Graduation

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.

Be a hero in your own life. Do the bold thing, do the honorable thing. Do the thing that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Do it for the simple heroic reason you feel it's right.

The hardest thing in the world is to let yourself know what you know. Because life is noisy. Everything we're told, everything about the way we're raised and educated and bombarded by our culture makes noise. And that noise makes it very hard to hear the ticking of our own hearts.

Your good friends from college may be the best friends you ever have. Guard those relationships like gold, work hard to maintain them. When they have a wedding, go across the country to be there. When one of them needs your help, cross the globe to give it to them.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. 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.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Fantasizing, projecting yourself into a successful situation is the most powerful means there is of achieving personal goals.

To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act.

Seventy-five percent of your education was paid for by your tuition, but twenty-five percent was paid for by people who never met you, through direct contributions to your endowment. They did not know who you were but gave generously so you could have your education.

You have not earned the right to do less than your best.