Graduation

Don't do what makes you happy. Do what makes you great. Do what's uncomfortable and scary and hard but pays off in the long run. Be willing to fail. Let yourself fail. Fail in the way and the place where you would be proud to fail.

Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness. That's the attitude that says we can't defeat poverty and disease. We absolutely can.

So let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism.

If our optimism doesn't address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools — and we will surprise the pessimists.

It's okay to not really know what you're doing, and just trust your gut. Make the best judgment you can. There's not going to be a syllabus assigned to you.

You're all here because you're good at not failing. This is the culmination of doing a great job at not failing. However, there are no GPAs after this. Failure is an option.

Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But family, health, friends, and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will never be the same.

Passion is the key reason for choosing a career.

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

That incomparable feeling is what happens when you do the right thing.

Ideally, we lose ourselves in what we read only to return to ourselves transformed, and part of a more expansive world.

As important as freedom of expression is — and it most surely is — so too it is important to know what it is we want to express, and why.