aren't so useful, well, let me see if I can walk you through some of those. Believe it or not, they asked me to come up with the title of this speech. Yes. Just characterized, it says a speech and yes, they think it's good enough to come up with a name. What's so hard to understand? The name I came up with off the top of my head was, what do I know? Pretty good. And oddly enough, that line went from being some jokey device I was using to deflect my own fears of being up here to a genuine challenge to myself. What do I know that I can tell you guys about that could possibly illuminate the future that stands in front of you?

Well, I know that tomorrow you've all received a piece of paper that says you've gotten one of the best educations there is to get period. I also know that that education did not necessarily happen in the classroom. The funniest thing about me is my getting into Brown, I didn't feel I deserve to get in. So I made it my mission to deserve to graduate. That was my thing. I came to Brown as a midyear. I don't know if that program exists anymore, but yes, one person? Nope. Okay. It's gotten smaller since I was here, but I was one of 32 kids that were not accepted in the fall with everyone else. Thanks. Anyway. But rather we came in alone, hungry and cold in January.

I remember immediately trying to find my place, to find a group, to find my people. There was a moment where I even thought I might try to play basketball here. Don't laugh yet, don't laugh yet. My brother Paul was actually the captain of the basketball team, so I had communicated with the coach a couple of times about potentially walking on, still no laughter, please. And it was January, so it was mid season. I walked up to the gym one day to meet with the coach. I opened the door as the door swung open, by the time it reached the end, and it was coming back, I went, no. Nope. These dudes were too big. They were too good and it was just after lunch and they were on their second practice. No, thank you. No, thank you.
So I turned around and walked straight through the campus toward my dorm. When something caught my eye. I saw a flyer for a sketch comedy group called Out of Bounds. Yes, you can all clap for them. That's how big we were too. It's funny because I think the flyer caught my eye because it was nailed to a tree. And I remember thinking like, "Whoa, I haven't been at Brown very long, but protecting trees is kind of like one of your things".

So I went in for the audition and my entire life changed. Nope, not because I got in, not because I started acting. It was through that group that I found my way into this community. It was through that group that I met my people and all of a sudden I was surrounded by the most inspiring peers. I mean, every single one of them seemed way smarter than me, way cooler than me, way more interesting. And one of the best decisions I made in my life was just to lean all the way in. Nope, not to acting. Are you kidding. I mean, I really wasn't good enough to be here. I don't know if you're listening. These kids were amazing. Truly by the end of senior year, the only parts I had ever gotten were like arm guard number four or terrified hostage guest number two. Yeah, that's right. When I was at Brown, we did die hard the musical. Yep. You guys really missed out. I can promise you that. My parents were right here. They'll tell you, you missed out. They didn't miss out. It was ridiculous. Okay. You still have your shirts that say, my kid went to Brown and all I got was diehard to musical. That seems harsh, but we'll talk about it later.

No, I didn't get to throw everything in acting, but I did throw everything I had into this unparalleled pool of brilliant people. People often ask me how I got into acting. The truth is I didn't get into acting. I got into everything. Believe it or not. When I got to Brown, I really hadn't listened to any music that wasn't on the radio, seen any movie that wasn't in the multiplex. One day I asked a small group of friends to each give me, one of their favorite movies, favorite albums, and they did, every single week for four years. Yeah. Cry. Okay, I'm back. It was the experience of my life. One of the most mind blowing, mind expanding experiences and no drugs were necessary.

It was without a doubt the beginning of everything. For the next four years I wanted to be a part of it all. I formed a new way of thinking, a new way of executing those thoughts. I leaped out of my comfort zone, then stayed there and then left again. I experienced firsthand the powerful shift in doing something out of love rather than out of necessity. I learned what it meant to believe. I took chances, I failed and I took more chances. So yes, in the classroom I received one of the greatest educations one can possibly get, true, but the piece of paper I got at graduation also represents that education. The piece of paper I got not only says where I was educated, but who I was educated with and it declares that I am a member of that community of people to be relied upon, to take risks, provoke thought, and to be committed participants in this world.

The piece of paper I got represented every facet of my experience and the piece of paper I got is the exact same piece of paper you're going to get tomorrow. The piece of paper I got, I live my life every single day by, because when looking at this sense of nervous that you're feeling now, ask yourself, what's it based in? Is it based in the unknown? Because my question to you is up until now, how else have you approached each new tomorrow? And if your nerves are based in fear of failure, well, my question is up until now, how have you defined success because in this community, without the presence of financial gain, isn't success simply defined as you're just being onto something, taking an idea farther that it never been before? Why does it ever need to change? It doesn't.

Or if your nerves are based on something bigger, a fear of something bigger. The world at large. Well, to that I do say yes, it's true there are right. The future does indeed belong to you, but the abstract weight of responsibility to change it over night very much does not. Real change is organic. You're the only responsibility you all have is to hold fast to everything that you have lived right here. To not conform. To realize that when you're out there, you've done all this before, right in here. Remember fondly the discomfort you felt when you were asked to push yourself farther than you were ever. Sure. You could go.
In the wash of elation when you finally got there. Remember to be scared. You've been there, scared before. You'll be scared again. Find more of your people. Lean all the way in. Take chances, fail big and take chances again, listen to music. Remember to believe in something and fall in love as many times as it takes. And remember before you do something special, just do something. The truth can almost seem too simple, but the simple truth is the program you ran here is the same program. Just run it again and again and again. That's what I know. Thank you to this class, to this institution is my honor. Thank you.

Bill Nye: 'Turn your fear into excitement', Goucher College - 2019

24 May 2019, Goucher College,

Thank you all so much, thank you so much for including me today. Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished faculty, distinguished speakers, alumni, parents, boys, girls, kids of all ages, and especially graduates. Congratulations, you made it. Nicely done. Yes. Now, you might be thinking, those parents and all those older adults, they can’t get me now. Well, it’s too late people, they already did.

Now, we want you to go out there and, dare I say it, change the world. As you may have heard a moment ago, I was awarded an honorary doctorate from Goucher 20 years ago. So when I’m here at Goucher especially, you can trust me, because I’m a doctor.

For your entire life, I imagine, you’ve heard people say you are the future. And there’s a reason for that. Trust me, you are the future. And right now in the spring of 2019, your future looks both exciting, full of astonishing promise, and, trust me, it also looks terrifying for everyone on Earth.

You have access to more human knowledge, more computing power, and more fun, in your electric phone machines than your ancestors could imagine, let alone make use of. And it sure looks like information, transportation, and agricultural technologies are going to get better and better. The future is full of astonishing promise.

But our world is changing. There are now so many of us living increasingly energy-intensive lives and burning ancient plants to get that energy that we are changing the climate of a whole planet. You might say the world is on fire, and these are scary times for everyone on Earth.

Speaking of scary times for everyone on Earth, as you may have heard a moment ago, my mother graduated from Goucher in 1942, and in the winter of 1941 and 1942, everyone around here, in the United States, was terrified. They could see the troubles in Europe and Asia were about to become troubles for everyone on Earth. The first such conflict, the first big war to end all wars—which it didn’t—was rekindled and the U.S. was once again going to be dragged into the deadliest war ever, or maybe just so far: the Second World War.

That winter, my mother’s boyfriend disappeared, captured by the Japanese navy from Wake Island, a tiny atoll 5,000 nautical miles west of Pearl Harbor. That spring, my mother, along with several other Goucher women, class of 1942, became cryptanalysts, the codebreakers. They all went on to have remarkable careers; they all helped win the war. But back then, so did everyone. Everyone in the U.S., most people everywhere, went to work to solve a global conflict. I mean, win the war and get back to work—and they did. It was an extraordinary time because everyone was scared. Everyone pitched in, and in five short years, they got ‘er done.

Now all of you aren’t facing a global war, or, at least, not yet. Instead, you’re facing a global change of life itself. Our world is warming, and the living things around us are changing and dying at an unprecedented rate. So you are going to have to make big changes in the way you and your kids live. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, after James Watt came up with a very practical steam engine, we had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Today, we have nearly 415, a change by a factor of one and a half in just two-and-a-half centuries. We’re not talking about two million years; we’re talking about 200 years. The only other times climates have changed this fast here on Earth are associated with the occasional asteroid impact. There’s never been anything like it in all of human history.

When my grandmother, who grew up in Washington, DC, went to see the Wright Brothers aeroplane fly in College Park, MD, in 1909, there were a few more than one-and-a-half billion people on Earth. Today, there are almost six times that many. We are burning and breathing an atmosphere that’s so thin…how thin is it? It’s so thin, if you can drive straight up, you’d be in outer space in an hour. On 695, it would be two and a half hours.

With every passing second, there are four more people born on Earth. By the time you all reach your billionth second on this planet, a little over halfway into your 31st year, we will have nine billion people, we may have close to 10 billion people, on Earth.

We, by that I mean you, are going to find ways to feed us all. And you will, with technology derived from science, and with policies that support innovation investment in the greater good, policies based on facts. It is no longer a matter of only keeping the air and water clean, curtailing the accidental creation of plastic trash, like straws, and hoping that will be OK. No. Nowadays we, by that I mean you, are going to have to steer our spaceship, take charge of Earth. It’s no longer a matter of just being good stewards. From now on, we humans will have to deliberately control what we do to our atmosphere, the land and sea, to ensure that we maintain as much biodiversity as possible, while taking care of all of us.

Now when it comes to changing the world, don’t be scared. Don’t freak out. When you have to perform doing anything, be it a final exam, dressing for a date, winning a world war, or managing a planet, you might be nervous. You might be scared. And that fear can stop you cold. But don’t let it. As we say in the theater, and on television, take that fear and turn it into excitement. You’re Goucher graduates, for crying out loud. You can do this, people! Take a chance, make a difference. It’s what everyone here wants you to do in every challenge you face—turn your fear into excitement and change the world.

If you could, in Harry-Potter-magic-wand-ical fashion, make one sweeping change to the world that would address climate change, it would be this. You would raise the standard of living for girls and women worldwide. That’s a fact. My mom was a woman, for example. Now instead of a magic wand, let us provide these three things for everyone on Earth. And women of the world, they’ll be educated, they’ll have fewer kids, and the kids they do have will be educated, healthy, and productive, so here we go.

First, we want clean water for every citizen in the world. Water enables us to be healthy. It enables us to have agriculture, feed our populations. Second, we want energy for everybody. In general, when we say energy, we mean renewably produced reliable electricity for everyone on Earth. Electricity is magical. You can use it to light a room, navigate by satellite, produce TV shows, make instant-grams, or you can use it to make toast. It’s versatile, it’s transmittable, it’s efficient. Third, we want access to the internet, or whatever you kids call internet in the coming decades, to provide global information for everyone in the world. By connecting everybody electronically, landline or a constellation of low-orbiting satellites, we can change things.

When I think about those three big, big ideas, I sense some tough challenges. But I’m filled with optimism. This is as good a moment as any in our time together to talk about advice. Just regular advice. It’s a good idea, for example, to always wear shoes in a factory where they make thumbtacks. When crossing a highway in a car or especially on foot, it’s a good idea to look up from your phone once in a while. Once in a while! And it’s good to read the label on a can of paint—before you drink it. You see, you should be paying attention. It’s just what I’m talking about.

Now when I was in college, and for twenty more years in the workforce, if I wanted to know something fun, like the atomic number of rubidium, or if I wanted to know something important, like the score of the Orioles game, I had to look it up in a printed source, a newspaper, a journal, a chemical handbook. But now, facts like those are available in a few milliseconds from several generally very reliable sources. I mean, it’s not that likely that someone is going to create a website on which they deliberately state that rubidium has 38 protons instead of 37. Ha, that would be funny. Oh, man.

But people do make up a lot of misleading and just plain wrong things and post them on the internet. The skill we all need now is that of critical thinking. It’s what we used to call reasoning or logic, the ability to reason, whether or not something is reasonable, and then to find a way to check it, to verify it.

Now here’s something else I hope you’ll carry with you as long as you live. Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t. Everyone. Farmers know things about plants that most of us, even botanists, never will. Bricklayers have an intimate knowledge of what it takes to lay bricks. Cooks know how to use copper bowls to control egg proteins, and that’s cool. Respect that knowledge and learn from others. It will bring out the best in them, and it will bring out the best in you.

Keep in mind, everyone, that if you couldn’t choose where to be born on Earth, but you could choose when, this would be the time to be born. This is the most exciting time in human history. Life is better now, for more of us, than ever before in history. As strange as it may seem, this really is the best time. The opportunities before us are amazing. No matter what else is going on, everyone, please be optimistic. People who are not optimistic don’t get very much done. They get spun up and worn down by their own self-doubt, and they’ll bring you down with them.

When my grandparents joined our merry band here on Earth, no one had any idea what relativity was or is. They saw the creation of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. My grandmother was alive when the first Wright brothers’ flight took place, which would later fit in the cargo version of a 747 airplane that I worked on. The whole flight would fit inside, height and distance.

Your mobile phone uses both special and general relativities so that it can tell you what side of the street you’re standing on. And speaking of relativistic physics, you were all in college when gravitational waves were proven to exist. You were in first grade or so when the universe was shown to be not only expanding but accelerating outward. And dark matter and dark energy are responsible. And you know what dark matter and dark energy are? Nobody knows!

Understanding those currently mysterious forces may lead to everyday technology like a mobile phone and will be in your lifetime. And by the way, I’m predicting right now that gravitons, particles of gravity, will be measured or even isolated. So will darkons. Darkons—particles of dark. It’s just a word I kind of made up there. Mark my words, or my word. Darkon, well, they’ll be dark.

And what I’m saying is, as troublesome as some of our global problems seem to be, you are all up to the challenges. You know more physics than Isaac Newton or Copernicus, you know more about evolution, biology, and genetics than Darwin or Wallace did, or even could. Those guys didn’t even know there was DNA.

And speaking of biological acronyms (who isn’t?), Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, is going to change the way we farm, treat diseases, and give birth. In your lifetime, we may discover evidence of life on Mars or the ocean moon of Jupiter, Europa. The future, your future, is going to be extraordinary.

As graduates, I imagine more than a few of you are concerned about what’s next. What you’re going to do for a living. What you’re going to do for the rest of your life. My advice: Just get started. Just get started. As you may know, I worked on a TV show intended to get young viewers excited about science so in the future we’d have a more scientifically literate society and, of course, more scientists and engineers. But please, keep in mind, I’m not advocating for everyone to become a scientist, and I’m certainly not asking that everyone become an engineer. The fashion consequences alone would be very troubling.

I got here today by taking a good job in the aerospace industry. I started writing jokes for a local comedy show. I left my full-time regular engineering job October 3, 1986 roughly, to pursue a career in television. I just got started and one thing led to some other pretty good things. So turn any concern you have, any time you have it, about your future into excitement.

Wait, wait, there’s one more thing that’s not really advice, people. I guess it’s the closest thing I can provide to a command. Vote! You have to vote. Thank you! I’m glad this is not controversial. Hang on, there’s just a little more! Voting is how we influence policymakers, it’s how we make big changes, it’s how we get things done. If you don’t want to vote, will you please just shut up, so the rest of us can get on with changing things for the better.

To me, the Founding Fathers, the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution, were nerds. They were trying to come up with a system that would always work for people who, for some reason, don’t always get along. And built in is change. That’s the key, and for me, the key to the progress—to the process—of science. And I remind you, Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution refers to the progress of science and useful arts. And that, to me, reflects this insight that our Founding Fathers had. Change is what you have to have in order to adapt. And that’s what you all are going to do as you go out to, dare I say it, change the world.

As Bruno Mars remarked, before we leave, I’d like to tell you a little something. Take a moment and consider what you have accomplished here at Goucher, and what you’ll be able to accomplish on account of your Goucher days. Whatever it cost, it’s priceless. Your diploma will be worth more tomorrow than it is today. It’ll be worth even more, far more, ten years from now. You have a liberal arts education. This enables you to understand the world in ways that many other people choose not to. So class of 2019, here’s wishing you excitement, optimism, and joy in what you do. Use your knowledge and your abilities to bring out the best in those around you, and let them bring out the best in you. We are all excited about your future because you can, and you will, dare I say it, change the world! This has been an honor. Thank you, thank you so much. Thank you. Woo!

Mindy Kaling: 'I just whispered, 'why not me?', Dartmouth - 2018

9 June 2018, Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA

Good morning to the Class of 2018, the faculty, the parents, the grandparents, fellow honorees, and the paid laughers I have scattered throughout the audience.

It is an honor to join you this morning for this special occasion.

It is also an honor to speak to you today from behind this gigantic tree stump. Like some sort of female Lorax with an advanced degree. That’s right, you guys; I’m hitting Dr. Seuss hard and early in this speech. Because Dartmouth grads have a privilege unique among all the Ivy League: We will be forced to be mini-experts on Dr. Seuss for our entire lives.

On my deathbed, I’ll be saying, “Did you know that his real name was Theodor Geisel? Did you know he was editor of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern?” And yes, while no U.S. Presidents have gone to Dartmouth, we can at least lay claim for the wonderful Dr. Seuss.

Another notable alumnus is Salmon P. Chase, the man on the $10,000 bill. A symbolically powerful piece of paper that’s largely useless in the real world. Like a degree in playwriting which I received from this very institution. Thank you for paying for that, Mom and Dad!

It’s a thrill to be back here in New Hampshire, the Granite State, known for two things: the place where you can legally not wear your seatbelt, and Adam Sandler’s birthplace.

New Hampshire has one of the best mottos of any state: “Live Free or Die.” For outsiders, it sounds like an exciting declaration of freedom; but when you’re here in January, “die” actually sounds like a pretty good option.

I remember the days when it was so cold your sneeze would become an ice sculpture before it hit the ground. In Los Angeles, where I live now, if I sneeze, I just call my doctor and have my blood replaced with that of a teenage track star. That’s normal there. I’m mostly track star right now.

Before I get any further, I should actually probably clarify who I am for the parents and grandparents in the audience who are thinking to themselves, “Who is this loud Indian woman? Is that the girl from Quantico? She looks so much worse in person.”

No, no, I’m not Priyanka Chopra, not even Padma Lakshmi. I’m the other Indian woman we have allowed to be on television, Mindy Kaling. Thank you, thank you.

You may remember me from my role on The Office as Kelly Kapoor, who internet commenters said was—quote—“shrill” and—quote—“took up valuable time that could have gone to Steve Carell.”

I then created and starred in my own TV show, The Mindy Project. Thank you, thank you very much. It was an uphill battle to get the show on the air, but it was worth it, because it enabled me to become Dartmouth’s most successful female minority show creator who has spoken at commencement!

Oh wait, no. Shonda Rhimes went here. Yup, and she’s created like 10 more shows than me, so great. No, cool. Cool, cool, cool, Shonda. Friggin’ role model, good for you.

But today is not about famous alumni. No, no. It’s about the men and women who have toiled in obscurity for years so that they might better our country. I speak, of course, of the 51 percent of Dartmouth grads who will go into finance—highest in the Ivy League! Look left. Look right. All three of you will be spending at least ten years in a white collar prison.

I know that going into the real world sounds scary, but it’s exciting too. Finally, you’ll be in control of your own lives. No longer will there be an irrational Board of Trustees telling you you can’t have hard liquor on campus, for the ridiculous reason that they don’t want you to die. Come tomorrow, no one can stop you from filling your apartment with $4.99 handles of Uncle Satan’s Unfiltered Potato Vodka. Go crazy.

It’s a real moment of reflection for me to be standing here speaking to all of you now, because it makes me harken back to my own time at my Dartmouth graduation. Madeleine Albright was my commencement speaker; and while I don’t remember any specific quotes she said, or even a general gist of what she was talking about, I do remember thinking: “I wonder what it will be like to have my own cell phone?”

How things have changed. For all I know, at this very moment, most of you are posting this speech on your Instagram stories with a GIF of Winnie the Pooh twerking. If you are, please at least use my official hashtag, MindyGoesBigGreenTwentyEighteen. Thank you.

I bet none of you remember a time before the internet. Hell, you probably don’t even remember a time before the Facebook page, “Dartmouth Memes for Cold AF Teens.” Yeah, yeah. I know about that. Made me feel like a real creep researching it. “Hello, I’m a 38‑year‑old woman who wants to join your teen Facebook group. It's for research, I swear!”

Meanwhile, when I was in college we didn’t even have Google. If you wanted to find out, say, how tall Ben Affleck was, you were out of luck. You just had to sit there, not knowing, and your entire day would be ruined.

Or, say I wanted to meet up with a friend—I couldn’t just text her. I had to walk outside and hope I accidentally bumped into her. Or, I “blitzed” her. Ah, BlitzMail. You know that feeling you have when you tell your friends that you “blitz” and they don’t get it and you roll your eyes all smug like “Oh, it’s a Dartmouth thing.” That ends today. You try to say “blitz” one hundred yards east of White River Junction and you will get laughed back to your one-room triple in the Choates.

Fun fact: In 2001, the year I graduated, a pinkeye epidemic broke out amongst my classmates because we were all using public BlitzMail iMac terminals and not washing our hands. Those are just the kind of the sexy stories indicative of my time at Dartmouth.

You have so many cool new things here now. Like, look at the new logo, the D-Pine. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of what college-aged Mindy thought a marijuana leaf might look like but I was too scared to actually find out. And this new House System sounds really cool! It's so Hogwarts-y! You know, you're sorted into your little Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, except they’re called … South House. West House. School House.

Okay, come on guys. School House? Really? We’re just saying what we see? That’s the laziest name I’ve ever heard in my life, and I've spent over a decade working on shows called The Office and The Mindy Project.

