23rd November 2024
I often look at commencement & graduation speeches for words of wisdom & inspiration.
Commencement speeches are an opportunity for media moguls, celebrities, and CEOs to impart wisdom to the graduating classes of colleges and universities.
The JK Rowling speech at Harvard in 2008,
Bill Gates speech in 2007, John F Kennedy speech at American University in 1963 are some of the most memorable speeches but nothing to beat the famous Steve Jobs speech at Stanford in 2005 which has more than 20 million views on YouTube alone.
Recently, I came across a
Commencement speech with infinite wisdom which resonates with me.
Bill Watterson, the cartoonist most famous for his wildly successful Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, delivered the commencement speech at Kenyon College on May 20, 1990.
While it is significantly less known than David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is Water” commencement speech from the same podium 15 years later, Watterson’s speech is similarly wisdom rich.
My favorite line from the speech is:
“In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords them the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake.
A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to their potential—as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.”
Bill Gates spoke along similar lines to the graduates of Northern Arizona University at their commencement ceremony in 2023.
“My last piece of advice is the one I could have used the most. It took me a long time to learn. And it is this: You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack,”
Gates shared that he “didn’t believe in vacations.”
Only as he got older, he realized that “there is more to life than work.”
“Don’t wait as long as I did to learn this lesson. Take time to nurture your relationships, to celebrate your successes, and to recover from your losses,” he added.
Isn’t this a wonderful guide to rejecting that default culture and building a life by our own design.
Live a life you love, start today & stay blessed forever.