Denzel Washington, the two-time Academy Award and Tony Award-winning actor, delivered a commencement address at Dillard University in New Orleans structured around three main points: put God first, fail big, and give back. This quote came from his second point — 'fail big' — which he announced with characteristic bravado before immediately complicating it. Washington drew the distinction between dreams and goals with the urgency of someone who had lived it. He described the nine-dot IQ test where the only solution requires drawing lines outside the box, using it as a metaphor for the kind of thinking that leads to real achievement. But then he pivoted: dreams without the structure of goals are just pleasant fantasies. 'I try to give myself a goal every day,' he said. 'Sometimes it's just not to curse somebody out.' The line about discipline and consistency that followed was delivered with the cadence of a preacher: 'Not just one Tuesday and miss a few days — you have to work at it every day.' For graduates of a historically Black university, the message carried particular resonance — dreams had never been the problem; the structural barriers to achieving them were. Washington's answer was to meet structural barriers with structural planning.