Still, I remember sitting where you’re sitting. I was so full of questions like, “When is this thing going to end?” and “How many friends can I invite to dinner and still have mom and dad pay?” And, most importantly, “Why didn’t I wear any clothes underneath my gown?”

Now we’re reaching the part of the speech where I am supposed to tell you something uplifting like “follow your dreams.”

In general, advice isn’t actually an effective way to change your life. If all it took to make your life great was hearing amazing advice, then everyone who watched TED Talks would be a millionaire.

So don’t trust any one story of how how to become successful. As Madeline Albright said at my Commencement—see, I don’t remember anything. And I did just fine.

So here is some practical advice that you may or may not remember at the end of this speech because, hey, that’s the gig:

1. First off, remove “Proficient at Word” from your resume. That is ridiculous. You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel of competency there. This is how you become proficient at Word: You open Word on your computer.

2. Most of your post-college life is simply filling out forms. Car insurance, health insurance, W-2s. W-4s, 1099s. Guess what? None of us know what any of those forms mean, but you will fill out a hundred of them before you die.

3. You never need more than one pancake. Trust me on this. Cartoons have trained us to want a giant stack of those bad boys, but order one first and then just see how you feel later.

4. This one is just for guys: When you go on dates, act as if every woman you’re talking to is a reporter for an online publication that you are scared of. One shouldn’t need the threat of public exposure and scorn to treat women well; but if that’s what it’s gonna take, fine. Date like everyone’s watching, because we are.

5. And this might be the most important—buy a toilet plunger. Trust me on this. Don’t wait until you need a plunger to buy a plunger.

Commencement is a time of transition for parents, too. That empty nest you were enjoying these past four years? Gone as soon as this speech is over. I hope you like full‑time lodgers who don’t pay rent, don’t do laundry, eat all the food in your fridge, and binge Family Guy on your sofa for weeks. That is your life now.

Although some of your graduates will be making more money than you—51% to be exact. And to the parents of those investment bankers, consultants, and hedge fund analysts—congratulations. Your kids will be fabulously wealthy but still somehow sharing your cell phone plan because it—quote—“saves everybody money.”

Okay, now let’s get real. Let me rip off the Band-Aid for all you, the ’18s. Next year, the next year of your life is going to be bad. You have been in the comfortable fleece-lined womb of mother Dartmouth for four years now, and you’re gonna go out in the cold, hard world.

Out there in the real world, there will be a target on your back. People will want to confirm their expectations of Ivy League graduates—that you’re a jerk, that you’re spoiled, that you use the word “summer” as a verb. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. I mean come on, the guy from the ten-thousand-dollar bill went to this school.

You’re graduating into a world where it seems like everything is falling apart. Trust in institutions are at a record low; the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore; and for all I know, the president just tweeted us into a war with Wakanda, a country that doesn’t exist.

So, Class of 2018, you are entering a world that we have toppled—we have toppled—like a Jenga tower, and we are relying on you to rebuild it.

But how can you do that with the knowledge that things are so unstable out there? I’ll tell you my secret, the one thing that has kept me going through the years, my superpower: delusion.

This is something I may share with our president, a fact that is both horrifying and interesting. Two years in, I think we can pretty safely say that he’s not getting carved onto Mount Rushmore; but damn if that isn’t a testament to how far you can get just by believing you’re the smartest, most successful person in the world.

My point is, you have to have insane confidence in yourself, even if it’s not real. You need to be your own cheerleader now, because there isn’t a room full of people waiting with pom‑poms to tell you, “You did it! We’ve been waiting all this time for you to succeed!”

So, I’m giving you permission to root for yourself. And while you’re at it, root for those around you, too. It took me a long time to realize that success isn’t a zero-sum game. Which leads me to the next part of my remarks.

I thought I might take a second to speak to the ladies in the audience. (Guys, take a break; you don’t have to pay attention during this part. Maybe spend the next 30 seconds thinking about all the extra money you’ll make in your life for doing the same job as a woman. Pretty sweet.)

Hey girls, we need to do a better job of supporting each other. I know that I am guilty of it too. We live in a world where it seems like there’s only room for one of us at the table. So when another woman shows up, we think, “Oh my god, she’s going to take the one woman spot! That was supposed to be mine!”

But that’s just what certain people want us to do! Wouldn’t it be better if we worked together to dismantle a system that makes us feel like there’s limited room for us? Because when women work together, we can accomplish anything. Even stealing the world’s most expensive diamond necklace from the Met Gala, like in Ocean’s 8, a movie starring me, which opens in theaters June 8th. And to that end, women, don’t be ashamed to toot your own horn like I just did.

Okay, guys, you can listen again. You didn’t miss much. Just remember to see Ocean’s 8, now playing in theaters nationwide. Ocean’s 8: Every con has its pros.

Now I wanted to share a little bit about me, Mindy Kaling, the Dartmouth student. When I came to Hanover in the fall of 1997, I was, as many of you were: driven, bright, ambitious, and really, really into The Black Eyed Peas.

I arrived here as a 17-year-old, took the lay of the land, and immediately began making a checklist of everything I wanted to accomplish. I told myself that by the time I graduated in 2001, I would have checked them all off.

And here was my freshman fall checklist: be on Hanover crew, on Lodge crew, be in an a cappella group, be in an improv troupe, write a play that’s performed at the Bentley, do a cartoon for the D, and try to be in a cool senior society. And guess what? I completed that checklist. But before you think: “Wait, why is this woman just bragging about her accomplishments from 17 years ago?”—keep listening.

Then, I graduated. And I made a new checklist for my twenties: get married by 27, have kids at 30, win an Oscar, be the star of my own TV show, host the MTV Music Awards (this was 2001, guys; it made more sense then), and do it all while being a size 2.

Well, spoiler alert: I’ve only done one of those things, and I’m not sure I will ever do the others. And that is a really scary feeling. Knowing how far that I’ve strayed from the person that I was hoping to be when I was 21.

I will tell you a personal story. After my daughter was born in December, I remember bringing her home and being in my house with her for the first time and thinking, “Huh. According to movies and TV, this is traditionally the time when my mother and spouse are supposed to be here, sharing this experience with me.” And I looked around, and I had neither. And for a moment, it was kind of scary. Like, “Can I do this by myself?”

But then, that feeling went away, because the reality is, I’m not doing it by myself. I’m surrounded by family and friends who love and support me. And the joy I feel from being with my daughter Katherine eclipses anything from any crazy checklist.

So I just want to tell you guys, don’t be scared if you don’t do things in the right order, or if you don’t do some things at all. I didn’t think I’d have a child before I got married, but hey, it turned out that way, and I wouldn’t change a thing. I didn’t think I’d have dessert before breakfast today, but hey, it turned out that way and I wouldn’t change a thing.

So if I could impart any advice, it’s this: If you have a checklist, good for you. Structured ambition can sometimes be motivating. But also, feel free to let it go. Yes, my culminating advice from my speech is a song from the Disney animated movie, Frozen.

I’ve covered a lot of ground today, not all of it was serious, but I wanted to leave you with this: I was not someone who should have the life I have now, and yet I do. I was sitting in the chair you are literally sitting in right now and I just whispered, “Why not me?” And I kept whispering it for seventeen years; and here I am, someone that this school deemed worthy enough to speak to you at your Commencement.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, but especially not yourself. Go conquer the world. Just remember this: Why not you? You made it this far.

Thank you very much, and congratulations to the Class of 2018.

Barack Obama: 'The ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt,', Notre Dame University - 2009

17 May 2009, South Bend, Indiana, USA

Well, first of all, congratulations, Class of 2009. (Applause.) Congratulations to all the parents, the cousins — (applause) — the aunts, the uncles — all the people who helped to bring you to the point that you are here today. Thank you so much to Father Jenkins for that extraordinary introduction, even though you said what I want to say much more elegantly. (Laughter.) You are doing an extraordinary job as president of this extraordinary institution. (Applause.) Your continued and courageous — and contagious — commitment to honest, thoughtful dialogue is an inspiration to us all. (Applause.)

Good afternoon. To Father Hesburgh, to Notre Dame trustees, to faculty, to family: I am honored to be here today. (Applause.) And I am grateful to all of you for allowing me to be a part of your graduation.

And I also want to thank you for the honorary degree that I received. I know it has not been without controversy. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but these honorary degrees are apparently pretty hard to come by. (Laughter.) So far I’m only 1 for 2 as President. (Laughter and applause.) Father Hesburgh is 150 for 150. (Laughter and applause.) I guess that’s better. (Laughter.) So, Father Ted, after the ceremony, maybe you can give me some pointers to boost my average.

I also want to congratulate the Class of 2009 for all your accomplishments. And since this is Notre Dame —

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Abortion is murder! Stop killing children!

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: That’s all right. And since —

AUDIENCE: We are ND! We are ND!

AUDIENCE: Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

THE PRESIDENT: We’re fine, everybody. We’re following Brennan’s adage that we don’t do things easily. (Laughter.) We’re not going to shy away from things that are uncomfortable sometimes. (Applause.)

Now, since this is Notre Dame I think we should talk not only about your accomplishments in the classroom, but also in the competitive arena. (Laughter.) No, don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about that. (Laughter.) We all know about this university’s proud and storied football team, but I also hear that Notre Dame holds the largest outdoor 5-on-5 basketball tournament in the world — Bookstore Basketball. (Applause.)

Now this excites me. (Laughter.) I want to congratulate the winners of this year’s tournament, a team by the name of “Hallelujah Holla Back.” (Laughter and applause.) Congratulations. Well done. Though I have to say, I am personally disappointed that the “Barack O’Ballers” did not pull it out this year. (Laughter.) So next year, if you need a 6’2″ forward with a decent jumper, you know where I live. (Laughter and applause.)

Every one of you should be proud of what you have achieved at this institution. One hundred and sixty-three classes of Notre Dame graduates have sat where you sit today. Some were here during years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare — periods of relative peace and prosperity that required little by way of sacrifice or struggle.

You, however, are not getting off that easy. You have a different deal. Your class has come of age at a moment of great consequence for our nation and for the world — a rare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age. It’s a privilege and a responsibility afforded to few generations — and a task that you’re now called to fulfill.

This generation, your generation is the one that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to a global economy that left millions behind even before the most recent crisis hit — an economy where greed and short-term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day’s work. (Applause.)

Your generation must decide how to save God’s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it. Your generation must seek peace at a time when there are those who will stop at nothing to do us harm, and when weapons in the hands of a few can destroy the many. And we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity — diversity of thought, diversity of culture, and diversity of belief.

In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family. (Applause.)

And it’s this last challenge that I’d like to talk about today, despite the fact that Father John stole all my best lines. (Laughter.) For the major threats we face in the 21st century — whether it’s global recession or violent extremism; the spread of nuclear weapons or pandemic disease — these things do not discriminate. They do not recognize borders. They do not see color. They do not target specific ethnic groups.

Moreover, no one person, or religion, or nation can meet these challenges alone. Our very survival has never required greater cooperation and greater understanding among all people from all places than at this moment in history.

Unfortunately, finding that common ground — recognizing that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a “single garment of destiny” — is not easy. And part of the problem, of course, lies in the imperfections of man — our selfishness, our pride, our stubbornness, our acquisitiveness, our insecurities, our egos; all the cruelties large and small that those of us in the Christian tradition understand to be rooted in original sin. We too often seek advantage over others. We cling to outworn prejudice and fear those who are unfamiliar. Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism; in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice. And so, for all our technology and scientific advances, we see here in this country and around the globe violence and want and strife that would seem sadly familiar to those in ancient times.

We know these things; and hopefully one of the benefits of the wonderful education that you’ve received here at Notre Dame is that you’ve had time to consider these wrongs in the world; perhaps recognized impulses in yourself that you want to leave behind. You’ve grown determined, each in your own way, to right them. And yet, one of the vexing things for those of us interested in promoting greater understanding and cooperation among people is the discovery that even bringing together persons of good will, bringing together men and women of principle and purpose — even accomplishing that can be difficult.

The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm. The gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of HIV/AIDS, but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts. Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships can be relieved. (Applause.)

The question, then — the question then is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without, as Father John said, demonetizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?
And of course, nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion.

As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called “The Audacity of Hope.” A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the Illinois primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life — but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website — an entry that said I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor said he had assumed I was a reasonable person, he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.” Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn’t change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that — when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground. That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.”

So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions, let’s reduce unintended pregnancies. (Applause.) Let’s make adoption more available. (Applause.) Let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. (Applause.) Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women.” Those are things we can do. (Applause.)

Now, understand — understand, Class of 2009, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.

Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words. It’s a way of life that has always been the Notre Dame tradition. (Applause.) Father Hesburgh has long spoken of this institution as both a lighthouse and a crossroads. A lighthouse that stands apart, shining with the wisdom of the Catholic tradition, while the crossroads is where “¼differences of culture and religion and conviction can co-exist with friendship, civility, hospitality, and especially love.” And I want to join him and Father John in saying how inspired I am by the maturity and responsibility with which this class has approached the debate surrounding today’s ceremony. You are an example of what Notre Dame is about. (Applause.)

This tradition of cooperation and understanding is one that I learned in my own life many years ago — also with the help of the Catholic Church.

You see, I was not raised in a particularly religious household, but my mother instilled in me a sense of service and empathy that eventually led me to become a community organizer after I graduated college. And a group of Catholic churches in Chicago helped fund an organization known as the Developing Communities Project, and we worked to lift up South Side neighborhoods that had been devastated when the local steel plant closed.

And it was quite an eclectic crew — Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish and African American organizers, working-class black, white, and Hispanic residents — all of us with different experiences, all of us with different beliefs. But all of us learned to work side by side because all of us saw in these neighborhoods other human beings who needed our help — to find jobs and improve schools. We were bound together in the service of others.

And something else happened during the time I spent in these neighborhoods — perhaps because the church folks I worked with were so welcoming and understanding; perhaps because they invited me to their services and sang with me from their hymnals; perhaps because I was really broke and they fed me. (Laughter.) Perhaps because I witnessed all of the good works their faith inspired them to perform, I found myself drawn not just to the work with the church; I was drawn to be in the church. It was through this service that I was brought to Christ.

And at the time, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was the Archbishop of Chicago. (Applause.) For those of you too young to have known him or known of him, he was a kind and good and wise man. A saintly man. I can still remember him speaking at one of the first organizing meetings I attended on the South Side. He stood as both a lighthouse and a crossroads — unafraid to speak his mind on moral issues ranging from poverty and AIDS and abortion to the death penalty and nuclear war. And yet, he was congenial and gentle in his persuasion, always trying to bring people together, always trying to find common ground. Just before he died, a reporter asked Cardinal Bernardin about this approach to his ministry. And he said, “You can’t really get on with preaching the Gospel until you’ve touched hearts and minds.”

My heart and mind were touched by him. They were touched by the words and deeds of the men and women I worked alongside in parishes across Chicago. And I’d like to think that we touched the hearts and minds of the neighborhood families whose lives we helped change. For this, I believe, is our highest calling.

Now, you, Class of 2009, are about to enter the next phase of your life at a time of great uncertainty. You’ll be called to help restore a free market that’s also fair to all who are willing to work. You’ll be called to seek new sources of energy that can save our planet; to give future generations the same chance that you had to receive an extraordinary education. And whether as a person drawn to public service, or simply someone who insists on being an active citizen, you will be exposed to more opinions and ideas broadcast through more means of communication than ever existed before. You’ll hear talking heads scream on cable, and you’ll read blogs that claim definitive knowledge, and you will watch politicians pretend they know what they’re talking about. (Laughter.) Occasionally, you may have the great fortune of actually seeing important issues debated by people who do know what they’re talking about — by well-intentioned people with brilliant minds and mastery of the facts. In fact, I suspect that some of you will be among those brightest stars.

And in this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true, have confidence in the values with which you’ve been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. In other words, stand as a lighthouse.

But remember, too, that you can be a crossroads. Remember, too, that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It’s the belief in things not seen. It’s beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us. And those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

And this doubt should not push us away our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open and curious and eager to continue the spiritual and moral debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us even as we cling to our faith to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works and charity and kindness and service that moves hearts and minds.

For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It’s no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule — the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. The call to serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth.

So many of you at Notre Dame — by the last count, upwards of 80 percent — have lived this law of love through the service you’ve performed at schools and hospitals; international relief agencies and local charities. Brennan is just one example of what your class has accomplished. That’s incredibly impressive, a powerful testament to this institution. (Applause.)

Now you must carry the tradition forward. Make it a way of life. Because when you serve, it doesn’t just improve your community, it makes you a part of your community. It breaks down walls. It fosters cooperation. And when that happens — when people set aside their differences, even for a moment, to work in common effort toward a common goal; when they struggle together, and sacrifice together, and learn from one another — then all things are possible.

After all, I stand here today, as President and as an African American, on the 55th anniversary of the day that the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Now, Brown was of course the first major step in dismantling the “separate but equal” doctrine, but it would take a number of years and a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all of God’s children. There were freedom rides and lunch counters and Billy clubs, and there was also a Civil Rights Commission appointed by President Eisenhower. It was the 12 resolutions recommended by this commission that would ultimately become law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
There were six members of this commission. It included five whites and one African American; Democrats and Republicans; two Southern governors, the dean of a Southern law school, a Midwestern university president, and your own Father Ted Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame. (Applause.) So they worked for two years, and at times, President Eisenhower had to intervene personally since no hotel or restaurant in the South would serve the black and white members of the commission together. And finally, when they reached an impasse in Louisiana, Father Ted flew them all to Notre Dame’s retreat in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin — (applause) — where they eventually overcame their differences and hammered out a final deal.

And years later, President Eisenhower asked Father Ted how on Earth he was able to broker an agreement between men of such different backgrounds and beliefs. And Father Ted simply said that during their first dinner in Wisconsin, they discovered they were all fishermen. (Laughter.) And so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake. They fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history.

I will not pretend that the challenges we face will be easy, or that the answers will come quickly, or that all our differences and divisions will fade happily away — because life is not that simple. It never has been.

But as you leave here today, remember the lessons of Cardinal Bernardin, of Father Hesburgh, of movements for change both large and small. Remember that each of us, endowed with the dignity possessed by all children of God, has the grace to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we all seek the same love of family, the same fulfillment of a life well lived. Remember that in the end, in some way we are all fishermen.

If nothing else, that knowledge should give us faith that through our collective labor, and God’s providence, and our willingness to shoulder each other’s burdens, America will continue on its precious journey towards that more perfect union. Congratulations, Class of 2009. May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

James Carville: 'Failure is to success as oxygen is to life', Tulane University - 2008

17 May 2008, Tulane University, Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans

As you see, my speech will be awfully short on advice, but I do advise you that when you pick a spouse, pick one – be as lucky as I did, and pick one that fascinates you, and challenges you, and entertains you, that you enjoy like so much, as I do with Mary, and we're delighted to be returned to the city that we fell in love in, and we got married in, and now we're going to live in.

Now, I want to welcome all you "old" school fans – (Applause) – I left Louisiana in 1986 and returned in 2008, which is 22 years. To give you some idea of 22 years -- that was how long it took me to get out of undergraduate school – (Laughter) – or it's how long it took FEMA to get to New Orleans. I don't know which one, but -- (Laughter)

All of these commencements, and I've – from everywhere – from Pala Alto to Princeton, from Boulder to Boston, from Athens to Ann Arbor, all have a certain tenor, and that is that a commencement speaker is supposed to deliver some wisdom or observation, something about what they've learned, to you, and that's what's supposed to take you forward in life -- and you will get no such thing here in New Orleans. (Laughter) I'll promise you. The May air is full of such nauseating bunk. (Laughter).

But when you listen to what Dr. Cowen said – and I did the research – I thought I might use this, as the rabbis would say, as a teaching moment. And a teaching moment is not what I have to teach you. It's what "you" have taught "me," and what you have taught the world. That's right. This is about you giving me and the world an education.

The first thing you taught me – I suspected this was true, but I didn't know it. I now know it. The age of cynicism is dead. You drove a stake right through the heart of it. (Applause) Your fingerprints are all over it. You heard it. You left because of the storm. You had to disperse all over the country – 600 different schools. You heard about, "Oh, the heat, the humidity, the corruption, the crime," the this, "the geographics" – whatever -- you heard every reason that you shouldn't come back, and you did. Every cynic had every reason for you.

I want to remind you of what C.S. Lewis said in the 1943 essay. He said, "You can't go on seeing through things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is to say is not to see." And every cynic, every person, could see through everything, but you felt – you felt that -- you felt it. And your feelings are much, much more important to you than your sight. Those are the most important things they have. And you saw it. And when this history of his generation is written – and Dr. Cowen is right, you are going to be the next-greatest generation. At the top – at the very top of this generation is going to be the Tulane Class of 2008. (Applause)

Lesson Number 2 -- in this teaching moment we're having here is: You did not fear failure. And I want to talk you a little bit about failure. Failure is to success what oxygen is to life. You say, "Wait a minute. That sounds absurd. How can -- "Failure is to success what oxygen is to life." There can be no success without failure. You instinctively understood that. Because in September of 2005, this was not an assured thing – not at all. In order to succeed you have to fail.

Let me give you an example. Now you say, "I'm a little bit skeptical of this. I need some proof." Okay. Who is the most successful American ever? Who is the person that – okay, I'll throw a name out just for the hell of it. How about Abe Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois? Pretty stout, wasn't he? Pretty stout. Who is the greatest failure in American history? Abraham Lincoln.

