Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Emperor of All Maladies' and a practicing oncologist at Columbia University, delivered the commencement address at USC in May 2018. His speech was built around a single, deceptively simple idea: the importance of listening. Mukherjee structured his argument around three forms of listening — listening to other minds (empathy), listening to history, and listening to nature — and argued that mastering all three was the true requirement for entering adulthood. The metaphor of 'emerging from your own head' was both intellectual and deeply personal. He described learning to listen to experiments as a young immunologist, learning to listen to patients as a medical resident, and finally learning to listen to history when he began writing his 600-page history of cancer.