I ran across this tonight while doing research for a presentation I have to complete for Friday … and since it’s commencement season, I thought you might enjoy it. Wayyyy back in 2008, my then-intern Samantha asked me if I could speak at her high school, and I was honored to do so.
Anyway, I don’t think I ever posted it, or if I did, I don’t remember doing so. Then again, I rarely remember anything except that I really like dessert.
Mmm … dessert.
Commencement Address to Baruch College Campus High School
June 26, 2008
Julia Allison
[Samantha introduces me]
Thanks Samantha - that was sweet.
Of course, Samantha HAS to say sweet things about me. She’s my intern. In three months, when she goes to college and STOPS being my intern - THAT’S when she gets to say mean things about me. Obviously - because she’s a New Yorker! - for profit. She’ll get a top tier lit agent and auction off the rights for a tell-all “novel” called The Devil Thinks She’s Carrie Bradshaw. It will go on to sell three bajillion copies and Anne Hathaway will get to play me in the movie, except this time she won’t have to lose weight for the role.
See, graduates? Sweat-shop like indentured servitude ISN’T a waste of time after all!
And if that’s the only thing you learn today, it’ll be more than I learned from my high school graduation speech, where the speaker - a school board member - talked mostly about death. At least that’s what a classmate told me when I asked him about it on Facebook. I must have slept through it, which is surprising, because when you think “school board member” you generally think “riveting, poignant, hysterical, ridiculously good looking” - really everything you want in a commencement speaker. I can’t imagine what went wrong when they planned that.
So, yes. Commencement addresses. They’re funny, actually. I listened to a lot of them when I was preparing for this - Oprah, Steve Jobs, JK Rowling, Conan O’Brien, Ali G.
They all gave really good advice. Especially Ali G. (“You is the most cleverest students ever! You is the elite!” he told Harvard’s graduating class in 2004. Yes! Exactly! Great … advice … Put that on your resume! Who even needs internships??)
But the funny thing about really good advice - with the exception of Ali G’s - is that … um … how shall I put this? It’s all the same. Mostly they’re cliches that people repeat ad nauseam, but then don’t back up in their everyday lives. Cliches like LIVE IN THE MOMENT, TREAT OTHERS THE WAY YOU’D LIKE TO BE TREATED, TURN THE OTHER CHEEK, STOP AND SMELL THE ROSES, MATH IS HARD, WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE SWEET LOVE … you know, those sorts of things.
And that’s not really anyone’s fault. It’s hard not to be cliche, only because once you more or less figure out life - inasmuch as anyone can really figure it out - you realize that there are only, like, three Really Big Lessons. The rest is just God being all “creative” and paraphrasing the originals.
You’ll hear - and ignore - these same three lessons in hundreds of permutations before you finally repeat them to your kids, so they can hear and ignore you. It’s the Circle of “I Told You So.”
Lesson #1) Yay for Failure.
Every commencement speaker in the history of the world loves to talk about how awesome failure is, and how they’re pretty much the best at failing, ever. Except Ali G. He mainly talks about the size of men’s feet, but we really don’t need to get into that.
Their point, of course, is that failure teaches us things. As I read in O - the Oprah magazine (where I get all my spiritual guidance) - “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” To translate for future college students: “When you lose at beer pong, you WILL learn to not to fill the cups with vodka.”
Okay, so maybe that’s not the (only) kind of profound lesson that failure can teach you. The fact is, failure is really fun to reminisce about when you’re far, farrrr away from it. JK Rowling, who everyone knows was practically homeless when she started writing Harry Potter, talked about this to Harvard grads last month. “You will never truly know yourself or the strengths of your relationships until you have been tested by your adversity. Rock bottom became a solid foundation upon which I built my life.” That’s inspiring!
But not a great consolation when you have to call up your parents and explain, like I did when I was a junior, why you got an “F” in your Intro to Film class. (Who knew you needed to actually WATCH the assigned movies?) I’m a very creative thinker, so I told my parents that the registrar automatically fills students’ transcripts with Fs until the professors send in their REAL grades, and mine was, uh … late … with my “B.”
My dad’s still waiting for the updated transcript.
That, of course, wasn’t the only thing I failed at in college - just one of the most pathetic. I was also rejected as a Georgetown tour guide two years in a row, kicked off of Kickline and fired from my school paper for telling the editor that I wanted my dog to pee on one of his conservative editorials. Clearly, I’ve always been a bastion of maturity.