Let me read to you about Lincoln's failures, because I think it's very important to keep these in mind as you go forward, so you never fear failure. Lincoln failed in business as a shopkeeper. He failed as a farmer. He ran for the State legislature and lost. His sweetheart died. He had a nervous breakdown. When he finally got to the State legislature, he ran for Speaker and lost. He ran for Vice President -- lost. He ran for the Senate -- lost again. And when he was finally elected President – the nation he was elected to lead fell apart. As Commander in Chief, he was inexperienced. He lost the First Battle of Manassas, Big Bethel, Kessler's Cross Lanes, McDowell, Fort Monroe, Cross Keys, Fort Republic, Gaines' Mill, Cedar Mountain, Fair Oaks, Fairfield, Gap, Second Manassas, he pressed on, then he lost Harpers Ferry, Shepherdstown and the Battle of Fredericksburg.

And that was just a partial list of what he failed at. He was prone to depression during the war. His son, Willie, died, and his wife was the subject of bitter political attacks.

You're not going to fail as much as Lincoln (Laughter), so don't worry about it. Have no fear. Have no fear. And you've already shown – you've already shown a knack for looking failure in the eye and pressing on, and pressing on.

I also think – Lesson Number 3 -- it is completely and totally appropriate that this class graduate in this building. A little bit about the history of this building. (Applause) There is a – I think a great movie, but certainly a movie that's produced a line that defines the generation before you. A Field of Dreams, where they said, "If you build it, they will come." "If you build it, they will come." And they built this building, and they came. The Rolling Stones came here – largest indoor concert ever. President – my wife's idol, President George H. W. Bush was nominated in this building. Pope John Paul II came to this building. Six Super Bowls – more than any other – come to this building. The BCS Championship – of which my beloved Tigers have won two -- have come to this building. Mohammed Ali came here for a championship fight; he came to this building. We all have the energy of this building hosting people who had no place left to go during Hurricane Katrina. This building has a glorious history. Many great things have happened here.

But you remember this for the rest of your life: Maybe the greatest thing that happened here is that this class came here to graduate. Because the maxim, "If we build it, they will come," has now changed. And it is now, "We will come and we build it." And that marks a departure. And that's the significance of what you mean, and what you mean in this building that has hosted and seen, and been a part of so much.

So you will go on, and because of what you've learned and what you felt, and what you all have been through, you'll all go far in life. Some of you will go distant from here -- many places, many achievements, many accomplishments. What I want you to try to do is save a sliver in your heart for this magnificent university and its faculty, who educated you; for this utterly wonderful, interesting, fascinating city, who thanks you; and for this very humble and respectful commencement speaker, who loves you.

Thank you. (Applause)

Arno Rafael Minkkinen: 'Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus', Finding Your Own Vision, New England School of Photography - 2004

June 2004, New England School of Photography, Waltham, Masachussets, USA

We are in the midst of sea change – a tidal wave might be more accurate – with the medium of photography. While the lens is still firmly fixed to the camera body, the body itself appears to have imploded. The inner workings, that is—the guts of the camera from Talbot’s days (when cameras were called “mousetraps” by his wife who was always tripping over them) have changed faster than anyone expected.

The digital camera, the D-SLR, has become the new tool for lens-based professionals and artists almost overnight. Everywhere. We all have them now. But the pictures have not changed. Nor have the ground rules for making them. The need for pictures that make a mark on our lives, that give meaning to experience, that park themselves deep in our consciousness, the way new music always does, has never been greater, the appetite for lens-based visual culture stands above most other mediums of communication hands down.

In the art world, photography has stepped forward as the most important art medium of our times.

Roberta Smith, writing for New York Times a few years back, put it this way (and I am paraphrasing here): “In the last 30 years no medium has had a more profound effect on art than the medium of photography.” This, mind you, comes from one of America’s foremost critics of sculpture!

There is a bus station in Helsinki I want to introduce you to, a bus station just next to Eliel Saarinen’s famous train station. Surrounded by Jugenstil architectural gems like the National Theater and the National Art Museum, the bus station makes a cool backdrop for Magnum wannabees armed with D-SLRs and vintage Leica’s.

You might find yourself there sometime, too.

But getting back to the bus station and what makes it famous, at least among the students I teach at UMass Lowell, the University of Art & Design Helsinki, École d’Art Appliqués in Lausanne, or the many workshops I give in Tuscany, Maine and Santa Fe, is the metaphor it offers students and professionals alike for creative continuity in a life-long journey in photography, the metaphor it provides to young artists seeking to discover their own unique vision one day.

The Helsinki Bus Station: let me describe what happens there.

Some two-dozen platforms are laid out in a square at the heart of the city. At the head of each platform is a sign posting the numbers of the buses that leave from that particular platform. The bus numbers might read as follows: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.

Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer stopping at bus stop intervals along the way where the same numbers are again repeated: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.

Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer, meaning the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity.

Ok, so you have been working for three years making platinum studies of nudes. Call it bus #21.

You take those three years of work on the nude to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. His bus, 71, was on the same line. Or you take them to a gallery in Paris and are reminded to check out Bill Brandt, bus 58, and so on.

Shocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years others have already done.

So you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform.

This time you are going to make 8×10 view camera color snapshots of people lying on the beach from a cherry picker crane.

You spend three years at it and three grand and produce a series of works that elicit the same comment: haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach? Or, if they are steamy black and white 8×10 camera view of palm trees swaying off a beachfront, haven’t you seen the work of Sally Mann?

So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What to do?

It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

Why, because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

For a time maybe 21 and 71 dovetail one another but soon they split off as well, Irving Penn is headed elsewhere.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

And as the years mount up and your work takes begins to pile up, it won’t be long before the critics become very intrigued, not just by what separates your work from a Sally Mann or a Ralph Gibson, but by what you did when you first got started!

You regain the whole bus route in fact. The vintage prints made in twenty years ago are suddenly re-evaluated, and for what it is worth, start selling at a premium.

At the end of the line—where the bus comes to rest and the driver can get out for a smoke or better yet a cup of coffee—that’s when the work is done. It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision.

Why, because you stayed on the bus.

When I began photography I was enamored with the work of Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals, and Jerry Uelsmann. I was on their platforms. Each told me that it was possible to use your mind to make pictures. As a copywriter on the Minolta account (before I became a photographer) I wrote: “What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” I took that credo and made it my own. Not with multiple images like Uelsmann or in sequences like Michals. But it was Ralph Gibson’s images that haunted me.

There was this one picture in particular of hands coming up over the prow of boat he made in 1970 that I loved. I had picture of my foot coming over the prow of a Finnish rowboat the other way made in 1976. I am sure his image had inspired mine even though I wasn’t thinking about it when I made my picture.

In 1989, there was a show in Antibes called Three Masters of the Surreal with Eikoh Hosoe, the great Japanese master, Ralph Gibson, and humbly, myself. At the party after the vernissage, I told Ralph about my trepidations when I first began photography. He nodded his head and said, “When I first saw your work (this was in 1975 or thereabouts), I had that feeling of something familiar.” But then he was quick to add: “But you know, it didn’t take you long to find your way.”

I had found the difference. Ralph went on to photograph women and walls, color and surreal light. I continued my bus route less haunted, more assured.

So, our best chance of making our voice and vision heard is to find that common attribute by which the work can be recognized, by which audiences are made curious. It can happen early, as my teacher Harry Callahan stated it: you never get much better than your first important works. And they come soon.

At an auction in London at Sotheby’s a few years back, one of my pieces came up for bidding. It shows my upside down face with mouth wide open on a boardwalk in Narragansett, Rhode Island. When the auctioneer announced the piece, certainly he or she didn’t describe it as a student work, which, in fact, it was. I had made it for Harry’s class.

And it is why I teach. Teachers who say, “Oh, it’s just student work,” should maybe think twice about teaching.

Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do.

And so, if your heart is set on 8×10 platinum landscapes in misty southern terrains, work your way through those who inspire you, ride their bus route and damn those who would say you are merely repeating what has been done before. Wait for the months and years to pass and soon your differences will begin to appear with clarity and intelligence, when your originality will become visible, even the works from those very first years of trepidation when everything you did seemed so done before.

We can do a whole lot of things in art, become ten different artists, but if we do that, there is great danger that we will communicate very little in the end. I say ride the bus of your dreams and stay the course.

In closing, I now want to take you to Switzerland where I also teach.

Stand back, stand back, far enough so you can see your own mountain top, then head straight for it knowing it will disappear from sight for most of your life as you meander the hidden forest trails that lift you ever higher even as many sections force you to drop down into the mountainside pockets of disappointment or even despair, but you will be climbing soon enough and always headed towards your goal.

There will be those special occasions, and may there be many of them, when the fruits of your labors are suddenly made visible, to be celebrated, when you will again see that peak, only closer now, giving you the confidence to step forward ever more briskly and bravely.

At one point the tree line will thin out the way hair on the top of old man begins to bald away but air will be clear and the path sure.

At the top you will delight in what you have accomplished as much as become aware of peaks far higher than what you had ever dreamed of, peaks that from the distance when you first saw them were hard to judge for their heights.

But now you see them way up there but your climbing days are done.

If you look up to those lofty peaks with raging jealousy, you will end your days in sadness and regret.

If you look down at the path you came up, you can become proud or even arrogant if you like of every step you took.

But if you skim the horizon with your eyes and take in the gorgeous sweep of panorama before you, you will know peace and rare humility.

We do not have to be number one in this world. We only have to be number one to ourselves. There is a special peace that comes with such humility, one that showers respect on you from your peers both above and below you.

When you reach this peak in life, you’ve reached the highest peak of them all.

God can’t bless both sides of a football field any more than she or he should bless one country over another.

You can’t be number one without having a number deux, tres, quatro, or funf.

It’s a lesson we are back in the classrooms of America learning I think. I hope.

When I see bumper stickers that read my son made the dean’s list, I see all the sons and daughters that didn’t. Tracey Moffatt has this poignant series of works dedicated to athletes who’ve come in fourth place: no gold, no silver, not even bronze. Being number uno? Stardom is no dream to chase. We just need to be good. And make good work.

So, be the caretaker of your vision. Make it famous. And above all, remember, that art is risk made visible.

Good luck and see you out there. You’re going to be great.

Atul Gawande: 'Curiosity and What Equality Really Means', UCLA Medical School - 2018

1 June 2018, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA

I want to start with a story. One night, on my surgery rotation, during my third year of medical school, I followed my chief resident into the trauma bay in the emergency department. We’d been summoned to see a prisoner who’d swallowed half a razor blade and slashed his left wrist with the corner of the crimp on a toothpaste tube. He was about thirty, built like a boxer, with a tattooed neck, hands shackled to the gurney, and gauze around his left wrist showing bright crimson seeping through.

The first thing out of his mouth was a creepy comment about the chief resident, an Asian-American woman. I won’t say what he said. Just know he managed in only a few words to be racist, sexist, and utterly menacing to her. She turned on her heels, handed me the clipboard, and said, “He’s all yours.”

I looked at the two policemen with him to see what they were going to do. I don’t know what I expected. That they’d yell at him? Beat him? But they only looked at me impassively, maybe slightly amused. He was all mine.

So what now?

Graduates, wherever you go from here, and whatever you do, you will be tested. And the test will be about your ability to hold onto your principles. The foundational principle of medicine, going back centuries, is that all lives are of equal worth.

This is a radical idea, one ultimately inscribed in our nation’s founding documents: we are all created equal and should be respected as such. I do not think it a mere coincidence that among the fifty-six founding fathers who signed the declaration of our independence was a physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush. He was a committed revolutionary and abolitionist precisely because of his belief in the principle.

We in medicine do not always live up to that principle. History has been about the struggle to close the gap between the aspiration and the reality. But when that gap is exposed—when it turns out that some people get worse or no treatment because of their lack of money, lack of connections, background, darker skin pigment, or additional X chromosome—we are at least ashamed about it. We believe a C.E.O. and a cabbie with the same heart disease deserve the same chance at survival.

Hospitals are one of the very few places left where you encounter the whole span of society. Walking the halls, you begin to understand that the average American is someone who has a high-school education and thirty thousand dollars a year in per-capita earnings, out of which thirty per cent goes to taxes and another thirty per cent to housing and health-care costs. (These Americans are also told, by the way, that people like them, the majority of the population, have no future in a knowledge economy, because, hey, what can anyone do about it, anyway?) Working in health care, you also know, more than most, that we incarcerate more people than any other economically developed country; that thirty per cent of adults carry a criminal arrest record; that seven million people are currently incarcerated, on parole, or on probation; and that a massive and troubling proportion of all of them are mentally ill or black.

Most people don’t have this broad vantage. We all occupy our own bubbles. Trust in others, even our neighbors, is at an historic low. Much of society has become like an airplane boarding line, with different rights and privileges for zones one to ninety-seven, depending on your wealth, frequent-flier miles, credit rating, and S.A.T. scores; and many of those in line think—though no one likes to admit it—that they deserve what they have more than the others behind them. Then the boarding agent catches some people from zone eighty-four jumping ahead of the people in zone fifty-seven, and all hell breaks loose.

Insisting that people are equally worthy of respect is an especially challenging idea today. In medicine, you see people who are troublesome in every way: the complainer, the person with the unfriendly tone, the unwitting bigot, the guy who, as they say, makes “poor life choices.” People can be untrustworthy, even scary. When they’re an actual threat—as the inmate was for my chief resident—you have to walk away. But you will also see lots of people whom you might have written off prove generous, caring, resourceful, brilliant. You don’t have to like or trust everyone to believe their lives are worth preserving.

We’ve divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.

Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity. Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people—to insure, for instance, that you’ve given them enough anesthetic before doing a procedure. To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others and the world beyond your boarding zone.

We are in a dangerous moment because every kind of curiosity is under attack—scientific curiosity, journalistic curiosity, artistic curiosity, cultural curiosity. This is what happens when the abiding emotions have become anger and fear. Underneath that anger and fear are often legitimate feelings of being ignored and unheard—a sense, for many, that others don’t care what it’s like in their shoes. So why offer curiosity to anyone else?

Once we lose the desire to understand—to be surprised, to listen and bear witness—we lose our humanity. Among the most important capacities that you take with you today is your curiosity. You must guard it, for curiosity is the beginning of empathy. When others say that someone is evil or crazy, or even a hero or an angel, they are usually trying to shut off curiosity. Don’t let them. We are all capable of heroic and of evil things. No one and nothing that you encounter in your life and career will be simply heroic or evil. Virtue is a capacity. It can always be lost or gained. That potential is why all of our lives are of equal worth.

In medicine, you are asked to open yourself to others’ lives and perspectives—to people as well as to circumstances you do not and perhaps will not understand. This is part of what I love most about this profession. It aims to sustain bedrock values that matter across all of society.

But the work of preserving those values is hard. When I began my story, I made a point of not telling you the inmate’s crime, although one of the policemen told me. I wasn’t sure whether it’d change how open you’d be to putting yourself in my shoes as I wrestled with what to do.

The man’s vital signs were normal. He had no abdominal tenderness. An X-ray showed the razor hadn’t perforated his gastrointestinal tract. I put on gloves and unwrapped his blood-soaked dressing. I held pressure. He’d made numerous slashes but none deep enough to reach an artery. I’d heard that inmates sometimes swallowed blades wrapped in cellophane or inflicted wounds on themselves that, though not life-threatening, were severe enough to get them time out of prison. This man had done both.

I tried to summon enough curiosity to wonder what it had taken to push him over that edge, but I couldn’t. I only saw a bully. As I reluctantly set about suturing together the long strips of skin on his forearm, he kept up a stream of invective: about the hospital, the policemen, the inexpert job I was doing. I don’t do well when I feel humiliated. I had the urge to tell him to shut up and be a little appreciative. I thought about abandoning him.

But he’d controlled himself enough to hold still for my ministrations. And I suddenly remembered a lesson a professor had taught about brain function. When people speak, they aren’t just expressing their ideas; they are, even more, expressing their emotions. And it’s the emotions that they really want heard. So I stopped listening to the man’s words and tried to listen for the emotions.

“You seem really angry and like you feel disrespected,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I am. I am angry and disrespected.”

His voice changed. He told me that I have no idea what it was like inside. He’d been in solitary for two years straight. His eyes began to water. He calmed down. I did, too. For the next hour, I just sewed and listened, trying to hear the feelings behind his words.

I didn’t understand him or like him. But all it took to see his humanity—to be able to treat him—was to supply that tiny bit of openness and curiosity.

Graduates, you have studied for thousands of hours on end. You will be licensed to make diagnoses and prescribe an armament of drugs and procedures. Most of all, you will be given trust to see human beings at their most vulnerable and serve them. That trust is earned because of your values, your commitment to serving all as equals, and your openness to people’s humanity. The renewal of these values is why we’re all so grateful to be here—and so grateful that you will carry those values on, beyond us.

Tim Cook: - 'If you hope to change the world, you must find your fearlessness', Duke University - 2018

13 May 2018, Duke University,

Hello, Blue Devils! It’s great to be back.

It’s an honor to stand before you—both as your commencement speaker and a fellow Duke graduate.

I earned my degree from the Fuqua School in 1988. In preparing for this speech, I reached out to one of my favorite professors from back then. Bob Reinheimer taught a great course in Management Communications, which included sharpening your public speaking skills.

We hadn’t spoken for decades, so I was thrilled when he told me: he remembered a particularly gifted public speaker who took his class in the 1980s…

With a bright mind and a charming personality!
He said he knew—way back then—this person was destined for greatness.

You can imagine how this made me feel. Professor Reinheimer had an eye for talent. And, if I do say so, I think his instincts were right…

Melinda Gates has really made her mark on the world.

I’m grateful to Bob, Dean Boulding, and all of my Duke professors. Their teachings have stayed with me throughout my career.

I want to thank President Price, the Duke Faculty, and my fellow members of the Board of Trustees for the honor of speaking with you today. I’d also like to recognize this year’s honorary degree recipients.

And most of all, congratulations to the class of 2018!

No graduate gets to this moment alone. I want to acknowledge your parents, grandparents and friends here cheering you on, just as they have every step of the way. Let’s give them our thanks.

Today especially, I remember my mother, who watched me graduate from Duke. I wouldn’t have been there that day—or made it here today—without her support.

Let’s give our special thanks to all the mothers here today, on Mother’s Day.

I have wonderful memories here. Studying—and not studying—with people I still count as friends to this day. Cheering at Cameron for every victory.

Cheering even louder when that victory is over Carolina.

Look back over your shoulder fondly and say goodbye to act one of your life. And then quickly look forward. Act two begins today. It’s your turn to reach out and take the baton.

You enter the world at a time of great challenge.

Our country is deeply divided—and too many Americans refuse to hear any opinion that differs from their own.

Our planet is warming with devastating consequences—and there are some who deny it’s even happening.

Our schools and communities suffer from deep inequality—we fail to guarantee every student the right to a good education.

And yet we are not powerless in the face of these problems. You are not powerless to fix them.

No generation has ever held more power than yours. And no generation has been able to make change happen faster than yours can. The pace at which progress is possible has accelerated dramatically. Aided by technology, every individual has the tools, potential, and reach to build a better world.

That makes this the best time in history to be alive.

Whatever you choose to do with your life…

Wherever your passion takes you.

I urge you to take the power you have been given and use it for good. Aspire to leave this world better than you found it.

I didn’t always see life as clearly as I do now. But I’ve learned the greatest challenge of life is knowing when to break with conventional wisdom.

Don’t just accept the world you inherit today.

Don’t just accept the status quo.

No big challenge has ever been solved, and no lasting improvement has ever been achieved, unless people dare to try something different. Dare to think different.

I was lucky to learn from someone who believed this deeply. Someone who knew that changing the world starts with “following a vision, not a path.” He was my friend and mentor, Steve Jobs.

Steve’s vision was that great ideas come from a restless refusal to accept things as they are. And those principles still guide us at Apple today.

We reject the notion that global warming is inevitable.

That’s why we run Apple on 100% renewable energy.

We reject the excuse that getting the most out of technology means trading away your right to privacy.

So we choose a different path: Collecting as little of your data as possible. Being thoughtful and respectful when it’s in our care. Because we know it belongs to you.

In every way, at every turn, the question we ask ourselves is not ‘what can we do’ but ‘what should we do’.

Because Steve taught us that’s how change happens. And from him I learned to never be content with things as they are.

I believe this mindset comes naturally to young people…and you should never let go of that restlessness.

So today’s ceremony isn’t just about presenting you with a degree, it’s about presenting you with a question.

How will you challenge the status quo? How will you push the world forward?

Fifty years ago today—May 13th, 1968—Robert Kennedy was campaigning in Nebraska, and spoke to a group of students who were wrestling with that same question.

Those were troubled times, too. The U.S. was at war in Vietnam. There was violent unrest in America’s cities. And the country was still reeling from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King a month earlier.

Kennedy gave the students a call to action. When you look across this country, and when you see peoples’ lives held back by discrimination and poverty… when you see injustice and inequality. He said, you should be the last people to accept things as they are.

Let Kennedy’s words echo here today.

“You should be the last people to accept [it].”
Whatever path you’ve chosen…
Be it medicine, business, engineering, the humanities—whatever drives your passion. Be the last to accept the notion that the world you inherit cannot be improved.
Be the last to accept the excuse that says, “that’s just how things are done here.” Duke graduates, you should be the last people to accept it.
And you should be the first to change it.

The world-class education you’ve received—that you’ve worked so hard for—gives you opportunities that few people have.

You are uniquely qualified, and therefore uniquely responsible, to build a better way forward. That won’t be easy. It will require great courage.

