Couric wove this moment of gentle wisdom into her broader lesson about courage. After quoting Theodore Roosevelt's famous 'Man in the Arena' passage, she listed the many forms courage would take in the graduates' lives: the courage to seek truth, to stand up for the underdog, to trust your moral compass, to love fearlessly and unconditionally. And then, almost as an afterthought, the hardest form of courage of all — accepting imperfection. Coming from a woman who had spent her career under intense public scrutiny, who had lost her husband to colon cancer and rebuilt her life in the public eye, the line carried the weight of hard-won experience.