Speech

To all those who feel different, if you're part of a group that's called 'other,' a group that does not get the chance to be center stage — build your own stage and make them see you.

There may be more failures than victories. I've been blessed to have 24 Grammys, but I've lost 46 times. That meant rejection 46 times. Please don't ever feel entitled to win — just keep working harder.

Don't just dream about what you're going to do. Don't criticize somebody else for what they're not doing. You be it. Be about it. Be about that action and go do it.

Look for the job in life that you would take if you didn't need a job. Don't settle for anything eventually that's less than working for a company you admire or people you admire.

By reading, you can have lunch with Ben Franklin, or every great personality in the history of the world. You can in fact have a very long lunch with them.

I have never known anybody who got to the age of 70 or so and had all of the people love him or her that they wanted to have in that position, that ever felt like anything but a success.

It's very conventional for every generation to underestimate the potential of the following one. It's because they don't realize that the progress of one generation becomes the foundational premise for the next.

My father spent the equivalent of a year's salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford. It was my first time ever on a plane.

Be open, be impatient, be hopeful.

The challenges we face go well beyond a virus, and the old normal wasn't good enough.

You don't have to accept what was considered normal before. You don't have to accept the world as it is. You can make it into the world as it should be and could be. You can create a new normal.

You don't always need hope when everything's going fine. It's when things seem darkest. That's when you need it the most.