The thing is, it’s not failing in and of itself that’s so fantastic. You can’t be like “Okay, I’ve failed! Now where’s my SUCCESS, damnit??”
As Oprah said in her address to Stanford’s class of 2008 this month, and probably to your moms every weekday at 11 am for the past twenty-five years, “Ask every failure - what is this here to teach me? And as soon as you get the lesson, you get to move on. If you really get the lesson, you pass and you don’t have to repeat the class.”
Here’s the key - something Oprah forgot to mention. The real lessons are ALMOST 100% LIKELY to be TOTALLY DIFFERENT THAN YOU EXPECT. What do I mean by that? Well, if you fail on a test, you’ve been taught to think that the lesson is study harder, right? Um … no. It’s not. (Your parents are glaring at me right now.) It’s not “study harder” or “get a better GPA” or “go to more discussion sections” or even “stop flirting with your one really hot Intro to Chem TA,” although probably that’s a good idea.
So what’s the real lesson? It depends on you. On a small scale, maybe that failed test means that you’ve prioritized something else - you were up all night talking with your roommate and what you learned in that one conversation far outshone anything you could have learned from studying. OR - maybe you failed that test because, despite the lingering belief that all human beings should choose between business, law or medicine, you actually are much better suited to being a Professional Hipster - um, I mean, artist - living in Williamsburg, listening to bands which are so cool they don’t even exist yet. Who knows?
You might just have a very different life path, and the only way of getting there is to FAIL off the one you thought you’d be taking.
Which brings me to the second theme commencement speakers loooove to harp upon, which is, of course:
#2) Don’t listen to anyone else.
Your parents are having a heart attack right now. Hold on, hold on!
Let me clarify - or allow Steve Jobs to clarify. In his famous 2005 commencement address to Stanford, he said, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
And here’s the most important line: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Sounds so simple, right? Duh? You’d be shocked (but your parents won’t be) at the number of people who forget that they’re not living for what other people think.
You’re about to leave your homes and embark upon this new adventure. NOW is the time to begin finding out what YOU want to learn, what YOU want to spend your time doing - not what your parents or guidance counselors think is appropriate.
Because by the time you hit your mid-thirties you’ll have over a decade of people telling you how and why you can’t do things. If you’re like most highly ambitious people, you’ll try to screen them out - but after all those years, the “can’ts” build up, like plaque in your arteries.
And that’s when you really start losing your youth - it isn’t the wrinkles or the sunspots or even the extra cellulite on your thighs. It’s the loss of hope. The loss of optimism. The loss of the attitude that says “screw you, I can do this - who are you to tell me I can’t?” It’s the loss of the ability to game the system simply by virtue of the fact that you don’t GET the system.
It turns out that ignorance can be - if not bliss - a highly useful weapon in your life arsenal.
Which brings us back to Steve Jobs. His famous story from that commencement speech goes something like this: he’s bored by college, drops out, but then stays because he’s curious and genuinely wants to learn. He takes a class called Calligraphy - a class he never could have or would have taken otherwise - and what he learns there becomes the basis for the industry changing typeface in the first Macintosh graphical user interface.
Feel free to bring this up to your parents if you ever have a disagreement about the “usefulness” of a course you’d like to take in college. “But Steve Jobs!” you can whine, and then reference the iPod’s latest sales figures. They’ll totally capitulate.
Okay, I’m almost done here … the final lesson is …
drumroll please!
#3) Dump your boyfriend or girlfriend before you go off to college.
Okay, okay, that’s not actually one of the Big Three Lessons - but it IS really good advice. Advice you totally won’t take, but let me guarantee you - one day, after a long freshman year of whining and forced long-distance misery, you’ll realize I’m right.
I suppose that advice does - in a sense - support my real final lesson - which is … JUST ENJOY YOURSELF! (Also known as LIVE IN THE MOMENT). You grew up in one of the most fascinating, complicated, stimulating cities in the world. Resist the urge to become jaded.
People - mostly old people you won’t listen to - will tell you over and over that these years are the best in your life. You will ignore them. Don’t. That kind of pressure may not be terribly helpful, but it’s a sage reminder that you are about to have the ability to explore the world and your own innate curiosity with a freedom that may be - not impossible - but difficult to regain in later life.
Don’t ever take that for granted.
I will close with one of my favorite lines from a faux commencement address written by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune back in 1997. It was so popular they made a song out of it called “Wear Sunscreen.”
“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.
You are NOT as fat as you imagine.”
Congratulations Class of 2008!
