Here are excerpts of the Graduation Day speeches some of the more well-known of them made.
1. Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencement Address 2005)
“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
From MacBooks to iPhones to Apple Watches, Steve Jobs’s legacy will continue to live on as technology continues to advance.
In his graduation speech at Stanford University, Jobs went straight to the point when he said, “Life is changeable and mouldable to how you want it to be.”
His approach? Simple, “No big deal, just three stories.”
• Connecting the dots: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.”
• Love and loss: “Keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
• Death: “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror in the morning and asked myself, ‘If the today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?’”
2. J K Rowling (Harvard Commencement Address 2008)
“Achievable goals, the first step to self-improvement.”
She’s the woman behind the world of wizardry at Hogwarts that made billions of readers of all ages fall in love with Harry Potter.
The two main points of Rowling’s speech touched on the fringe benefits of failure (aka tests of adversity); and the crucial importance of imagination.
She talked about her childhood and the heartbreak of poverty but added that failure helped her strip away the inessential and concentrate on the only work that ever mattered to her – being a storyteller. The rest is history.
3. Sheryl Sandberg (UC Berkeley Commencement Keynote Speech, 2016)
“When life sucks you under, you can kick against the bottom, find the surface and breathe again.”
Best-selling author and Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg has many accomplishments under her belt. She is known for breaking the glass ceiling and is an inspiration to young women all over the world.
Her UC Berkeley Commencement Keynote Speech in 2016 was the first time she had spoken in public since her husband’s death in 2015.
The raw intensity of her every word made her speech hard to forget. The authenticity and transparency of her emotions had the thousands of people listening to her every word. She shared her road to recovery and the resilience it took to stay on track.
Her graduation speech marked the fire that continues to burn inside her, and one we hope will spark the flame within young women out there.
4. Will Ferrell (Harvard, 2003)
“As you set off into the world, don’t be afraid to question your leaders.”
As one of this generation’s greatest comedians, Will Ferrell was able to make the speech easy to digest but also imparted blunt knowledge to the graduates in the audience.
Although some may think that his speech was too unconventional, it has been named as one of the best graduation speeches ever delivered.
Ferrell, although not a Harvard alumnus himself, made his speech relatable to his audience in terms of telling them how different their lives would become once they stepped into the real world as fresh graduates.
14 years on, Ferrell received a doctorate degree from his alma mater, the University of Southern California, and once again, gave an awe-inspiring graduation speech.
5. Natalie Portman (Harvard Graduation Speech, 2015)
“Achievement is wonderful when you know why you’re doing it, and when you don’t know, it can be a terrible trap.”
Many will know Natalie Portman as the face of top-grossing films such as Star Wars and The Black Swan. But her accolades do not stop there; coming from a family of academics, she attended Harvard while being an actress.
In her Graduation Speech for the Harvard University Class of 2015, she shared the insecurities that lay beneath her seemingly perfect exterior.
“There was a reason I was an actor, I love what I do… I wanted to tell stories, imagine the lives of others and help others do the same,’ she said.
What made her speech great was that Portman, one of the more diverse and talented actresses of our time, was able to end the speech on a serious and unforgettable note.
6. David Foster Wallace (Kenyon College, 2005)
“It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head.”
David Foster Wallace’s main message was that what you choose to pay attention to matters, and your ability to be aware of that and control what enters your mind is what will define your reality.
Wallace said that if people default to their easy and automatic natural setting of selfishness, then the rest of the world and the people in it will seem like they’re just in the way.
He also talked about how to think, and how one’s paradigms could affect one’s entire experience of the world.
This article first appeared in thenewsavvy.com
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