Long

At some point, you're going to find yourself on the bench and you're going to have two choices: you can sit and sulk and feel sorry for yourself, or you can accept what you cannot control and refocus your energy, preparing yourself for the next opportunity life brings you.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

The right reason to go to college is so you can find new ways to awe yourself by reflecting on how fascinating the world we live in is. We are actually on a giant rock hurling through space. It's a crazy interesting world we are living in.

Trees, as it turns out, grow out of the air, not out of the ground! That is a beautiful thing to contemplate. And getting the special glasses that allow me to look at the world this way, well for me, that is a really good reason that I went to college.

These stories we tell about ourselves — they're almost like our infrastructure, like railroads or highways. We can build them almost any way we want to. But once they're in place, this whole inner landscape grows up around them.

The world will tell you that it's time to grow up and leave those foolish, youthful diversions behind. But don't fall for that. I'm here to tell you those foolish diversions are the real nectar of life. Put up a fight. Be a fool.

I wish there was a way to know you're in the good ol' days before you've actually left them. Good ol' days are marked by relatively high levels of foolishness. Case in point: college.

Don't worry about the plot to take over the world. Just do what is in front of you, and do it well. Working on your grand plan is like shoveling snow that hasn't fallen yet.

You cannot let a fear of failure or a fear of comparison or a fear of judgment stop you from doing the things that will make you great. You cannot succeed without the risk of failure. You cannot have a voice without the risk of criticism. You cannot love without the risk of loss. You must take these risks.

Don't do what makes you happy. Do what makes you great. Do what's uncomfortable and scary and hard but pays off in the long run. Be willing to fail. Let yourself fail. Fail in the way and the place where you would be proud to fail.

Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness. That's the attitude that says we can't defeat poverty and disease. We absolutely can.

If our optimism doesn't address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools — and we will surprise the pessimists.