English Speeches with Audio & Transcripts | Books & Articles
Duke Class of 2021: I wish you lives with Desmond’s kind of love: Love for our neighbors—and for people who feel like they’re a world apart. Love for justice—defined by a spirit of mutuality and community. Love for a world where we don’t need to win at someone else’s expense, even if they’re Tar Heels—where we can win together.
I believe we are finally creating the scientific and technological tools to turn the world into a neighborhood. And that gives you an amazing ethical opportunity no one has ever had before. I hope you will use to the tool of technology to do what you already had it in your heart to do. To connect. To make of this world a brotherhood and a sisterhood.
Everything I’ve done in my life is a result of persistence. And I challenge all of you to do the same. We’ve all had a New Orleans education. I lived in New Orleans for four years as well. Cultivate what you’ve learned, make something special out of it. And never give up.
As you go forward today, use your minds and hands and your hearts to build something bigger than yourselves. Always remember, there is no idea bigger than this. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “All life is interrelated. We are all bound together into a single garment of destiny.”
Impermanence is the natural state of the universe. Everything changes, all the time. Sometimes those changes are so imperceptible we’re not always conscious of them. But nothing stays the same forever. And this fact of impermanence is something we’re all aware of.
I graduated from the University of Life. All right? I received a degree from the School of Hard Knocks. And our colors were black and blue, baby. I had office hours with the Dean of Bloody Noses. All right? I borrowed my class notes from Professor Knuckle Sandwich and his Teaching Assistant, Ms. Fat Lip Thon Nyun. That’s the kind of school I went to for real, okay?
I hope you will hold tightly to the community you’ve built here because whatever life brings, your success will be sweetened and your setbacks softened if you can share them together. Most of all, I hope you will find happiness and joy, meaning and fulfillment, and a life that gives to you all that you ask of it.
It’s OK to be scared. In fact, if you weren’t scared, I’d be scared for you. But let me repeat something that the most extraordinary, certainly one of the most extraordinary men I’ve ever known said. “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears. Let your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
No matter how cliché it may sound, you will never truly be successful until you learn to give beyond yourself. Empathy and kindness are the true signs of emotional intelligence. Enjoy the process of your search without succumbing to the pressure of results…trust your gut……keep throwing darts at the dart board…..don’t listen to the critics and you will figure it out.
First off, I want to thank the teachers and faculty of Broad Run High School for first considering and then inviting me to speak here. It was flattering, I am touched and humbled, and you have made a grave mistake. I’m being paid for this, right? Oh, wait, there’s some advice, right off the bat – always get paid.
What’s been at the edge of your awareness that you’ll place in that letter so it’s nearer to your core. How you might bridge your own dreams and those of a family in the periphery with its own heartbreakingly simple goal: “Stay nourished. Stay safe.”
Don’t get hung up on what other people say is practical. Instead, steer your ship into the choppy seas. Look for the rough spots, the problems that seem too big, the complexities that other people are content to work around. It’s in those places that you will find your purpose. It’s there that you can make your greatest contribution.
Technology is wonderful and powerful and efficient, but there’s no app for inspiration. Don’t let a four-inch screen narrow your vision. Open your eyes so wide that you let the entire world come in.
You enter a world of difficulty with open eyes, tasked with writing a story that is not necessarily of your choosing but is still entirely yours. You’re the pride of your parents and grandparents, of aunts, uncles and teachers, of the communities that shaped you in ways seen and unseen. You weren’t promised this day.
The past often offers an illuminating and clear-headed perspective from which to observe and reconcile the passions of the present moment, just when they threaten to overwhelm us.
My wish for you graduates is that you get comfortable with failure, with rejection, accept that it’s a possibility, but never let it define you. And never let it hold you back.
Graduates, being a builder is about believing that you cannot possibly be the greatest cause on this Earth, because you aren’t built to last. It’s about making peace with the fact that you won’t be there for the end of the story.
It is in the truly trying moments that the fearless inspire us. Duke graduates, be fearless! Be the last people to accept things as they are. And the first people to stand up and change them for the better.
I encourage you to remember that when you discover your passion, and make the first steps of your career, everything you’ve learned, everything you’ve experienced, makes you a different kind of contributor.
You don’t need all of the answers on your graduation day. What you need today is to have confidence and trust in what you decide is your moonshot. Confidence that you will do what is hard and trust that you can achieve what is great. Confidence and trust that you will be a part of something larger than any one person.