Harvard University

Continue to share your heart with people even if it's been broken. Don't treat your heart like an action figure wrapped in plastic and never used.

When you feel scared, hold someone's hand and look into their eyes. And when you feel brave, do the same thing.

You can't do it alone. Be open to collaboration. Other people and other people's ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.

Don't treat your heart like an action figure wrapped in plastic and never used.

Ask for guidance before you commit the crime. Trust me, it is much less embarrassing to ask for help privately than to beg for forgiveness at graduation.

All of us are here today because somebody helped us. And now it's our job to help others. And that is education, and that is human progress in its simplest form.

If I could get the help I needed to get a B minus in statistics at graduate school at Harvard, there is hope for world peace.

Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.