Jesmyn Ward, the two-time National Book Award-winning novelist, delivered the 2018 commencement address at Tulane University. Her speech was a deeply personal dismantling of the myth that success comes from one perfect choice. Growing up poor, rural, and Black in Mississippi, she had believed with youthful certainty that education was a singular magical key — that going to a good university would change the entire narrative of her life. But after Stanford, she couldn't find work, couldn't write well, and moved home. Six months later, a drunk driver killed her brother. Everything she thought she knew about the relationship between effort and success was shattered. What followed was a decade of persistent, unglamorous steps: folding jeans at a Tommy Hilfiger outlet with cracked hands, working as a publishing assistant too depressed to do the job well, reading voraciously for two and a half years before writing a single story, applying to MFA programs, facing rejection after rejection. Success, she learned, demands education and passion and commitment and persistence and hunger and patience.