But that courage will not only help you live your life to the fullest—it will empower you to transform the lives of others.

Last month I was in Birmingham to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. And I had the incredible privilege of spending time with women and men who marched and worked alongside him.

Many of them were younger at the time than you are now. They told me that when they defied their parents and joined the sit-ins and boycotts, when they faced the police dogs and firehoses, they were risking everything they had—becoming foot soldiers for justice without a second thought.

Because they knew that change had to come.
Because they believed so deeply in the cause of justice.

Because they knew, even with all the adversity they had faced, they had the chance to build something better for the next generation.

We can all learn from their example. If you hope to change the world, you must find your fearlessness.

Now, if you’re anything like I was on graduation day, maybe you’re not feeling so fearless.

Maybe you’re thinking about the job you hope to get, or wondering where you’re going to live, or how to repay that student loan. These, I know, are real concerns. I had them, too. But don’t let those worries stop you from making a difference.

Fearlessness means taking the first step, even if you don’t know where it will take you. It means being driven by a higher purpose, rather than by applause.

It means knowing that you reveal your character when you stand apart, more than when you stand with the crowd.

If you step up, without fear of failure… if you talk and listen to each other, without fear of rejection… if you act with decency and kindness, even when no one is looking, even if it seems small or inconsequential, trust me, the rest will fall into place.

More importantly, you’ll be able to tackle the big things when they come your way. It’s in those truly trying moments that the fearless inspire us.

Fearless like the students of Parkland, Florida—who refuse to be silent about the epidemic of gun violence, and have rallied millions to their cause.

Fearless like the women who say “me, too” and “time’s up”… women who cast light into dark places, and move us toward a more just and equal future.

Fearless like those who fight for the rights of immigrants… who understand that our only hopeful future is one that embraces all who want to contribute.

Duke graduates, be fearless.

Be the last people to accept things as they are, and the first people to stand up and change them for the better.

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at Page Auditorium to an overflow crowd. Students who couldn’t get a seat listened from outside on the lawn. Dr. King warned them that someday we would all have to atone, not only for the words and actions of the bad people, but for “the appalling silence and indifference of the good people, who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’”

Martin Luther King stood right here at Duke, and said: “The time is always right to do right.” For you, graduates, that time is now.
It will always be now.

It’s time to add your brick to the path of progress.

It’s time for all of us to move forward.
And it’s time for you to lead the way.
Thank you—and congratulations, Class of 2018!

Rex Tillerson: 'Freedom to seek the truth is the very essence of freedom itself', Virginia Military Institute - 2018

16 May 2018, Virginia Military Academy, Virginia, USA

Maintain and protect who you are, and remember that being a person with integrity is the most valuable asset you have. Don’t ever let anyone take it from you. Carefully consider the values and the culture of the organizations in which you seek to work. Look for employers who set high standards for personal conduct and who reward ethical leadership. Identify mentors who exemplify integrity and leadership excellence. Developing as a leader largely comes from also practicing good followership.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Above all else, do not lie', Harvard University Class Day - 2018

23 May 2018, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Good afternoon.
Harvard class of 2018, hello.
Thank you so much for asking me to be here today, it meant a lot to me, to know that you the students select the class day speaker. Thank you.
Congratulations to you and to all your loved ones who are here.

I spent a wonderful year at the Radcliffe Institute here at Harvard, doing a fellowship in 2011 and I fell in love with Cambridge and so it’s very good to be back.
My name is Chimamanda, in Igbo it means my personal spirit will never be broken. I’m not sure why but some people find it difficult to pronounce, a few years ago I spoke at an event in London,the English woman who was to introduce me had written my name phonetically on the piece of paper, and backstage she held on tightly to this paper while repeating the pronunciation over and over. I could tell, she was very eager toget it right.
And then she went on to the stage and gave a lovely introduction and ended with the words ‘ladies and gentlemen please welcome chimichanga.’

I told this story at a dinner party shortly afterwards and one of the guests seemed very annoyed that I was laughing about it, ‘that was so insulting’ he said ‘that English woman could have tried harder.’ But the truth is she did try very hard, in fact she ended up calling me a fried burrito because she had tried very hard and then ended up with an utterly human mistake. That was the result of anxiety.
So, the point of this story is not to say that you can call me chimichanga.The point is that intent matters, that context matters. Somebody might very well call me chimichanga out of a malicious desire to mock my name and that I would certainly not laugh about, for there is a difference between malice mistake and a mistake.
We now live in a culture of calling out, a culture of outrage, and you should call people out, you should be outraged, but always remember context and never disregard intent.

If I were asked the title of my address today, I would say Above all else do not lie or don’t lie too often,which is really to say tell the truth. But lying, the word, the idea, the act has such political potency in America today, but it somehow feels more apt. Above all else do not lie.

I grew up in Nigeria through military dictatorship and through incipient democracies and America always felt aspirational when yet another absurd thing happened politically we would say, this can never happen in America. But today the political discourse in America includes questions that are straight from the land of the absurd. Questions such as should we call a lie a lie? When is a lie a lie?
And so, class of 2018 at no time has it felt as agent as now that we must protect and value the truth.
Before I tell you about lying, I must first admit to lying. I routinely lie about my height even at the doctor’s office. In Lagos when I am meeting friends for lunch, I lie about being stuck in traffic when I’m really still at home only just getting dressed.
Now there are other lies, sadly however, I cannot tell you without having to kill you afterwards. But what I know is that I have always felt my best and done my best when I fear toward the truth when I don’t lie and my biggest regrets of my life are those times when I did not have the courage to embrace the truth.
Now telling the truth does not mean that everything will work out, actually it sometimes doesn’t. I’m not telling you to tell the truth because it will always work out, but because you will sleep well at night. And there’s nothing more beautiful than to wake up every day holding in your hand the full measure of your integrity.

Many years ago, before my first novel was published, I attended a writer’s conference here in the US. It was a gathering of many aspiring writers and a few established writers. Now the former, the aspiring writers sucking up to the latter, the established writers – was a revered ritual of the conference and so during one of the breaks I walked up to a man, an established writer whose name I knew well but whose work had not read. I shook his hand and told him what a fan I was, ‘I love your work’ I said. His wife was sitting next to him, ‘Which of his books have you read?’ she asked and I froze. ‘which have you read?’ she asked again.

Everyone at the table was quiet, watching, waiting. I smiled a mad smile, and I mumbled ‘the one about the man discovering himself’ which of course was complete bullshit.

But I thought it might be convincing because that kind of describes half of all the novels written by men. And the I fled but before I fled, I heard the writer say to his wife ‘honey you shouldn’t have done that.’ But the truth is that I shouldn’t have done that.

To read a novel is to give honor to art, why lie about giving honor to something to which you have not?
I was of course absolutely mortified that day but I have come to respect what that writer’s wife had, a fantastic bullshit detector and now that I have the good fortune of being an established writer, one who does not like to miss an opportunity to wallow in praise by the way, I can sense when a person is saying empty words and it feels much worse than they had said nothing at all, so have a good bullshit detector. If you don’t have it now, work on it. But having that detector means that you must also use it on yourself. And sometimes the hardest truths are those we have to tell ourselves.
When I started sending out my early writing to agents and publishers and started getting rejections, I convinced myself that my work had simply not found the right home, which might have been true. But there was another truth that took me much longer to consider, that the manuscript was not good. And in fact, the first novel I wrote or what I thought was a novel, eventually needed to be put away in a drawer and I’m so grateful that it was never published.

It is hard to tell ourselves the ruth about our failures, our fragilities, our uncertainties, it is hard to tell ourselves that maybe we haven’t done the best that we can. It is hard to tell ourselves the truth of our emotions that maybe what we feel is hurt rather than anger, that maybe it’s time to close the chapter of a relationship and walk away. And yet when we do, we are the better off for it.

I understand that the Harvard College mission calls on you to be citizen leaders, I don’t even know what citizen leader means. It sort of sounds like a Harvard Graduate saying I went to college in Boston, which by the way has to be the most immodest form of modesty. Please class of 2018 when you are asked where you went to college just say Harvard.

By the way I went to Yale for graduate school, not New Haven which has other universities, but we also know that in the grand snobbery sweepstakes of prestigious American colleges, grad school doesn’t really count, it’s undergrad that counts. So it’s entirely possible I don’t even know how this works.

So you’re charged to be citizen leaders which I suppose it means you’re charged to be leaders. I often wonder who will be led if everyone is supposed to be a leader. But whether you are the leader or whether you’re the led I urge you to always bend towards the truth, to err on the side of the truth.

And to help you do this, make literature your religion, which is to say read widely, read fiction and poetry and narrative nonfiction. Make the human story the center of your understanding of the world. Think of people as people, not as abstractions who have to conform to bloodless logic but as people, fragile, imperfect, with pride that can be wounded and hearts that can be touched.

Literature is my religion. I have learned from literature that we humans are flawed, all of us are flawed. But even while flawed, we are capable of enduring goodness, we do not need first to be perfect before we can do what is right and just.

And you Harvard class of 2018 are not unfamiliar with speaking the truth. When you stood alongside dinning-hall walkers during the strike, when you protested the end of daca when, when you supported the Black Lives Matter movement, you were speaking the truth about the dignity that every single human being deserves. I applaud you. I urge you to continue.
But remember outside the cocoon of Harvard, the consequences will be greater, the stakes will be higher, please don’t let that stop you from telling the truth. Sometimes especially in politicized spaces, telling the truth will be an act of courage, be courageous.

Never set out to provoke for thesake of provoking, but never silence yourself out of fear that the truth youspeak might provoke, be courageous.
People can be remarkably resistant to the fact that they do not like, but don’t let that silence you from speaking the truth, be courageous.
Be courageous enough to acknowledge that even if there is no value in the position of the other side, there is value in knowing what that position is. Listen to the other side at least the reasonable other side.

Be courageous enough to acknowledge that democracy is always fragile and justice has nothing to do with the political left or the political right.

Be courageous enough to recognize those things that get in the way of telling the truth, the empty cleverness, the morally bankrupt irony, the desire to desire to please, the deliberate of fuchsia, the tendency to confuse cynicism for sophistication.

Be courageous enough to accept that life is messy. Your life will not always perfectly match your ideology, sometimes even your choices will not align with your ideology. Don’t justify and rationalize it, acknowledge it. Because it is in trying to justify that we get into that twisting dark unending tunnel of lies from which it is sometimes impossible to re-emerge whole.
Be courageous enough to say I don’t know. This might be harder to do with everyone calling you ‘Harvard’. But ignorance accepted is an opportunity, ignorance denied is a closed door, and it takes courage to admit to the truth of what you do not know.

Some people think that Harvard is the best school in the world, personally I’m not sure I need to know what my people at Yale think about that. But I do know that for many people all over the world, Harvard has become much more than just a school. Harvard is a metaphor for untouchable intellectual achievement

Now that you are Harvard graduates the world will make assumptions about you, many of them will be to your benefit, such as the assumption of competence and intelligence, employers will pay attention to your resume when they see Harvard on it. But there will be other assumptions, people who don’t know anything about you except that you went to Harvard will assume that you feel superior, that you think you’re all that. They will roll their eyes when you make a normal human mistake.

So you will inspire resentment and hopefully that will help you keep in mind the humanity of every one including the privileged.

But these assumptions that people will make about you are minuscule compared to the enormous privilege that comes with a Harvard degree. You now have a certain kind of access, a certain kind of power. And I know it is terribly cliché to say that you must now use this power to change the world but really, you must now use this power to change theworld.

Change a slice of the world, nomatter how small. If you fell a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo,nurture that dissatisfaction, be propelled by your dissatisfaction, act, get into the system and change the system. Challenge the still assumptions that undergrad, so many of America’s cultural institutions tell new stories, champion new storytellers because the truth is that the universal does not belong to anyone group but people, everybody’s story is potentially universal, it just needs to be told well.

Change the media in America, make it about truth, not entertainment, not about profit making but truth. And while you’re doing it, be astute about when you need balance and when you don’t. Because sometimes seeking balance gets in the way of telling the truth. If you’re reporting about the sun rising in the east, you do not need to hear the other side because there’s no real other side.

A Harvard degree will give you access and opportunities, but sadly I have to inform you that it will not make you invincible, you still have that fragile human core at the center of all of us. There will be times when petrified of failing, when fear of failure holds you back, in those moments here is the truth that is easy to forget, you don’t actually know that you will fail.

I was lucky to be given a great gift by the universe, knowing from childhood what I loved most. I was lucky to have wonderful supportive parents. Writing is what I love, had I not had the good fortune of being published I would be somewhere right now completely unknown, possibly broke but I would be writing.

Some of you here today know what you love, and some of you don’t. if you don’t know, you will. If not something that you love, then something that you like or something that you don’t hate – or something. You will find it. But to find it you must try. The wonderful Shonda Rhimes said very wisely that you have to do something until you can do something else. Try. If doesn’t work out, try something else.

I knew from spending a year in medical school that it was not for me, actually that’s not true I knew even before medical school but going to medical school clarified it for me and it’s not wasted time it’s experience and experience will serve you in ways you do not expect.

I cannot tell you how many times in the course of writing my second novel Half of a Yellow Sun which was a deeply emotional book for me, I felt chocked with uncertainty. I would climb into bed and eat chocolate. But I knew that with all the chocolate eating, after all the sinking into a dark place, that I would get up and keep writing.

I cannot tell you how often I would sit down to write and instead I would find myself going online to look at shoes and to put different shoes in various online carts and then remove some and put some back and order some and not order some.

I’m actually thinking of starting a society of esteemed procrastinators and I suspect many of you would probably sign up. Procrastination is a form of fear and it is difficult to acknowledge fear. but the truth is that you cannot create anything of value without both self doubt and self belief. Without self doubt you become complacent, without self belief you cannot succeed, you need both.

And there is also the fear of measuring up – of keeping up, which for you might be heightened by the heavy weight of all those Harvard expectations. I want to share a line from a lovely poem by Mary Oliver, whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.

When you fall into the funk of competition, when you compare yourself with other Harvard graduates, when you worry that you didn’t get that job at Goldman or McKenzie or in Sillicon Valley right after graduation or didnt win a Pulitzer at 30 or didn’t become a managing director or partner of something at 35, think of literature. Think of the early bloomers and the late bloomers. Think of the many experimental novels that do not follow the traditional form. Your story does not have to have a traditional arc. There is an Igbo saying which translates literary to whenever you wake up, that is your morning. What matters is that you wake up.

The world is calling you. America is calling you. There is work to be done, there are tarnished things that needs to shine again. There are broken things that need to be made whole again. You are in the position to do this. You can do it. Be courageous. Tell the truth. I wish you courage and I wish you well.

Michael Blomberg: 'To be honourabe, you must be honest', Rice University - 2018

12 May 2018, Rice University,. Houston, Texas, USA

David thank you for those kind words.

Good morning, everyone and Members of the Board, faculty, staff, parents and family – it really is an honor to be with you to celebrate the great Class of 2018. How about a nice round of applause for them again?

Today, you’re ready to go ‘beyond the hedges’ -- and who knows what the future holds for you.

Rice alumni have been Nobel Prize winners, cabinet members, astronauts, titans of industry, award-winning artists, and everything in between -- including the two scientists who discovered Bucky balls.

And I’m glad to say that one member of the Class of 2018 has already begun working for my company, bringing the total number of Owls at Bloomberg LP to 13, so I’m doing my part, and many of you have similar exciting plans lined up I’m sure, and that's great.

But if you don't yet know what you're going to do for the rest of your life, don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. Leave that to your parents! As excited as they are today, they'll be even more excited if you don't move back home into their basement.

So let's give a big round of applause to all the parents and families who supported you and made this day possible!

Now for the serious stuff. When I was deciding what I really wanted to say today, I kept thinking about a Rice tradition that's an incredibly important part of student life here. No, I'm not talking about Willy Week. I'm talking about the honor code.

When you first arrived on campus for O-week, you attended a presentation on the Honor Code. Your very first quiz tested your knowledge of the code, you had to say what it was about, and so today, I thought it would be fitting for you as graduates to end your time here the same way you began it: by hearing a few words about the meaning of honor.

Don't worry: There’s no quiz involved. But there will be a test when you leave this campus -- one that will last for the rest of your life. And that's what I want to explain today -- and it actually starts with the opposite of honor.

As a New Yorker, I was surprised to learn that an act of dishonor in my hometown almost blocked Rice from coming into existence. William Marsh Rice was murdered at his home in Manhattan, just a few blocks from my company's headquarters, by two schemers who tried to re-write his will.

They were caught, his money went where he wanted it to go, the university was built, and fittingly, an honor code was created that has been central to student life here from the beginning.

And ever since you arrived here on campus, on nearly every test and paper you submitted, you signed a statement that began, ‘On my honor.’ But have you ever stopped to think about what that phrase really means?

The concept of honor has taken on different meanings through the ages: chivalry, chastity, courage, strength. And when divorced from morality, or attached to prejudice, honor has been used to justify murder, and repression, and deceit. But the essence of honor has always been found in the word itself.

As those of you who majored in Linguistics probably know, the words ‘honor’ and ‘honest’ are two sides of the same coin. In fact, the Latin word ‘honestus’ can mean both ‘honest’ and ‘honorable.’

To be honorable, you must be honest. And that means speaking honestly, and acting honestly, even when it requires you to admit wrongdoing -- and suffer the consequences. The commitment to honesty is a responsibility that you accepted as an Owl. It is also, I believe, a patriotic responsibility.

As young children, one of the first things we learn about American history is the story of George Washington and the fallen cherry tree. ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ young George tells his father. ‘I cut it down.’ That story is a legend, of course. But legends are passed down from generation to generation because they carry some larger truth.

The cherry tree legend has endured because it's not really about George Washington. It's about us, as a nation. It's about what we want for our children -- and what we value in our leaders: honesty.

We’ve always lionized our two greatest presidents -- Washington and Lincoln -- not only for their accomplishments, but also for their honesty. We see their integrity and morals as a reflection of our honor as a nation.

However, today when we look at the city that bears Washington's name, it's hard not to wonder: What the hell happened?

In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year was ‘post-truth.’ And last year brought us the phrase, ‘alternative facts.’ In essence, they both mean: Up can be down. Black can be white. True can be false. Feelings can be facts.

A New York Senator known for working across the aisle, my old friend Pat Moynihan, once said: ‘People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.’ That didn’t used to be a controversial statement.

Today, those in politics routinely dismiss any inconvenient information, no matter how factual, as fake -- and they routinely say things that are demonstrably false. When authoritarian regimes around the world did this, we scoffed at them. We thought the American people would never stand for that!

For my generation, the plain truth about America -- the freedom, opportunity, and prosperity we enjoyed -- was our most powerful advantage in the Cold War. The more communists had access to real news, the more they would demand freedom. We believed that -- and we were right.

Today, though, many of those at the highest levels of power see the plain truth as a threat. They fear it. They deny it. And they attack it -- just as the communists once did. And so here we are, in the midst of an epidemic of dishonesty, and an endless barrage of lies.

The trend toward elected officials propagating alternate realities -- or winking at those who do -- is one of the most serious dangers facing democracies. Free societies depend on citizens who recognize that deceit in government isn’t something to shrug your shoulders at.

When elected officials speak as though they are above the truth, they will act as though they are above the law. And when we tolerate dishonesty, we get criminality.

Sometimes, it's in the form of corruption. Sometimes, it's abuse of power. And sometimes, it's both. If left unchecked, these abuses can erode the institutions that preserve and protect our rights and freedoms -- and open the door to tyranny and fascism.

Now, you might say: There’s always been deceitful politicians and dishonest politicians -- in both parties. And that's true. But there is now more tolerance for dishonesty in politics than I have seen in my lifetime. And I've been alive for one-third of the time the United States has existed! I know, you find that hard to believe. So do I, but if you do the math, that’s what it is.

My generation can tell you: The only thing more dangerous than dishonest politicians who have no respect for the law, is a chorus of enablers who defend their every lie.

Remember: The Honor Code here at Rice just doesn’t require you to be honest. It requires you to say something if you saw others acting dishonestly. Now that might be the most difficult part of an honor code, but it may also be the most important, because violations affect the whole community.

And the same is true in our country. If we want elected officials to be honest, we have to hold them accountable when they are not -- or else suffer the consequences.

Now, don't get me wrong: honest people can disagree. That's what democracy is all about! But productive debate requires an acceptance of basic reality.

Take science for example: If 99 percent of scientists whose research has been peer-reviewed reach the same general conclusion about a theory, then we ought to accept it as the best available information -- even if it's not a 100 percent certainty.

Yes, climate change is only a theory -- just like gravity is only a theory. And the fact that Newton's theory of motion didn’t take into account Maxwell’s observations on the speed of electromagnetic waves as a constant and that Einstein’s special theory of relativity better described motion when things move very fast -- doesn’t mean that if I let go of this pen it won’t fall to the ground.

That, graduates, is not a Chinese hoax. It's called science -- and we should demand that politicians have the honesty to respect it.

Hard though it is to believe, some federal agencies have actually banned their employees from using the phrase ‘climate change.’ If censorship solved problems, today we’d all be part of the old USSR, and the Soviets would have us speaking Russian.

Of course, it's always good to be skeptical and ask questions. But we must be willing to place a certain amount of trust in the integrity of scientists. If you aren’t willing to do that, don't get on an airplane, don't use a cell phone or microwave, don't get treated in a hospital, and don’t even think about binge-watching Netflix.

Scientific discovery permeates practically every aspect of our lives -- except, too often, our political debates.

The dishonesty in Washington isn't just about science, of course. We weren’t tackling so many of the biggest problems that affect your future – from the lack of good jobs in many communities, to the prevalence of gun violence, to the threats to the economy and threats to the environment -- because too many political leaders are being dishonest about facts and data, and too many people are letting them get away with it.

So how did we get here? How did we go from a president who could not tell a lie to politicians who can not tell the truth? From a George Washington who embodied honesty, to a Washington, D.C. defined by deceit?

It’s popular to blame social media for spreading false information. I for one am totally convinced that Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber are still dating, but the problem isn't just unreliable stories. It's also the public's willingness -- even eagerness -- to believe anything that paints the other side in a bad light. That's extreme partisanship -- and that is what's fueling and excusing all this dishonesty.

Extreme partisanship is like an infectious disease. But instead of crippling the body, it cripples the mind. It blocks us from understanding the other side. It blinds us from seeing the strengths in their ideas -- and the weaknesses of our own. And it leads us to defend or excuse lies and unethical actions when our own side commits them.

For example: In the 1990s, leading Democrats spent the decade defending the occupant of the Oval Office against charges of lying and personal immorality, and attempting to silence and discredit the women who spoke out. At the same time, leading Republicans spent that decade attacking the lack of ethics and honesty in the White House.

Today, the roles are exactly reversed -- not because the parties have changed their beliefs -- but because the party occupying the Oval Office has changed.

When someone's judgment about an action depends on the party affiliation of the person who committed it, they're being dishonest with themselves and with the public. And yet, those kinds of judgments have become so second nature that many people -- in both parties -- don't even realize that they are making them.

Now, I know it's natural to root for your own side -- especially when the other side is the Houston Cougars. But governing is not a game.

When people see the world as a battle between left and right, they become more loyal to their tribe than to our country. When power -- not progress -- becomes the object of the battle, truth and honesty become the first casualties.

You learned here at Rice that honesty leads to trust and trust leads to freedom -- like the freedom to take tests outside the classroom. In democracy, it's no different. If we aren't honest with one another, we don't trust one another, then we place limits on what we ourselves can do, and what we can do together as a country.

It's a formula for gridlock and national decline -- but graduates, here's the thing: It doesn't have to be that way.

When I was in city government, I didn't care which party proposed an idea -- and I never once asked someone his or her party affiliation during a job interview, or who they voted for. As a result, we had a dream team of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. That diversity made our debates sharper, our policies smarter, and our government better.

Arguments were won and lost on facts and data -- not parties and polls. That was why we had success. And it's been great to see other mayors around the country taking that same kind of approach. But at the national level, in Washington today, partisanship is everything. And I think the dishonesty that it produces is one of the greatest challenges that your generation will have to confront.

Of course, partisanship is not a new problem. George Washington warned against it in his Farewell Address. He referred to the ‘dangers of parties,’ and called the passion that people have for our parties, quote, ‘worst enemy’ of democracy -- a precursor to tyranny. Washington urged Americans to, quote, ‘discourage and restrain’ partisanship. Sadly, in recent years, the opposite has happened.

There is now unrestrained, rabid partisanship everywhere we look. It’s not just on social media and cable news. It's in the communities where we live, which are becoming more deeply red or more deeply blue. It’s in the groups and associations and churches we join, which increasingly attract like-minded people. It’s even in the people we marry.

Fifty years ago, most parents didn't care whether their children married a member of another political party, but they didn't want them marrying outside their race or religion, or inside their gender.

Today, thankfully, polls show a strong majority support for inter-racial, inter-religious, and same-sex marriage and that is progress. But unfortunately, the percentage of parents who don't want their children marrying outside of their political party has doubled and the more people segregate themselves by party, the harder it becomes to understand the other side, and the more extreme each party grows.

Studies show that people become more extreme in their views when they are grouped together with like-minded people. And that’s now happening in both parties. And as a result, I think it's fair to say the country is more divided by party than it has ever been since the Civil War.

Last month, legislators in South Carolina -- which was the first state in the Union to secede back in 1860 -- introduced a resolution that contemplated a debate on secession. Now it's easy to dismiss that as a fringe idea -- and let’s hope it never happens. But in like-minded groups, fringe ideas can gather momentum with dangerous speed – just remember Germany in the late 1930s.

If that continues to happen here, America will become even more divided, and our national anthem may as well become the Taylor Swift song: ‘We are never, ever, ever, getting back together.’

So why do I bring this up as you finish your time at this great university?

Well, I'm hoping you graduates will draw more inspiration from a song by a different artist: Zedd, Maren Morris, and Grey: ‘Why don't you just meet me in the middle? I'm losing my mind just a little.’

Bringing the country back together I know won't be easy. But I believe it can be done -- and if we are to continue as a true democracy, it must be done, and it will be up to your generation to help lead it.

Graduates, you're ready for this challenge. Because bringing the country back together starts with the first lesson you learned here at Rice: Honesty matters. And everyone must be held accountable for being honest. So as you go out into the world, I urge you to do what honesty requires.

Recognize that no one, nor either party, has a monopoly on good ideas. Judge events based on what happened, not who did it. Hold yourself and our leaders to the highest standards of ethics and morality. Respect the knowledge of scientists. Follow the data, wherever it leads. Listen to people you disagree with -- without trying to censor them or shout over them. And have the courage to say things that your own side does not want to hear.

I just came yesterday from visiting an old friend in Arizona, who has displayed that kind of courage throughout his life: Senator John McCain, who is currently fighting brain cancer.

Now, John and I often don’t see eye to eye on issues. But I have always admired his willingness to reach across the aisle, when others wouldn't dare.

He bucked party leaders when his conscience demanded it. He defended the honor of his opponents, even if it cost him votes. And he owned up to his mistakes -- just like that young kid with the cherry tree.

Imagine what our country would be like if more of our elected officials had the courage to serve with the honor that John has always shown on the battlefield, in Washington and in his personal life.

Graduates, after today, you will no longer be bound by the Rice honor code. It will be up to you to decide how to live your life -- and to follow your own honor code.

This university has given you a special opportunity to learn the true meaning of honor to base that code on. And now, I believe, you have a special obligation to carry it forward -- into your work places, your communities, your political discussions, and yes, into the voting booth because the greatest threat to American democracy isn't communism or jihadism, or any other external force or foreign power. It's our own willingness to tolerate dishonesty in service of party, and in pursuit of power.

So let me leave you with one final thought: We can all recite the inspiring words that begin the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident --

But remember that the Founding Fathers were able to bring those truths to life only because of the Declaration's final words: ‘We mutually pledge to each other, our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.’

That pledge of honor and that commitment to truth is why we are here today. And in order to preserve those truths, and the rights they guarantee us, every generation must take that same pledge, and it's now your turn.

Earlier today, I told President Leebron that I'd like to make a donation to Rice. His eyes lit up! But I said, ‘No, not a financial donation.’ I told him I'd like to donate a cherry tree to be planted here on campus with a plaque that reads: ‘In Honor of the Class of 2018.’

And when you come back to campus as alumni, if you pass by the tree, I hope you'll remember why it's there -- and what it represents to our great country. And throughout your life, when you chop down a cherry tree, as we all do from time to time, admit it -- and demand nothing less from those who represent us.

Graduates, you have earned this great celebration. So tonight, have one last Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit. And tomorrow, carry the values of this great university with you, wherever you go.

You will never regret it. I make that pledge to you on my honor.

Congratulations -- and go Owls!”

Oprah Winfrey: 'In life you're either principled, or you're not', USC Annenberg - 2018

11 May 2018, USC Anneneberg, Los Angeles, California, USA

Thank you Annenberg and a special thank you to Dean Willow Bay for inviting me here today and to the parents again I say and faculty, family, friends, graduates: Good morning. I want to give a special shout out because I was happy that Dean Bay invited me, but I was going to be here anyway. Because one of my lovely daughter girls attends the Annenberg School of Journalism and is getting her master's today. So I was coming in whether I was speaking or not. So a special shout out to a young woman who I met when she was in the seventh grade and it was the first year that I was looking for smart, bright, giving, resilient, kind, openhearted girls who had 'it' that factor that means that you keep going no matter what. This was the year that I chose everybody individually and I remember her walking into the office in a little township where we were doing interviews all over South Africa and she came in and recited a poem about her teacher. And when she walked out the door I go "that's an 'it' girl. Thando Dlomo, I am here to say I am so proud of you! Long way from the township in South Africa and her aunt has flown 30 hours to be here for this celebration today. Thank you so much.

So today I come bearing some good news and some bad news for anybody who intends to build the life around your ability to communicate. So I want to get the bad news out first so you can be clear. I always like to get the bad stuff up front. So here it is. Everything around us including and in particular the internet and social media is now being used to erode trust in our institutions. Interfere in our elections and wreak havoc on our infrastructure. It hands advertisers a map to our deepest desires. It enables misinformation to run rampant. Attention spans to run short and false stories from phony sites to run circles around major news outlets. We have literally walked into traffic while staring at our phones.

Now the good news. Many of your parents are probably taking you somewhere really special for dinner tonight. I heard. I heard. I heard. I can do a little better than that. Now that I've presented some of the bad news, the good news is that there really is a solution and the solution is each and every one of you because you will become the new editorial gatekeepers, an ambitious army of truth-seekers who will arm yourselves with the intelligence, with the insight and the facts necessary to strike down deceit. You are in a position to keep all of those who now disparage real news. You all are the ones who are going to keep those people in check. Why? Because you can push back and you can answer false narratives with real information and you can set the record straight. And you also have the ability and the power to give a voice as Dean Bay was saying to people who desperately now need to tell their stories and have their stories told. And this is what I do know for sure because I've been doing it a long time. If you can capture the humanity of people... if you can just capture the humanity of the people, of the stories that you are telling, you then get that much closer to your own humanity. And you could confront your bias and you can build your credibility, hone your instincts and compound your compassion. You could use your gifts. That's what you're really here to do to illuminate the darkness in our world. So this is what I also know that this moment in time this is your time to rise. It is.

Even though you can't go anywhere. You can't stand in line at Starbucks. You can go to a party. You can't go to any place without everywhere you turn, people are talking about how bad things are, how terrible it is. This is what I know. The problem is everybody is meeting hysteria with more hysteria and then we just are all becoming hysterical and it's getting worse. What I've learned all these years is that we're not supposed to match it or even get locked into resisting or pushing against it. We're supposed to see this moment in time for what it is, we're supposed to see through it and then transcend it. That is how you overcome hysteria. That is how you overcome the sniping at one another, the trolling, the mean-spirited partisanship on both sides of the aisle, the divisiveness, the injustices and the out-and-out hatred. You use it. Use this moment to encourage you to embolden you and to literally push you into the rising of your life. And to borrow a phrase from my beloved mentor Maya Angelou. 'Just like moons and like suns with the certainty of tides just like the hopes springing high you will rise.'

So your job now, let me tell you, is to take everything you've learned here and use what you've learned to challenge the left, to challenge the right and the center. When you see something, you say something and you say it with the facts and the reporting to back it up. Here's what you have to do. You make the choice every day, every single day to exemplify honesty because the truth, let me tell you something about the truth, the truth exonerates and it convicts. It disinfects and it galvanizes. The truth has always been and will always be our shield against corruption, our shield against greed and despair. The truth is our saving grace. And not only are you here USC Annenberg to tell it, to write it, to proclaim it, to speak it, but to be it. Be the truth! Be the truth!

So I want to get down to the real reason we're here today and about an hour and a half you're going to be catapulted into a world that appears to have gone off its rocker. And I can tell you I've hosted on the Oprah Show for 25 years, the number one show, never missed a day never missed a day. 25 years, 4561 shows. So I know how to talk, I can tell you that. But I was a little intimidated coming here because graduations... it's tough. It's hard trying to come up with something to share with you that you haven't already heard. What can I possibly say because I know this any inspiration or guidance I can offer is nothing that your parents or your deans or professors or Siri haven't already provided. So I'm here to really tell you I don't have any new lessons. I don't have any new lessons but I often think that it's not the new lessons, but so much as it is really learning the old ones again and again. So here are variations on a few grand themes beginning with this pick a problem, any problem. The list is long here just a few that are at the top of my list. There's gun violence and there's climate change and systemic racism, economic inequality, media bias. The homeless need opportunity, the addicted need treatment, the Dreamers need protection, the prison system needs reforming, the LGBTQ community needs acceptance, the social safety net needs saving and the misogyny needs to stop. But you can't fix everything and you can't save every soul. But what can you do? Here now I believe you have to declare war on one of our most dangerous enemies. And that is cynicism because when that little creature sinks in its hooks into you it'll cloud your clarity. It will compromise your integrity, it will lower your standards, it'll choke your empathy. And sooner or later, cynicism shatters your faith. When you hear yourself saying it doesn't matter what one person says oh well so work, it's not going to make any difference what I do. Who cares? When you hear yourself saying that know that you're on a collision course for our culture. And I understand how it's so easy to become disillusioned, so tempting to allow apathy to set in.

Because anxiety is being broadcast on 157 channels, 24 hours a day, all night long. And everybody I know is feeling it. But these times, these times are here to let us know that we need to take a stand for our right to have hope and we need to take a stand with every ounce of wit and courage we can muster. The question is what are you willing to stand for? That question is going to follow you throughout your life. And here's how you answer it. You put your honor where your mouth is. Put your honor where your mouth is. When you give your word, keep it, show up, do the work, get your hands dirty and then you will begin to draw strength from the understanding the true knowing that history is still being written. You're writing it every day. The wheels still in spin and what you do or what you don't do will be a part of it.

You build a legacy not from one thing, but from everything. I remember when I just opened my school in 2007 I came back and I had the great joy of sitting at Maya Angelou's table. She hadn't been able to attend the opening in South Africa and I said to her 'Oh Maya, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy that's going to be my greatest legacy.' I remember she was standing at the counter making biscuits and she turned, she put the dough down and she looked at me and she said 'you have no idea what your legacy will be.' I said 'excuse me? I just opened the school and these girls and it's going to be...' And she said 'you have no idea what your legacy will be because your legacy is every life you touch, every life you touch.' That changed me. And it's true you can't personally stop anybody from walking into a school with an assault rifle, nor can you singlehandedly ensure that the rights that your mothers and your grandmothers fought so hard for will be preserved for the daughters that you may someday have. It Will take more than you alone to pull 40 million Americans out of poverty, but who will you be if you don't care enough to try. And what mountains could we move I think, what gridlock could we eradicate if we were to join forces and work together in service of something greater than ourselves? You know my deepest satisfaction and my biggest rewards have come from exactly that. Pick a problem, any problem and do something about it because to somebody who's hurting, something is everything. So I hesitate to say this because there are rumors from my last big speech have finally died down, but here it is. Vote! Vote! Vote! Pay attention to what the people who claim to represent you are doing and saying in your name and on your behalf. They represent you and if they've not done right by you, if their policies are at odds with your core beliefs, then you have a responsibility to send them packing. If they go low, thank you Michelle Obama, if they go low, we go to the polls. People died for that right. They died for that right. I think about it every time I cast a vote. So don't let their sacrifice be in vain.

A couple of other thoughts. Eat a good breakfast. It really pays off. Pay your bills on time. Recycle. Make your bed. Aim high. Say thank you to people and actually really mean it. Ask for help when you need it and put your phone away at the dinner table. Just sit on it really and know that what you tweet and post, and Instagram today might be asked about in a job interview tomorrow or 20 years from tomorrow. Be nice to little kids. Be nice to your elders. Be nice to animals and know that it's better to be interested than interesting. Invest in a quality mattress. I'm telling you, your back will thank you later. And don't cheap out on your shoes and if you're fighting with someone you really love, for God's sakes, find your way back to them because life is short even on our longest days. And another thing you already know that definitely bears repeating, don't ever confuse what is legal with what is moral because they are entirely different animals. You see in a court of law there are loopholes and technicalities and bargains to be struck, but in life you're either principled or you're not. So do the right thing especially when nobody's looking. And while I'm at it, do not equate money and fame with accomplishment and character because I can assure you based on the thousands of people I've interviewed one does not automatically follow the other. Something else, you need to know this: your job is not always going to fulfill you.

There will be some days that you just might be bored. Other days you may not feel like going to work it all, go anyway. And remember that your job is not who you are, it's just what you're doing on the way to who you will become. Every remedial chore, every boss who takes credit for your ideas, that is going to happen. Look for the lessons because the lessons are always there and the number one lesson I could offer you where your work is concerned has this become so skilled, so vigilant, so flat out fantastic at what you do that your talent cannot be dismissed. And finally this will save you. Stop comparing yourself to other people.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: 'The first rule is 'Trust Yourself', USC - 2009

15 May 2009, University of Southern California, USA

Well, thank you very much. (Applause) Hello, everybody. What a great introduction, what a wonderful thing. What a great, great welcome I'm getting here, so thank you very much. I mean, I haven't heard applause like that since I announced that I was going to stop acting. (Applause)

But anyway, it is really terrific to see here so many graduate students and undergraduate students graduating here today. I heard that there are 4,500 graduating here today, undergraduate students, so this is fantastic. There are 2,200 men, 2,300 women and five have listed yourselves as undecided. (Applause)

So this is really a great, great bunch of people here, I love it. But seriously, President Sample, trustees, faculty, family, friends and graduates, it is a tremendous privilege to stand before you this morning. There's nothing that I enjoy more than celebrating great achievements. And I don't just mean your parents celebrating never having to pay another tuition bill, that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about just celebrating the great accomplishment. So let me congratulate the Trojan class of 2009 on your graduation from one of the finest universities in the world. Let's give our graduates a tremendous round of applause. What a special day, what a great accomplishment. (Applause)

Now, this an equally special day, of course, for the parents, for the grandparents, siblings and other family members whose support made all of this today possible. And let's not forget, of course, the professors, those dedicated individuals who taught you, who came up with exciting ways to share their vast wisdom, knowledge and experience with you.

And I must also say thank you to President Sample for honoring me with this fantastic degree. Thank you very much. Wow, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Doctor of Humane Letters. I love it. (Applause) But, of course, I noticed that it wasn't a doctorate in film or in cinema or in acting. I wonder why?

But anyway, that's OK. I take whatever I can get. But maybe now since I'm the doctor, I can go back up to Sacramento and maybe now the Legislature will finally listen to me. (Applause) But anyway, I stand before you today not just as Dr. Schwarzenegger or as Governor Schwarzenegger, or as The Terminator, or as Conan the Barbarian, but also as a proud new member of this Trojan family.

Now, some of you may know that my daughter just completed her freshman year right here. One of the most exciting things for me has been to learn about the great traditions that make this university so wonderful and so special.

My daughter told me all about, for instance, the Victory Bell. She sat me down and she told me it weighs 295 pounds and how the winner of the annual football game between USC and UCLA takes this bell and gets to paint it in the school colors. And I stopped her in the middle of talking, I said, "Wait a minute, Katherine, back up a little bit. UCLA has a football team?" (Applause)

Now, of course, my daughter's journey here at USC is just beginning, and yours is ending. I know that you're a little bit stressed out right now as you start this exciting new chapter in your lives. Some people say it is scary to leave the comfort of the university and to go out into the cold, hard world.

But I have to tell you something; I think this is a bunch of nonsense because after all, this is America. This is the greatest country on earth, with the greatest opportunities. (Applause) It is one thing if you were born in Afghanistan or in Swat Valley in Pakistan where you'd be forced to join the Taliban or be killed. Now, then I would say yes, that is a little bit scary.

But this, this is going to be a piece of cake for you, trust me. You live in America and you're prepared for the future with this tremendous education you have gotten here at one of the greatest universities in the world. This is going to be exciting, it's a great adventure and this is a new phase in your life. This is going to be awesome. (Applause)

Now, of course, this journey is not going to be without any setbacks, failures or disappointments. That's just the way life is. But you're ready and you are able, and you would not be here today with your degrees and with your honors if you wouldn't be ready.

So now, of course, to help you along the way, I thought that the best Schwarzenegger gift I could give you today is to give you a few of my own personal ideas on how to be successful. And parents, I just want you to know, maybe you should close your ears, you should plug your ears, because maybe there a few things that you maybe won't like in what I have to say.

But anyway, I can explain how I became successful and who I am today by going through what I call Dr. Schwarzenegger's Six Rules of Success. (Applause)

Now, of course, people ask me all the time, they say to me, "What is the secret to success?" And I give them always the short version. I say, "Number one, come to America. Number two, work your butt off. And number three, marry a Kennedy." (Applause)

But anyway, those are the short rules. Now today, I'm going to give you the six rules of success. But before I start, I just wanted to say these are my rules. I think that they can apply to anyone, but that is for you to decide, because not everyone is the same. There are some people that just like to kick back and coast through life and others want to be very intense and want to be number one and want to be successful. And that's like me.

I always wanted to be very intense, I always wanted to be number one. I took it very seriously, my career. So this was the same when I started with bodybuilding. I didn't want to just be a bodybuilding champion, I wanted to be the best bodybuilder of all time. The same was in the movies. I didn't want to just be a movie star; I wanted to be a great movie star that is the highest paid movie star and have above-the-title billing.

And so this intensity always paid off for me, this commitment always paid off for me. So here are some of the rules.

The first rule is: Trust yourself

And what I mean by that is, so many young people are getting so much advice from their parents and from their teachers and from everyone. But what is most important is that you have to dig deep down, dig deep down and ask yourselves, who do you want to be? Not what, but who.

And I'm talking about not what your parents and teachers want you to be, but you. I’m talking about figuring out for yourselves what makes you happy, no matter how crazy it may sound to other people.

I was lucky growing up because I did not have television or didn't have telephones, I didn't have the computers and the iPods. And, of course, Twitter was then something that birds did outside the window. I didn't have all these distractions and all this.

I spent a lot of time by myself, so I could figure out and listen to what is inside my heart and inside my head.

And I recognized very quickly that inside my head and heart were a burning desire to leave my small village in Austria -- not that there was something wrong with Austria, it's a beautiful country. But I wanted to leave that little place and I wanted to be part of something big, the United States of America, a powerful nation, the place where dreams can come true.

I knew when I came over here I could realize my dreams. And I decided that the best way for me to come to America was to become a bodybuilding champion, because I knew that was ticket the instant that I saw a magazine cover of my idol, Reg Park. He was Mr. Universe, he was starring in Hercules movies, he looked strong and powerful, he was so confident.

So when I found out how he got that way I became obsessed, and I went home and I said to my family, "I want to be a bodybuilding champion."

Now, you can imagine how that went over in my home in Austria. My parents, they couldn't believe it. They would have been just happy if I would have become a police officer like my father, or married someone like Heidi, had a bunch of kids and ran around like the von Trapp family in Sound of Music.

That's what my family had in mind for me, but something else burned inside me. Something burned inside me. I wanted to be different; I was determined to be unique. I was driven to think big and to dream big. Everyone else thought that I was crazy. My friends said, "If you want to be a champion in a sport, why don't you go and become a bicycle champion or a skiing champion or a soccer champion? Those are the Austrian sports."

But I didn't care. I wanted to be a bodybuilding champion and use that to come to America, and use that to go into the movies and make millions of dollars. So, of course, for extra motivation I read books on strongmen and on bodybuilding and looked at magazines. And one of the things I did was, I decorated my bedroom wall.

Right next to my bed there was this big wall that I decorated all with pictures. I hung up pictures of strongmen and bodybuilders and wrestlers and boxers and so on. And I was so excited about this great decoration that I took my mother to the bedroom and I showed her. And she shook her head. She was absolutely in shock and tears started running down her eyes.

And she called the doctor, she called our house doctor and she brought him in and she explained to him, "There's something wrong here." She looked at the wall with the doctor and she said, "Where did I go wrong? I mean, all of Arnold's friends have pictures on the wall of girls, and Arnold has all these men.

But it's not just men, they're half naked and they're oiled up with baby oil. What is going on here? Where did I go wrong?" So you can imagine, the doctor shook his head and he said, "There's nothing wrong. At this age you have idols and you go and have those -- this is just quite normal."

So this is rule number one. I wanted to become a champion; I was on a mission. So rule number one is, of course, trust yourself, no matter how and what anyone else thinks.

Rule number two is: Break the rules

. We have so many rules in life about everything. I say break the rules. Not the law, but break the rules. My wife has a t-shirt that says, "Well-behaved women rarely make history." Well, you know, I don't want to burst her bubble, but the same is true with men.

It is impossible to be a maverick or a true original if you're too well behaved and don't want to break the rules. You have to think outside the box. That's what I believe. After all, what is the point of being on this earth if all you want to do is be liked by everyone and avoid trouble?

The only way that I ever got anyplace was by breaking some of the rules. After all, I remember that after I was finished with my bodybuilding career I wanted to get into acting and I wanted to be a star in films. You can imagine what the agents said when I went to meet all those agents. Everyone had the same line, that it can't be done, the rules are different here. They said, "Look at your body. You have this huge monstrous body, overly developed. That doesn't fit into the movies. You don't understand.

This was 20 years ago, the Hercules movies. Now the little guys are in, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson." Before he gained weight, of course, that is. But anyway, those are the guys that were in. And the agents also complained about my accent. They said, "No one ever became a star with an accent like that, especially not with a German accent.

And yes, I can imagine with your name, Arnold Schwartzenschnitzel, or whatever the name, is, on a billboard. Yeah, that's going to draw a lot of tickets and sell a lot of tickets. Yeah, right." So this is the kind of negative attitude they had.

But I didn't listen to those rules, even though they were very nice and they said, "Look, we can get you some bit parts. We can get you to be playing a wrestler or a bouncer. Oh, maybe with your German accent we can get you to be a Nazi officer in Hogan's Heroes or something like that."

But I didn't listen to all this. Those were their rules, not my rules. I was convinced I could do it if I worked as hard as I did in bodybuilding, five hours a day. And I started getting to work, I started taking acting classes. I took English classes, took speech classes, dialogue classes. Accent removal classes I even took.

I remember running around saying, "A fine wine grows on the vine." You see, because Germans have difficulties with the F and the W and V, so, "A fine wine grows on the vine." I know what some of you are now saying, is I hope that Arnold got his money back.

But let me tell you something, I had a good time doing those things and it really helped me. And finally I broke through. I broke through and I started getting the first parts in TV; Streets of San Francisco, Lucille Ball hired me, I made Pumping Iron, Stay Hungry. And then I got the big break in Conan the Barbarian. (Applause)

And there the director said, "If we wouldn't have Schwarzenegger, we would have to build one." Now, think about that. And then, when I did Terminator, "I'll be back," became one of the most famous lines in movie history, all because of my crazy accent.

Now, think about it. The things that the agents said would be totally a detriment and would make it impossible for me to get a job, all of a sudden became an asset for me, all of those things, my accent, my body and everything.

So it just shows to you, never listen to that you can't do something. And, "You have to work your way up, of course, run for something else first." I mean, it was the same when I ran for governor, the same lines, that you have to work your way up, it can't be done. And then, of course, I ran for governor and the rest, of course, is history.

They said you have to start with a small job as mayor and then as assemblyman and then as lieutenant governor and then as governor. And they said that's the way it works in a political career. I said, "I'm not interested in a political career. I want to be a public servant. I want to fix California's problems and bring people together and bring the parties together.

So, like I said, I decided to run, I didn't pay attention to the rules. And I made it and the rest is history. Which, of course, brings me to

Rule number three: Don't be afraid to fail.

Anything I've ever attempted, I was always willing to fail. In the movie business, I remember, that you pick scripts. Many times you think this is a wining script, but then, of course, you find out later on, when you do the movie, that it didn't work and the movie goes in the toilet.

Now, we have seen my movies; I mean, Red Sonja, Hercules in New York, Last Action Hero. Those movies went in the toilet. But that's OK, because at the same time I made movies like Terminator and Conan and True Lies and Predator and Twins that went through the roof.

So you can't always win, but don't afraid of making decisions.

You can't be paralyzed by fear of failure or you will never push yourself. You keep pushing because you believe in yourself and in your vision and you know that it is the right thing to do, and success will come. So don't be afraid to fail.

Rule number four: Don’t listen to the naysayers.

How many times have you heard that you can't do this and you can't do that and it's never been done before? Just imagine if Bill Gates had quit when people said it can't be done.

I hear this all the time. As a matter of fact, I love it when someone says that no one has ever done this before, because then when I do it that means that I'm the first one that has done it. So pay no attention to the people that say it can't be done.

I remember my mother-in-law, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, when she started Special Olympics in 1968 people said that it would not work. The experts, the doctors that specialized in mental disabilities and mental retardation said, "It can't be done. You can't bring people out of their institutions. You can't make them participate in sports, in jumping and swimming and in running. They will hurt themselves, they will hurt each other, they will drown in the pool."

Well, let me tell you something. Now, 40 years later, Special Olympics is one of the greatest organizations, in 164 countries, dedicated to people with mental disabilities and that are intellectually challenged. (Applause)

And she did not take no for an answer. And the same is when you look at Barack Obama. I mean, imagine, if he would have listened. (Applause) If he would have listened to the naysayers he would have never run for president. People said it couldn't be done, that he couldn't get elected, that he couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton, that he would never win the general election.

But he followed his own heart, he didn’t listen to the "You can't," and he changed the course of American history.

So over and over you see that. If I would have listened to the naysayers I would still be in the Austrian Alps yodeling. (Laughter) I would never have come to America. I would have never met my wonderful wife Maria Shriver, I would have never had the wonderful four kids, I would have never done Terminator, and I wouldn't be standing here in front of you today as governor of the greatest state of the greatest country in the world.

So I never listen that, "You can't." (Applause) I always listen to myself and say, "Yes, you can."

And that brings me to rule number five, which is the most important rule of all: Work your butt off. You never want to fail because you didn't work hard enough. I never wanted to lose a competition or lose an election because I didn't work hard enough. I always believed leaving no stone unturned.

Mohammed Ali, one of my great heroes, had a great line in the '70s when he was asked, "How many sit-ups do you do?" He said, "I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. When I feel pain, that's when I start counting, because that's when it really counts."

That's what makes you a champion. Arnold Scvhwarzenegger in Kindergarten CopAnd that's the way it is with everything. No pain, no gain. So many of those lessons that I apply in life I have learned from sports, let me tell you, and especially that one. And let me tell you, it is important to have fun in life, of course.

But when you're out there partying, horsing around, someone out there at the same time is working hard.

Someone is getting smarter and someone is winning. Just remember that. Now, if you want to coast through life, don't pay attention to any of those rules.

But if you want to win, there is absolutely no way around hard, hard work.

None of my rules, by the way, of success, will work unless you do. I've always figured out that there 24 hours a day. You sleep six hours and have 18 hours left. Now, I know there are some of you out there that say well, wait a minute, I sleep eight hours or nine hours. Well, then, just sleep faster, I would recommend. (Laughter)

Because you only need to sleep six hours and then you have 18 hours left, and there are a lot of things you can accomplish. As a matter of fact, Ed Turner used to say always, "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise."

And, of course, all of you know already those things, because otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here today. Just remember, you can't climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.

And that takes me to rule number six, which is a very important rule: it's about giving back. Whatever path that you take in your lives, you must always find time to give something back, something back to your community, give something back to your state or to your country.

My father-in-law, Sargent Shriver -- who is a great American, a truly great American who started the Peace Corps, the Job Corps, Legal Aid to the Poor -- he said at Yale University to the students at a commencement speech, "Tear down that mirror. Tear down that mirror that makes you always look at yourself, and you will be able to look beyond that mirror and you will see the millions of people that need your help."

And let me tell you something, reaching out and helping people will bring you more satisfaction than anything else you have ever done. As a matter of fact today, after having worked for Special Olympics and having started After School Programs, I've promoted fitness, and now with my job as governor, I can tell you, playing a game of chess with an eight-year-old kid in an inner city school is far more exciting for me than walking down another red carpet or a movie premiere.

So let me tell you, as you prepare to go off into the world, remember those six rules:

Trust yourself, Break some rules, Don't be afraid to fail, Ignore the naysayers, Work like hell, and Give something back.

And now let me leave you with one final thought, and I will be brief, I promise. This university was conceived in 1880, back when Los Angeles was just a small frontier town. One hundred and twenty-five classes of Trojans have gone before you. They have sat there, exactly where you sit today, in good times and in bad, in times of war and in times of peace, in times of great promise and in times of great uncertainty.

Through it all, this great country, this great state, this great university, have stood tall and persevered. We are in tough times now and there's a lot of uncertainty in the world. But there is one thing certain; we'll be back. (Applause)

And we will back stronger and more prosperous than ever before, because that is what California and America have always done. The ancient Trojans were known for their fighting spirit, their refusal to give up, their ability to overcome great odds.

So as you graduate today, never lose that optimism and that fighting spirit. Never lose the spirit of Troy. Because remember, this is America and you are USC Trojans, proud, strong and ready to soar. Congratulations and God bless all of you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

Six Rules on How to Be Successful

1. Trust yourself
2. Break some rules
3. Don't be afraid to fail
4. Ignore the naysayers
5. Work like hell
6. Give something back.

Ira Glass: 'Don’t wait. Make the stuff you want to make now!', Columbia University School of Journalism - 2018

17 May 2018, Columbia University, New York City, USA

Ira Glass starts around 17 minutes into the video.

Dean, faculty, parents and hello my new colleagues. Look at you.

Welcome to the next phase of your life. It’s gonna be amazing. There’s a war in this country over facts and truth – and it’s not clear how it’s gonna play out and congratulations – you’re heading to the front lines.

I know those are words every parent wants to hear.

Speaking for everyone else who’s been slogging away in the trenches: glad to have you! We need the reinforcements. Couldn’t be a better time to become a journalist.

I’m honored to be here. To be offered an award that’s also gone to so many journalists I’ve admired.

It’s funny to me that you had Maggie Haberman here yesterday as your other graduation speaker, since she and I represent such radically different approaches to this job. I like imagining a version of the world where this ceremony today were a little more like the Grammys and she and I would hate each other’s guts … snipe at each other on Twitter … snatch each others’ awards like dueling, nerdy Kanyes.

I am very aware that in my twenties I got interested in the idea of doing stories about regular people and their lives precisely because I had no idea how to do what she does and what normal reporters do. I didn’t know how to cultivate sources or cover the news or unearth important things the public needs to know.

I am very aware that Maggie Haberman shows us all, day after day, a rigorous demonstration of how you use the traditional tools of journalism to get inside information from suspicious sources and break news and answer the biggest questions in the most important ongoing story out there right now.

And as for me … there’s this thing the drummer for the Who once said that I relate to a lot. His name was Keith Moon. And when he tried to explain what he did for a living, he once said: “I … am the greatest … Keith-Moon-type drummer in the world.”

I am very aware that I make my living with a weird grab bag of skills that probably shouldn’t add up to anything. My primary skill is that I’m a good editor. That’s the main thing I do all week. From the start it was the one thing in journalism I had a natural talent for … an easy command of. I also have a bunch of showbizzy skills that go into packaging material into a program – pacing and flow and humor and emotional arcs. Stuff I learned basically in high school musicals and as a teenaged magician at children’s birthday parties.

In my 20s there was a feeling I got in a certain kind of recorded interview that I became transfixed with. And loved. And tried to make happen again and again. There’s a feeling I got when music hits underneath a radio story that just got to me. And still does. And I cultivated that.

I’m also good at running and promoting a business. I like spreadsheets and budgets and dealing with member stations and all the machinery of making a radio show. I enjoy selling, which is fortunate because a certain amount of my job is selling. On the pledge drive. In promos. During the radio show … when I’m saying things to try to bait people to “stay with us.”

I guess the lesson of this for you guys … is that there are lots of ways to be a journalist. Maggie’s way. My way. Which is good news for you as each of you discovers your way.

Before I go further, I want to acknowledge my co-workers. In particular Julie Snyder who ran This American Life with me as my partner in making the show for two decades. And who left that job to create the podcasts Serial and S-Town, which – I think I can be braggy on her behalf – made the world rethink what podcasting can be.

The kind of journalism we do at our shows is a team sport. To be totally honest, most weeks I spend most of my hours at work not working on my own stories but in a scrum of people who are puzzling out how to make somebody else’s work the very best it can be. We edit each story over and over and over, each time dragging in some new person who hasn’t heard the thing yet to bring fresh ears. Our show is made as a collaboration – to serve our pleasure and curiosity as a group. It’s best when one or more of us gets obsessed and excited about something and then pulls the rest along. To figure out something original to say about Afro-futurism or police violence or Iraq or post-Katrina New Orleans or whatever.

Together we all set the editorial agenda. Together we chew over which stories to pursue and what the angles should be. And in the interest of factual accuracy I will say that the majority of the stories on the program that’ve gotten the most attention – Harper High School, the Giant Pool of Money, convicted murderers putting up a production of Hamlet in prison, Nikole Hannah Jones stories on our show and Sarah Koenig’s and Chana Jaffe Walt’s – they were not my idea or my doing. In fact, there are not one but two stories that I was totally completely against us taking on … that went on to win Peabody Awards.

With all that in mind, I accept this fancy honor on behalf of everyone I work with in making the product you’re honoring.

A brief digression now about editing. Brief but urgent. Editing does not get the respect it should. There are so many awards for reporters. Where are the awards for editors? There are so many famous reporters. So few famous editors. I believe that gifted editors are rarer than talented reporters. If you have the knack for it, I just wanna say: go for it. I really want to give you a nudge of encouragement in that direction. It’s a wonderful job and journalism needs you.

Editing is crucial because in my experience anything you try to make - what YOU want is for the story to be AMAZING. But what the story wants to be is MEDIOCRE OR WORSE. And the entire process of making the story is convincing the story to not be what it wants to be, which is BAD.

And turning it from the bad thing it’s trying to be, where the sources are inarticulate, and you don’t know how to structure it, and the structure you make doesn’t work, into the shining gleaming jewel that you have in your heart … that is editing!

Everyone else … Love your editors. Choose them with the care you’d choose someone to have sex with.

Do not have sex with them!

Let me go back. Choose them with the care you’d choose a good friend.

Choose your jobs with a careful eye on who your editor will be. Good news is very few editors, in my experience, are awful. The overwhelming majority are solid, decent, helpful. And then if you’re lucky you get somebody like the people I work with, like Julie Snyder, people who make everything they touch, so much better.

I’m guessing some of you are focused and directed and you know exactly what you want to do. But I bet many of you are like I was all through my 20s, when I really struggled to figure out how to do work that was meaningful to me. The work I do now really came from that long experience of being lost and trying to invent something that made sense to me. And seemed special to me. Something I was actually good at.

So if in the coming months and years … you feel lost and you’re stuck in some job that isn’t what you want … I just wanna say to you and to your parents … that’s normal. You’re not crazy. Happens to lots of us. You just have to get in there and make stuff and try things and push yourself hard and that’s the only way to find your way.

For those of you who feel like your work still isn’t at the level of skill that you want it to be, I can offer this: I started at NPR when I was 19 … and was not a decent writer or reporter until a decade into it. Editing I could always do. But those other skills were hard fought and didn’t come easily. I was 36 when I started This American Life, 17 years into doing this.

I realized this thing recently …

We’ve always had a paid internship at This American Life. It’s so competitive that eventually we had to stop calling it an internship and we now call it a fellowship. Like one intern came to us from a reporting job at NBC News, another from the digital staff of the New York Times. We were like “we can’t call these grown-ass people ‘interns.’”

And at some point … I looked at the skills of the candidates applying and I realized, “oh … if at any point in my 20s I’d applied for the internship at This American Life … I wouldn’t have gotten it!” Like … I couldn’t have been an intern on my own show! I wouldn’t make the cut.

It can take a long time to be as good as you want to be.

And be kind to yourself, during that period. And work hard.

You all are entering journalism at a fascinating and intense time.

For starters, I don’t know if you’ve heard … everyone in the country hates everyone else all the time.

Doing fact-based stories in that environment has some challenges.

Two weeks ago we were lucky to work with a great reporter, Steve Kolowich of the Chronicle of Higher Education … about something that happened at the University of Nebraska between a sophomore who put out a table to try to start a chapter of Turning Point USA — a right-wing group — on campus … and a left-wing teacher-slash-grad student in her 40s who started yelling at this girl and calling her names till the sophomore was in tears. Video of this, of course, went online … and things sort of exploded … the legislature got involved. Everyone assumed the worst of everyone else at pretty much every single moment.

Steve and his producer Dana Chivvis did a careful and sympathetic and evenhanded job parsing out everyone’s motives and what we should make of all of it.

But the fact that we talked to the right wing student, to hear her side of it, as one part of that story … one listener wrote:

I don’t even want to listen to this bullshit. I’m so sick of TAL highlighting the right. You don’t have to give equal airtime to stupidity just because stupidity took the office.

Here’s another:

Thanks for giving voice to a fascist organization. I’m out.

Or another:

So many pieces about how we “elite” liberals just don’t understand conservatives.

That was not what the story was about in any way by the way. The fact that someone took it that way is so … dispiriting.

I understand them just fine. They’re usually racist, don’t “believe” in science or facts. I’ve had enough of these kinds of “but what about the poor conservatives?” pieces.

Another:

Honestly, I’m getting a little tired of This American Life’s fixation on conservatives. I really have no interest in them or their feelings.

This intolerance to even listen to someone else … that’s new among our audience. Three or four years ago, we never got this reaction.

Often, reading the comments, one of my co-workers says it freaks him out because he feels like people don’t understand what journalism is. Sending some of our stories into this environment is like throwing baby bunnies into a cage of hungry snakes.

Like, we really expect them not to lick their lips and eat the bunnies?

I will say … the good news … is that most listeners were not like the ones I’m quoting here. That was a tiny percentage of the comments we got. Lots of people seem to be okay with the way we’re doing this coverage.

I did a fundraiser for a public radio station last night in someone’s very nice home in the suburbs, and the woman who hosted it told me she heard the episode we did a couple months ago on Republican Senator Jeff Flake. Producer Zoe Chace followed him for four months as he tried to get DACA legislation passed.

This woman told me she had that this feeling listening, which was she described like; “No. Don’t make me LIKE him!” She was like, “I didn’t want it to happen but you humanized him.”

And I was like “we didn’t humanize him! He is a human!”

You know? We were simply documenting who he is like we document anyone else. Zoe presented his stubborn idealism and also his flaws – argued with his premises – challenged him point by point throughout the hour. The same way we do with anyone who comes on the show.

This listener seemed cautiously okay with the fact that she was seeing him as a human being. Seeing a Republican senator as a person. To be sure, a person she did not agree with. But a person with principles and decency … and not a monster.

The fact that journalism can do that ... I think that’s one of the things journalism can accomplish in this present moment. Like, I don’t think anyone is going to change their minds about DACA. Or about any other issue facing the country because of some story they hear on the radio. That’s just not how people work. Like you would never change your minds about abortion or guns or who to vote for based on a story you heard on the radio. Nobody would.

But I do think it’s possible – in this utterly divided moment in our country – to get listeners to understand the reality and complexity of people who are not in their particular group — whatever that group might be.

We do a lot of stories on refugees and immigrants. We’ve done stories on kids who live in neighorhoods where their friends have been shot, and they fear getting shot. We did an hour of women in an office talking about – among other things – how it messed them up – like messed with their minds and feelings – to have a sexually harassing boss.

And I don’t think we changed anyone’s mind on any of those issues.

But I do think those kinds of stories made clear the stakes of what those experiences are. In some crude dumb way, those stories do the most old-fashioned thing a story is supposed to do. Which is: they make it possible to imagine, if this happened to you, this is what it might feel like.

I want to be clear about what I’m saying. Empathy is not enough, in reporting. There are lots of people I do not empathize with. After Charlottesville there was real disagreement on our staff about putting certain white nationalists on the air. About whether it promoted their ideas, no matter how we framed it.

With respect to people who feel differently, I believe that you can put someone like that on the air and interrogate them the way we interrogate anyone and anything else. In that case, to talk to the organizer of that rally about what he was trying to do and how he felt about the results. Did the fact that someone died, was he glad about that? Sorry? Guilty? That seemed worth knowing. Some stories are not about empathy, but about investigating a phenonenon to try to understand what we’re really dealing with.

Another thing I think about all the time lately is that there are all sorts of stories that nobody wants to hear anything about any more ever … refugee coverage is a perfect example ... because it has the two key ingredients of any story you don’t want to hear anything else about: 1) it’s depressing and 2) ... YOU ALREADY KNOW THE STORY. Like, it’s not complicated! 60 million displaced people, the largest refugee crisis since World War II ... nice middle class people from Syria and elsewhere whose homes were bombed out of existence ... they have no place to go ... Europe and America don’t want them ... dying on boats ... living in camps.

People are like, “We’ve got it. What else would I ever need to know?”

There are so many other stories in this category: climate change … I’d argue almost anything about the environment for most people is like that … This is awful to say, but so many human rights stories - it’s so hard to get people interested no matter how important they are to document … so many social justice stories, so many criminal justice stories, so many of these issues that we cover and I think are so important to cover. It is very hard to get anybody to listen to. We still do those stories, and they require cunning. They require cunning. To get people to listen. And when you guys do them, that should be part of what you think about. I really believe that the more idealistic your mission, the more cunning you have to employ to get people to engage with what you have to say.

On our show, we did two hours from the refugee camps in Greece, and we were very aware that if we said at the top of the show “Okay, great! America! Two hours from refugee camps in Greece!” I think any reasonable person would turn off the radio. Like that’s just too sad.

But being cunning means, for starters, you have to get really hardcore about how you begin those stories. How you’re going to pull people in and get them listening.

And again, this is kind of terrible thing to say … but our goal is to get them pulled in and listening before they actually understand what the story’s about.

And before we went to Greece, a bunch of us sat around a table and brainstormed about what we could possibly do at the beginning of those shows.

And we thought, okay maybe a couple falling in love.

Maybe something with kids, and we brainstormed what that would be. Or basically any little narrative with someone fun to listen to. We could get the characters going ... let plot kick in ... so the audience is invested in these people and would want to see how the plot would play out.

I have to say, this is one of the great strengths of narrative for a journalist, is that you can get audiences to listen to material they might think they’re not interested in, simply by getting them caught up in the people and wondering what will happen next, like, what’s the next beat of the plot. That’s enormously powerful.

The thing we actually started those shows with ... I remember I was reporting in this camp called Ritsona and this thing happened and I was like, “Oh, this is the opening of the show!”

And what it was, they were showing me around the camp, and every now and then someone would mention, “Oh yeah, and then there’s the wild boars that come out at night.”

I was like, “The wild boars that come out at night?”

They were these giant wild pigs. The camp was in the forest. And at night, these wild boars would roam between the tents. So if you had a little kid who wanted to pee or whatever, it was actually pretty dangerous to leave your tent. You’d have to time it around the wild pigs.

And everybody had pictures of the pigs, and stories about the pigs. And one of the older guys had set up this trap in the woods that was not gonna work at all. Like, I made him take me out there and show me the trap.

And I was like, okay, this is so surprising. This can open the show.

You gotta be tricky.

Something came up in a story we did on our show that I’ve been thinking for months since we broadcast it. Our senior producer Brian Reed was the reporter. He’s also the host of the podcast S-Town.

The story started with this political fight in Homer, Alaska, about immigration. This was right after the presidential election. Liberals on the city council proposed a resolution that would welcome immigrants to Homer, including undocumented immigrants and Muslims.

Trump supporters on the city council rightly recognized it as a slap against their guy.

And as Brian reported, it became the most bitter political fight anyone in the town could remember. Truly turned people against each other in a very ugly way. Led to a recall election. They had their own email scandal.

Everyone in town seemed to take a side.

Except apparently, this one guy ... Ben Tyrer. 27 years old. Who is not into the news. Never followed immigration as an issue – it just never interested him – but now that everyone he knew was fighting over this resolution, he thought he should have an opinion.

And so he went on the internet and started doing something new for him. He started visiting news sites, to figure out for himself: Would it be okay to welcome immigrants into Homer?

Brian did a story about what happened.

As Ben told Brian, when it came to news he was basically a baby learning to walk. Brian said in the story: “His understanding was that publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post had a bad rap, so he didn't really spend too much time there. He would go to a site like the BBC, but worried maybe they were giving him a liberal bent. So then he'd go to a site like this conservative Canadian one he found, The Rebel. But he knew he couldn't fully trust that either.”

So … this is a really good test case for journalism today, right? Here’s this guy who doesn’t really follow the news. Going out among the work of people like us. Looking for an answer to a question he has.

And he discovers in today’s journalism environment, he really didn’t know who to turn to. The whole experience was kind of headspinning.

Ben read about Muslim extremists setting fire to Germany’s oldest church — there’s a video of them celebrating. He read about “no go” zones in France — neighborhoods where Muslims don’t allow non-Muslims.

He read about crime waves sweeping Germany and France thanks to Muslim refugees there. One Breitbart article quoted a German government report that said 402,000 crimes were committed by Muslim refugees in Germany in 2015.

And after a week of this … Ben came to his conclusion.

He was convinced that it would not be safe to welcome immigrants to Homer. Immigrants, especially Muslims, seemed dangerous.

In fact he was so alarmed at what he’d learned that he decided to testify at this big city council meeting they had, where anyone could speak. He brought his news clippings with him.

And then the story took a surprising turn. As Brian was leaving one of his interviews with Ben, Ben said to him, “I’d love for you to tell me that I'm wrong. If you can read this stuff and tell me that I'm wrong, I would love that. Because, I don't like thinking this way about people.”

So Brian found an expert to fact-check the stories that’d alarmed Ben so much ... a BBC correspondent in Berlin ... who’d been reporting on all this for years.

And yes, the BBC was a source Ben wasn't sure he could trust, but he was game to listen.

And the reporter ran down all the stories that Ben had found so convincing.

And Brian set up a time for the two of them to talk.

Turns out … perhaps you anticipated this plot turn ... a couple of the alarming stories were true … but MOST of the stories Ben had read were exaggerated or totally false.

No-go zones in France don’t exist. There was no increase in crime by immigrants in Germany in 2015, other than the crime of crossing the border or overstaying a visa.

The video Ben saw on Breitbart … of Muslim men supposedly celebrating after setting Germany’s oldest church on fire.

Turns out: The church was not Germany's oldest. And it had not been set on fire!

And the men celebrating in the video? They were Syrian refugees celebrating a ceasefire in the war back home.

Ben was flabbergasted. He felt deceived. He concluded that he’d be wrong. About the whole thing. Immigrants no longer seemed dangerous.

And I bring up all this up to say … one of the things that struck me as we were working on that story, is that NONE of the news stories Ben had found so convincing were things I’d heard of.

It had never hit me so starkly. I mean we all know there’s a massive machine churning out non-factual stories that the fact-based media where I work doesn’t even bother to counter. Because there are just so many of them.

And so they just stand. Uncorrected.

And even if they WERE corrected, the people who trust those right-wing media sources don’t trust the mainstream sources who’d correct them anyway.

I am alarmed at how much non-factual material is out there, how gleefully it’s generated, and how exciting it is to read and pass around. And I know everyone in this room is very familiar with all this but I just wanna say: I’m disturbed by how often when I’m out reporting, I find myself in conversations with people I like a lot. Lovely people, good people, who say things that are just not close to being true.

That’s what I find most alarming about this moment we’re living through.

President Trump, like President Obama, will be out of the White House someday. As a non-partisan journalist I have no position on that.

But this information ecosystem …. this will be around for the rest of our lives. That’s the most frightening thing to me right now.

Non-factual information is whipping up people’s feelings and pushing the policy debate … to very strange places like … Homer, Alaska. All of Homer, Alaska, is up in arms debating whether to welcome immigrants to their town.

But immigrants do not want to go to Homer, Alaska!

The police chief told us - quote - "Homer is not a destination for immigrants, illegal or legal, and it never has been.”

Okay imagine. You’re a person who wants to cross into the United States and be undocumented in the United States. Let’s say you’re coming from Central America. Okay. Pass through Mexico. Cross into California or Texas. Cross through the entire length of the United States. Go to the northern border of the United States. Cross into Canada. Cross through Canada. Cross BACK into the United States at Alaska. It’s like you have to cross over to the very tip, the end of the Peninsula. It is the furthest point in the road.

Or! You’re a member of ISIS. You’re fleeing Syria. Where you gonna go next? I know! The United States! Wreak some havoc there. New York City? Nah! Chicago? No! You know where I'm gonna go? Homer, Alaska! Fly to Homer, Alaska. You will not be conspicuous in any way! You will hate the food.

And … the people pushing untruths see this is a war. They talk about this as a war. They fund it like a war. On the theory that – as Andrew Breitbart famously declared – “Politics is downstream from culture.” To change our country’s politics you have to first change our culture.

And I think most of the fact-based news media – our people – we don’t see treat it like a war.

And I think we need to do that. To flood the zone with money and new ideas about how to reach people and what to reach them with.

I think this is a moment that requires a strategy that has yet to be invented by people who have yet to take up arms.

Because when you have one side fighting a war against an opponent who isn’t fighting a war, guess who loses a lot of territory?

And we have lost a lot of territory. We have lots of the country that does not trust us, and a President who calls what we do “fake news.”

We need your ideas and energy to fight this war.

And we need great reporting.

One hopeful thing about this moment is watching so many organizations rise to the occasion with inspiringly great reporting, excellent reporting.

But there’s plenty of room for more. All of us in this room are living through a moment of seismic, historic change in this country. You bring fresh eyes to this. And a perspective those of us who are older do not have.

It’s traditional in this sort of speech to give advice. I will not do that.

Except this: amuse yourself.

I don’t think enough gets said about that when we’re training journalists. Everything will be better if you’re out for your own pleasure. Noticing what you’re actually truly interested in ... and curious about ... and making your work about that.

Like I said earlier, our radio show is run on the principle that among other things, it’s there for our pleasure. For our fun and curiosity as a staff. And the show is at its very best when one of us gets obsessed.

But even when I was a baby freelancer and taking any story NPR threw my way, I had a rule. In every story there had to be something in there for me. Some little thing I observed that amused me, some funny line I could get in there, some interesting back-and-forth in a quote.

And by the way, any of you doing broadcast or podcast: be in the tape! Cajoling, hondling, joking with, arguing with, interacting with your interviewees. It’s the single easiest way to make your stories better. Be in the tape. An interview properly done is a drama with two characters and not being in there as one of the characters is giving up one of your greatest powers. Don’t leave that power unused. Be in the tape. Don’t settle for less. Don’t do less than you can. Be in the tape.

If you’re funny in real life … be funny in your stories. It makes them better. And it doesn’t mean you aren’t a serious person dealing with serious subjects in a serious way.

If you’re not funny in real life … for god’s sake don’t try to be funny. Be yourself!

Don’t wait. Make the stuff you want to make now. No excuses. Don’t wait for the perfect job or whatever. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. One of the advantages of being a journalist is you don’t need permission. You can go and run down the story now and then find a home for it. Pay someone you respect - pay a friend - a little money to be your editor and the person you talk to about your next steps. Don’t wait. You have everything you need. Don’t wait.

Commencement addresses are a ridiculous form. It’s a kind of speech that’s doomed to failure. Precisely because nothing can be said that’s up to the task at hand. You are being launched from the training phase of your life into the vast exciting unknown of everything that’s to come. What words could possibly make that better? Seriously. What poncy little speech makes the liftoff of a rocket any better? Your ambition and your hopes for your coming lives … those are enough to fill this day with feeling. The wishes of your parents and loved ones for you … that’s enough.

To those I add my wishes for you. Which are big. I want you to be bold. I want you to change things. Although I am what came before you, I want you to tear up what came before you.

I really truly, no kidding, envy you. Starting as journalists today. To be starting at this moment when journalism itself is changing so much. To be part of remaking it into something new. To be reporting on these difficult times.

To be battling untruth with truth.

Best to you all, my new colleagues.

Christine Lagarde: 'Today, I thought I would take a page from Homer', A New Odyssey, .Claremont McKenna College - 2018

12 May 2018, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California, USA

Introduction

Good afternoon! Daniel, let me thank you for that very kind introduction. 

In my career I have spoken after Presidents, Prime Ministers, and even some celebrities. But I do not believe I have ever followed a Jeopardy! contestant — so this is a true honor for me!  

To President Chodosh, to the trustees, to the faculty and administration, thank you for inviting me. 

To the class of 2018 — congratulations! Each of you has completed a remarkable journey to get here. No one goes on that journey alone, however. So, to your parents, your entire family, your teachers and your professors, congratulations as well. Your sacrifice, support, engagement, and passion have made this day possible.  

And if I may, since tomorrow is Mother’s Day, can we take a moment to give special recognition to all our mothers and thank them for the love they have given us?  

A few years ago, I watched my own son graduate from college — so I know the pride and joy you feel this morning. 

Part I: A New Odyssey

Now, there is one more group I would like to acknowledge — your very own national champion women’s volleyball team: The Athenas. 

As a daughter of classics teachers, I was intrigued to learn of your team name. And I was even more fascinated when I read that in order to motivate the team, your coach developed an “Athena inspired journey” for the season. Borrowing from the Parthenon, the team created “pillars” that represented your values: focus, passion, and resilience. 

I am a bit jealous. When I was your age I was on the French national synchronized swimming team, but no coach ever proposed something so clever. 

When I read about this plan, I immediately thought of another famous journey involving Athena: The Odyssey. In Homer’s epic poem, Odysseus, guided by the goddess of wisdom Athena, spends ten years trying to find his way home. Ten years! This is after Odysseus had already spent a decade fighting in the Trojan war. Clearly ten years seems to be a time period of some significance.  

Today, I thought I would take a page from Homer, and borrow his idea of “ten years.” Ten years backward, ten years forward: 

So let us take a look back at the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on the students who sat in your chairs ten years ago. And then, let us take a look forward. What will the world be like in 2028, when today’s middle schoolers graduate from college? And, most importantly, how will each of you make a difference in shaping that future? 

Part II: The Class of 2008

In May 2008, what was happening in the world? The global economy was rattled. Bear Stearns had just folded and Lehman Brothers was about to go under.

As the French Finance Minister, I was in constant contact with European and US leaders. There was a very real sense that the entire financial system could collapse. The global economy turned negative, international trade came to a halt, unemployment skyrocketed and people lost their homes. 

During this turmoil the institution I now lead, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sprang into action. The IMF deployed its firepower and supported its member countries, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to help secure the global financial system, to make sure that people would not lose their deposits in the bank, and to kickstart the global economy. 

Through international cooperation, we avoided a global depression. But the consequences of the recession were felt by hundreds of millions all over the world, including right here in California. 

In May 2008, what was happening at Claremont? The class of 2008 prepared to graduate and faced a job market in crisis. Research shows that students who graduated in the US in 2008 and 2009 faced higher rates of unemployment and lower salaries than their peers who graduated before and after. 

By 2013, the average college graduate who finished school during the recession earned 36 percent less than peers who graduated a few years earlier.[1] To put it in Homer’s terms, the class of 2008, possibly distracted by the voices of the financial sirens, faced a near shipwreck. 

Many of you have studied the economic consequences of the great recession. How do I know? I looked at your thesis topics! One of you wrote about quantitative easing in the US and the UK. Another wrote about the large infrastructure gaps remaining in advanced economies. One of the most impressive topics was covered by Tim De Silva. Where is Tim? Can I read the title of your thesis? 

Ok, here it is: 

“Are volatility expectations in different countries interdependent? A data-driven solution to structural VAR identification for implied equity volatility indices.” 

Wow, Tim, this is quite a relevant topic, and I understand an award-winning one too.  Congratulations.  This is the kind of work anyone who has been tracking the recent ups and downs in the stock market might want to read. 

Now, like Odysseus, the class of 2008 turned adversity into an advantage. Homer tells us that Odysseus used the narrow escape from the Cyclops to convince his crew that they could survive any future test on their journey. Soon after, when Poseidon sends a tempest, Odysseus’ men remain confident that they will find a way through. 

In the midst of an economic storm, the class of 2008 also found new paths they may not have imagined during their years in college. In fact, a few Claremont students who lost their finance jobs in New York moved to Silicon Valley and developed start-ups that turned into successful businesses. 

Others embarked on careers in law, public service, and education. 

These young men and women were part of rebuilding the American economy. The international students who returned home were part of rebuilding their respective economies. The IMF was part of rebuilding the global economy —  we all cooperated in the same endeavor: Rescue the system. 

That system was severely tested at the beginning of 2008.  And that system was rescued and improved thanks to international cooperation, thanks to the belief that we could be stronger together. 

A lot was done over the past decade. A great depression was prevented. More resilient economies and safer financial systems were built. And because of this work, you, the class of 2018, have more freedom to chart your own course. 

To graduate at this moment, in this time of prosperity and technological revolution, is an extraordinary gift. But it does come with strings attached. 

To quote from a modern-day writer of epic stories, J.K. Rowling, “You have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.” 

This is your challenge. What kind of country, what kind of world, will you help build? What values will you respect? What will drive your life and the lives of others? Ten years from now, when the class of 2028 stands here and prepares to graduate, what will you have done to help them? 

Part III: The Class of 2028

Right now, the class of 2028 is about twelve years old. So they are not looking for a job just yet. 

But imagine the nature of the global economy when they finish college. 

You might walk into a meeting and sit next to someone who looks a lot like you, makes a joke, and then offers to help you with a project. An hour later, that same “someone” — who in reality is a robot — will walk outside to recharge its solar battery. 

When you buy a cup of coffee a quick retinal scan may automatically deduct money from your bank account — or maybe even your crypto-currency account. Cash may seem quaint. 

Here at Claremont, think of the experience future students will have: 

The Athenaeum could become a digital speaker’s forum — where playwrights and poets interact with students via a hologram. 

Your professors will be available around the clock. Office hours may only happen twice a week, but through artificial intelligence you could soon debate Aristotle with your philosophy teacher anytime day or night. 

Some things will not change of course. It will still be impossible to get into Econ 50. You think they would make an exception for the head of the IMF but apparently not. 

So yes, our lives will be more efficient, but there will be a cost. We may be increasingly connected to each other or possibly disconnected from one another at the very same time as many of us need to find new jobs and learn new skills. The fourth industrial revolution may well have morphed into the fifth industrial revolution that will owe much to services and data. 

How this all happens — who benefits from these changes and who is left behind —  is a story that you will help write. 

You arrive on the scene at an inflection point. The decisions you help make, through careers in government, finance, the tech sector and academia, will change the course of this narrative. 

Will the technology companies become regulated like public utilities? Will they be expected to respect your privacy and seek your consent prior to sharing your data? 

What will happen to those who lose jobs due to automation? 

Will excessive inequality continue to fracture our society? 

Shall we control our carbon emissions and find a way to tackle climate change? 

Will we invest in our human capital more than in tangible assets? 

These questions cannot wait for the class of 2028. We need your help in finding answers today. As of now, you become the writers of your own epic poem.

… 

The truth is that every class, every student, faces a unique set of challenges. History judges whether they meet the moment. 

For me, one of those challenges has been gender empowerment. 

I finished high school in France in 1973 and came to America as an American Field Service Scholar. I worked on the Hill, just as some of you will do next year. Later, in France, I went to law school and initially had trouble finding a job as a lawyer. Why? When I interviewed it was clear that a few firms would not treat me the same way they treated the male associates. As a young working mother, I raced from meetings to get back home and take care of my two sons. 

My generation confronted unequal pay for equal work, and gender discriminations that would prevent women from finding jobs and rising to the top of their fields.

The reality is that we have not fully resolved these issues.  

Progress has been made, yes, but not enough. Today, women in the United States make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. The percentage of women in the workforce in the US has stagnated — it is at the same level it was in the mid-1980s.[2] Less than seven percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.  In fact, a recent report showed that there are more Fortune 500 CEOs named James than Fortune 500 CEOs who are women. And around the world millions of women face legal barriers that prevent them from working at all. Think of places where women cannot hold title to property, control their own bank accounts, let alone travel by themselves. 

The job is not finished. 

I am committed to helping solve these problems and today I am reenergized. Why? Because of you, the new wave of young leaders, sitting right here, who I know will take on this challenge along with the others facing your generation. 

My hope is that when the Claremont McKenna Commencement speaker addresses the class of 2028 she will be able to say with confidence, “Thanks to the class of 2018, the world is a better place. One where there are better choices than just between Charybdis and Scylla.”

Conclusion

Now, I started with Athena, goddess of wisdom, so let me end with her. 

At the conclusion of Homer’s story, when Odysseus finally comes home, he discovers all is not well. 

His island, Ithaca, is consumed by conflict. His wife, Penelope, is harassed by suitors and his son, Telemachus, is suffering. He has found his way home, only to confront new questions and hurdles. You might think he would be dejected. Instead he is determined. He is determined because he receives help and love. Athena comes to him, in disguise, and gives him the encouragement he needs to face the next challenge. He also encounters his wet nurse, Eurycleia, who recognizes him, embraces him, and gives him all the love he needs. 

You too will face setbacks and unanswered questions in your life and your career. 

But remember you also have a goddess of wisdom in your corner. 

It is your education, your experience, and the incredible lessons you have learned right here at Claremont McKenna. 

And there will always be someone to give you the love that generates confidence that will help you move on and face the next hurdle. 

Thank you and congratulations class of 2018!

Ted Baillieu: 'Speak up, speak up for architecture' Architecture Faculty, University of Melbourne - 2013

18 December 2013, Royal Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne, Australia

 I am absolutely delighted to be here but I’m also deeply, deeply envious. I’m delighted to be at this graduation ceremony for this faculty, the best university in Australia, in the best city in Australia, in the best state in Australia, in arguably – unarguably – the best country in the world. But I am jealous. I’m jealous because I never got around to attending a graduation ceremony myself. In fact, this is my very first Harry Potter moment. My certificate arrived in a tube courtesy of Australia Post. I’m also jealous because those who are graduating here today are predominantly young. The world is yours, the future is yours – and what we on stage wouldn’t give to swap places with you and do it all again. You are fortunate indeed. It’s my view you’ve had the greatest education you can possibly have.

In saying that, I want to acknowledge the Deputy Chancellor Ross McPherson, Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Simon Evans, Dean Tom Kvan, the two legends here of my life, Daryl Jackson and Hugh O’Neill, the staff, students, parents and friends – and particularly those graduating. I also acknowledge all of those past and present, including our Indigenous communities, whose love of our land, whose care of our country, whose connection to our State, our city, to this place and to this university have left us with a legacy we should cherish and seek to nurture at every opportunity. What a legacy it is.

You only have to reflect back 160 years ago, when gold was first found, and reflect on those who subsequently came to Melbourne and Victoria from all over the world, every part of the world.

They came with ambition and they came with aspiration. They came with dreams of building businesses and raising families, and thoughts of the future. They had one predominantly, often forgotten, characteristic. They were so invariably young.

For this graduation it’s pertinent to reflect on 160 years ago, when the likes of young Joseph Reed arrived here as a young man. We sit today in part of his extraordinary legacy to our community, the Royal Exhibition Building, now World Heritage listed after just 125 years. A tribute in itself to Joseph Reed, responsible for so much of the great civic legacy of Victoria - Ormond College, parts of the Library, Government House, the Town Hall and so much more.

I think of young Alfred Dunn, who died as an architect in his late 20s in Melbourne, but before then had achieved so much. Such extraordinary buildings as the Auburn Uniting Church Tower and the church buildings around it, and many others. And J J Clark, John James Clark, who arrived here in the 1850s with his parents. He was just 13 years old and he went to work immediately at the Public Works Department as an architect. Just six years later, John James Clark designed the Treasury Building, at the age of 19 – the building at the top of Collins Street.

This is the legacy of our young ancestors and they are the inspiration for you into the future. It’s also the legacy of our multicultural origins. Our multicultural city and our State is something we should treasure as well, and we do. It’s the legacy of the great dreamers, those who came here with that ambition and aspiration, and it’s the legacy of a State that is fundamentally free and outward-looking, growing, clever and a place to dream. Unlike other states it’s a special legacy in Victoria.

You are blessed with having been at this university and having succeeded and graduated from your courses. In particular for me the architecture course at the University of Melbourne has been a life-giving discipline and a course for all.

An architectural education, a built environment education, is a life changing experience. An education in the built environment will equip you for life no matter what you do. Part science, part geology, part history, part art, part philosophy, part theatre, part planning, part law, part sociology, humanity, part wellbeing and dare I say, part politics. I loved and cherished the education I had at the University of Melbourne. I’m ever grateful. Seldom a day goes past without me thinking about it and I treasure that learning.

For you, you face an emergence into the wider world and if can dare offer some advice. I exhort you to find through your studies in the built environment, and architecture in particular, to find your balance, find your love and take the chance to always see the big picture. You will discover, I believe over time, that you have been given a seemingly secret gift. A simple gift. It’s a wisdom of life, the wisdom of the built environment and architecture. It is a gift that few others possess and from time to time you will be surprised, and you will be surprised that others – surprise, surprise – don’t have that same understanding. They are moments of true revelation.

In your life you will accumulate moments of true revelation because in the end, it’s your mission to take those others with you. That gift is simply the ability to orient yourself, orient yourself to the north, to the sun, to the weather, to the seasons, to the light, to the colours, to the patterns, to the land, to the materials, to the clock, to the future, to the people, and to the joy of the built environment. It’s the ability to place yourself in the great game of life. The ability in particular to consciously, knowingly, deliberately and sometimes mischievously, disturb that orientation. That’s the magic of architecture.

Remember, the basics never change. If you don’t use it, you may lose it, but you will never lose it if you keep thinking. When you do have those moments, make sure you stand in the shoes of those others who at the end of the day may not share that understanding, but desperately want to dream too.

If I can make one other observation. Architecture is the quiet art. Its practitioners tend to the quiet and thoughtful, but in this day and age when architecture has become too often just the science of accommodation, the built environment and architecture and the benefits of good design need you to yell. They need you to make a noise. Over the last 20 years in particular the built environment has been shaped, impacted and led more by the cost of construction, accountants and realtors than by planning or design, and that is of no good to anyone in the long term.

So I urge you, speak up, speak up for architecture, speak up for the built environment, speak up for yourselves and aim high, dream. Aim high.

If I can just finish with one small angle. A developer told me last week, when discussing a development and some of its finer points, that they benchmark their properties. They benchmark their projects. They benchmark those projects against other projects which don’t aim high. We had a long discussion about that.

I’d simply say to you don’t aim down, aim up. That is your responsibility as custodians of the built environment and architecture of tomorrow. Aim up, just as those young ancestors of ours aimed up 160 years ago. There’s nothing you can’t do. You’ve been blessed with the opportunity to have the greatest high of all – dreaming, drafting and shaping the living environment of others. Never, ever stop being young at heart. Never let go of the gift. Don’t waste a single moment. Have a ball – and above all congratulations.

Ronan Farrow: "I knew I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t honor the risks those women had taken to expose this", Loyola Marymount College - 2018

5 May 2018, Loyola Marymount, LA, California, USA

Hello Class of 2018! Faculty, Administrators, Students… congratulations! Parents, you’re done! Tear down those childhood bedrooms and reclaim the extra closet space you’ve always yearned for.

Thank you President Snyder, Provost Poon and Chair Viviano, for that lavish introduction.

As you may have concluded from said introduction, a whole lot happened in my life this past year. And I am very, very… tired. I’ve been up so long President Trump called Chuck Todd a “sleeping son of a bitch” and I just felt jealous.

I’ve been up so long I feel like a side effect in one of those uncomfortable medication ads with scenes of old people dancing.

It was an honor, this grueling past year, to crack into a series of stories that—thanks to the brave sources who risked so much to talk to me, and thanks to the brave activists who continue to turn those stories into social change—seem to be having an impact. Due not just to me but to a whole group of reporters banging their heads against the wall, cracking the tough stories… we are hearing the voices of sexual assault and harassment survivors who were for so long silent. We are grappling, as a culture, with our collective failure to create spaces that treat men and women equally and that treat everyone with respect and dignity. And we are learning a lot about how powerful men, who did despicable things, were protected for so long.

I know that hearing a generous introduction like the one I just got…Hearing about people the way they’re introduced as commencement speakers…The way the media talks about them, after the work is done… it’s easy for it to all seem kind of fancy. Like it was always so neat and packaged, tied up with a ribbon.

I’m still tackling tough stories, involving unsavory characters, and fielding a fair amount of threats and incoming fire in the process—so I’m grateful for any kind introduction, any award, any shred of support.

But I wanted to take a moment to talk about what it’s like trying to do work you believe in *before* the moment of impact.

I’ve talked a little about challenges I faced reporting my stories on sexual violence. How the systems commanded by those powerful men I mentioned earlier came crashing down on me too. And how people I trusted turned on me. And powerful forces in the media world became instruments of suppression.

I get asked about that story a lot. And fair enough—those vast systems that conspired to keep reporting on sexual assault quiet for so long are important to understand. But there’ll be time for that later. That’s not the story I want to tell you today.

I want to tell you about a simpler and more personal side of the story. One that, without a doubt, each and every one of you will experience your own version of in the coming years. A story that could have happened not just to a journalist but to an engineer or a foreman or a teacher or a doctor or a professor or a miner.

The reality is, I was not celebrated when I set about breaking the stories I broke this past year. I was a guy doing a job at a time when few people thought I was a success story. And I don’t say that for any sympathy. I’d had incredible career opportunities. I’d done work I was proud of, which I don’t take for granted.

But the reality is my career was on the rocks. And as a result of my tackling this story as doggedly as it did, it fell apart almost completely.

There was a moment about a year ago when I didn’t have the institutional support of my news organization. My contract was ending. And after I refused to stop work on the story, I did not have a new one. My book publisher dropped me, refusing to look at a single page of a manuscript I’d labored over for years. I found out another news outlet was racing to scoop me on the Weinstein story, and I knew I was falling behind. I did not know if I’d ever be able to report that story, or if a year of work would amount to anything. I did not know if I would let down woman after brave woman who had put their trust in me.

I had moved out of my home because I was being followed and threatened. I was facing personal legal threats from a powerful and wealthy man who said he would use the best lawyers in the country to wipe me out and destroy my future.

And, if against all odds I got through that and found a way to publish this story, I did not know whether anyone would care. Because I had spent a year in rooms with executives telling me it wasn’t a story. Because this was before the extraordinary months of conversation and analysis and acknowledgment that the suffering of these women mattered.

I’m not being falsely humble. I was sincerely at a moment when I did not know if I would have a job in journalism a month or two months after, or ever again.

And I wish I could tell you I was confident. That I was sure of myself. That I didn’t care, or I said “to hell with it.” And if there’s ever a movie I’m sure there’ll be a moment where some actor smirks and lowers his shades and says “over my dead body I’ll stop reporting” and swaggers out of the room.

But the real version of this was that I was heartbroken, and I was scared, and I had no idea if I was doing the right thing.

There were so many people in my ear at that time making such good arguments that what I was doing was a mistake. Not because they were evil, but because they looked at the world as it was a year ago and concluded, “This isn’t worth it. You’ll tell one story at the expense of so many others.” They were being rational about what our culture would accept and what it would care about, based on the existing evidence. And these were people I trusted. My bosses saying “you have got to stop, let it go.” My agent saying “it’s causing too many speed bumps for your career, you have got to let it go.” Even loved ones, saying “is this really worth it?” Pointing out that I would risk my whole career for a story that might not even make a dent.

And I seriously considered those perspectives because I felt, “Well, what do I know?” I remember a low point last fall where I hadn’t slept, and I had lost a lot of weight, and I was on the phone with my poor, long-suffering partner who dealt with a lot of really annoying calls from me during this period… and I was in a cab going from one meeting with a source to another and I had just learned I might get scooped entirely and I just fell apart. I was sobbing, and trying not to sob (which made it worse), and I’m pretty sure there was some snot happening and it was not pretty. And I remember saying “I swung too wide, I gambled too much, I lost everything and no one will even know.” And my partner said “okay, we are going to talk about all of this but also you are going to tip that cab driver really well.”

(The driver’s name was Omar and he was very supportive. Thanks, Omar.)

I didn’t stop. Because I knew I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t honor the risks those women had taken to expose this. But also, less nobly, because I really had gambled too much and there was no way out but through.

But I did start to think I might have made the wrong call.

In hindsight, it’s always clear whether or not your choices were the right ones. In hindsight, you know whether it was right to stick to your guns, or right to turn the other cheek. Whether it was right to not give up on a story, or right to give a little to get along, and move on—not because you’re cowardly, but because there are other stories and there’s only so much you can do.

But, in the moment, you don’t know how important a story is going to be. In the moment, you don’t know if you’re fighting because you’re right, or if you’re fighting because your ego, and your desire to win, and your notion of yourself as the hero in your own story are clouding your judgment.

You can have a feeling. You can have an instinct. You can have a gut reaction: a little inner voice that tells you what to do.

But you can’t be sure.

I am so grateful for every story of every person who stared down that uncertainty and listened to that voice telling them to do the right thing, even if it wasn’t clear it was the smart or strategic thing.

A group of juniors here, including Vandalena Mahoney, got behind the hashtag #BlackatLMU this past September, sharing the kind of stories of everyday prejudice that sometimes make us uncomfortable but are important to hear, and meeting with school administrators about race on campus.

In October, when the DACA legislation allowing people brought to this country illegally as kids to stay here longer was rescinded, Hayden Tanabe, class of 2018, organized around-the-clock lobbying and rallied the 28 Jesuit Student Body Presidents to sign a statement on the importance of supporting undocumented students.

Michael Peters, who would have graduated today, died last year awaiting an organ transplant. Friends said he was shy and quiet, but he found it in himself to write a searing op-ed in the Loyolan, highlighting the good we can all do if we become organ donors. He taught me something, even in death.

“Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you.” That’s 1 Timothy 4:16.

The lessons of those students who stood up, and let their own strong senses of principle guide them, and tackled tough topics are important. Because this isn’t going to get easier as you go through life.

Right now, we are surrounded by a culture that tells us to take the easy way out. That tries to tip the scales in favor of getting paid rather than protesting. That tells us to kill the story instead of poking the bear.

A culture that tells us not to trust that voice that says to fight.

And the reason the culture sends us that message is that we look around and we see people taking the easy way out—doing the immoral thing, or the selfish thing—and being rewarded. And it’s easy to conclude that’s just the way the world works.

So here’s what I would say to you. No matter what you choose to do; no matter what direction you go; whether you’re a doctor treating refugees or a financier making money off of foreclosures…

And I genuinely hope you don’t do that.

…You will face a moment in your career where you have *absolutely no idea* what to do. Where it will be totally unclear to you what the right thing is for you, for your family, for your community.

And I hope that in that moment you’ll be generous with yourself, but trust that inner voice. Because more than ever we need people to be guided by their own senses of principle—and not the whims of a culture that prizes ambition, and sensationalism, and celebrity, and vulgarity, and doing whatever it takes to win.

Because if enough of you listen to that voice—if enough of you prove that this generation isn’t going to make the same mistakes as the one before—then doing the right thing won’t seem as rare, or as hard, or as special.

No pressure or anything.

Congratulations, class of 2018.

Jack Heath: 'Be Good. Be Grateful. Be Kind. Be Still', University of Melbourne - 2018

11 April, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Jack Heath is the CEO of SANE Australia. SANE helps the more than 700,000 Australians living with mental illness, including bipolar, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorders, eating disorders, PTSD, complex forms of anxiety, and depression.

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, distinguished guests, teachers, GRADUATES

Thirty-two years ago, I graduated from this fine University with degrees in Law and Arts. It took me seven years to get there and I dealt with some mental health challenges along the way. In fact, just a few months before I was to sit my final law exams I was going to throw it all in. It was only thanks to a very kind Sub-dean of the Law School that I was convinced to stick it out and complete my degree – thank you Sally Walker. So, for those of you graduating today who have faced similar challenges, I have a sense of what it’s like and I salute your simply being here today.

Coming back to this building brings up mixed emotions. Over the years, I think I must have sat more than 30 exams here – the nerves haven’t gone away. But the main emotion I feel today is relief – no more exams! And for all of you graduating here today I suspect the feeling might be mutual.

I am deeply honoured to address you today and do so on behalf of the many members of my family who graduated from the University of Melbourne in arts, law, medicine, commerce, science, veterinary science and agricultural science. Apologies to the architects, engineers and others! My wife Catherine and I started dating at the University – 34 years later she is still beautiful, still fiercely intelligent. And while our daughter is set to graduate from two Sydney Universities to follow in the footsteps of her great grandmother, our son Jamie will head this way after his gap year.

Today as we celebrate your graduation, I ask you to consider FOUR invitations.

My first invitation is to BE GOOD. It was always the last thing my father would say to me whenever we parted company be it heading off to boarding school or back to Uni – BE GOOD. My father graduated in Ag Science in 1958 two years before I was born. He was a cricket tragic. Dad prided himself on ensuring his children had the best education possible even if that meant the only holiday we had each year was when we would drive down from Mooroopna for the Boxing Day Test. The last time I saw Dad alive was just over fifteen years ago – not too far from here. We had spent the day at the MCG watching the cricket. We left the members pavilion. I veered left towards the city and Dad veered to the right to his car. BE GOOD he said.

There are some events in public life where you can remember exactly where you were – like the time Princess Diana died. More recently, I was one of the many Australians outraged at the Australian cricket team’s ball tampering in South Africa. I was dismayed when I read it on my iPhone as I was getting of bed. I was bewildered when I watched the first media conference Steve Smith gave. How could he possibly not realise the enormity of what had happened – as if you could just say you were sorry, that everyone would move on and you would remain as captain. He failed to appreciate that whenever we do the wrong thing there are consequences. And so, my invitation is to be BE GOOD. Doing the right thing is always the right thing to do. And as you pursue your careers, I beseech you – if something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.

At the same time, I was very moved at Steve Smith’s second media conference when he showed deep and genuine remorse. I suspect Dad might have forgiven him as well.

My second invitation for you to consider is BE GRATEFUL. My family made big sacrifices to send me to boarding school and I’m sure many of you are graduating today thanks to the generosity of your families both here in Australia and overseas.

Our family tradition of giving your children the best education, whatever the financial cost, stretched back to my paternal grandmother Nellie Frances Carrick whom we knew as “Gran”. In April 1920 – 98 years ago this month – Gran graduated with a BA from the University of Melbourne. She then went teaching in Horsham before returning to the University to complete a Masters of Arts which was conferred in April 1922. She was one of only two women to complete her MA that year. Gran was an extraordinary woman. She had a consistency, depth, stoicism and grace that reminded me of the Renaissance sculptures she studied. At Christmas time, the only presents she ever gave her grandchildren were books – and we loved that.

It was only after she died that I came to understand how much Gran gave and how much she endured. When Gran was in her thirties my grandfather died unexpectedly leaving her with seven children, the eldest sixteen, the youngest nine months. Gran moved her family from Casterton to Melbourne. She would later teach History at Camberwell Girls High. She would see five of her seven children graduate from this University with the sixth becoming a priest and graduating from Maynooth University in Ireland and the seventh became a wonderful nurse. And whenever we went to visit Gran in Camberwell she would usually be outside … gently, wistfully but thoroughly sweeping up the leaves as though she was raking up all our sins and making things right again. Whenever I think of Gran, I feel incredibly grateful and proud.

My third invitation for you to consider is to BE KIND. My inspiration here is my mother who never went to University but rejoiced that I did. Mum is now in an aged care home in Pascoe Vale. Like my grandmother, Mum endured extraordinary hardship and tragedy that led to her spend some time in a psych hospital here in Melbourne. At home, she always sought to be the peacemaker, often to her detriment.

A few years back Mum developed dementia and last year when our family felt we could no longer give her the round-the-clock care she needed we put her into Edith Bendall Lodge – a

great home full of kindness. Many of you here will already have a family member who has suffered with dementia. Many of us here will end up with dementia ourselves.

Prior to Mum moving into care, my brothers and sister would rotate taking care of Mum often bringing her down from Tatura to spend the weekend in Melbourne while one brother and his family cared for her up in Tatura.

Dementia is so debilitating. I remember a weekend that I was looking after Mum and she could no longer manage going to the toilet. It was not an easy thing the first time I wiped my mother’s bum. In fact, it took me a quite a few times before it suddenly clicked into my self-obsessed brain that Mum had spent many, many months, if not years, wiping my bum and this was the least I could do to repay her kindness. BE KIND.

My final invitation for you to consider is BE STILL – not something I’m very good at. Many of us graduate from this University with great energy and ambition. We sometimes rush to change the world because that’s a far less daunting task than changing ourselves. It was the French philosopher Pascal who said “All man’s problems are caused by his inability to sit quietly in a room with himself.” My ambition drove me to become a Senior Adviser to Prime Minister Keating at the ripe age of 34. I thought I had arrived but I was struggling to stay well and keep it together. It was only a ten-day meditation retreat that led me to realise that I needed to stop, I needed to slow down. I’m still learning that lesson today. But what I do try to do every morning and night is to make time to be still. Even if I can’t still my mind, I try to still my body.

What I’ve come to learn is that without a sense of stillness and calm, it’s virtually impossible to be truly kind or truly grateful. When we’re rushing we often lose perspective and it can result in poor choices. So, I would strongly encourage you to find time to be still each day – make it part of your daily routine.

As you head out into this next chapter in your life – be it as a graduate or post-grad – I truly hope that each and every one of you makes the most of the incredible opportunity this University and its teachers have given you. I wish you every success.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if each one of us could see the benefits that will flow and the gratitude that will be expressed by your children and grandchildren 96, 98, or 100 years from now.

Be Good. Be Grateful. Be Kind. Be Still

Thank you.