Find your passion, follow your dreams. Don’t be afraid to fail and remember that you, too, can change the world. Commencement addresses to the class of 2012 delivered a typical slate of inspirational clichés. At Colby College, Tony Blair asked graduates to “never stop learning” and to “be afraid of not trying.” Eric Schmidt, chairman and former CEO of Google, told seniors at Boston University that technology and digital connectivity have given their generation greater opportunities and problem-solving tools than those of any other in recent history. “Not only is it an advantage you have; it’s a responsibility you carry,” he said.
Still, a few commencement speeches broke away from standard maxims to offer fresh perspective on an old exercise.
Harvard and Princeton universities went an unusual route, lining up American comedians Andy Samberg and Steve Carell as part of their Class Day exercises. Samberg kept his Cantab audience entertained with cracks about “useless” liberal arts majors, Mark Zuckerberg and Yale. Carell also interspersed comedy into his remarks at Princeton, but offered a more critical perspective to the graduates as he discussed the ramifications of technological advancement. He asked audience members to look at those sitting to their left, then to their right. “What do we learn from this exercise?” he said. “That nobody looks each other in the eyes anymore.” Today’s graduates are out of touch with their “simpler selves” Carell said, asking students to recall the “analog past.”
Amid the light-hearted and the clichéd commencement speeches, there were a few standout ones. In his address at Barnard College, United States President Barack Obama acknowledged the challenges facing today’s graduates – a struggling economy, unemployment, lingering gender inequalities. The question that remains, he said, is not whether things will improve (he said they always do) or whether we possess the solution to our problems (he said we already do). The question, Obama said, is “whether together, we can muster the will – in our own lives, in our common institutions, in our politics” to bring about needed change. “I’m convinced your generation possesses that will,” he added.
And at Williams College, journalist and surgeon Atul Gawande delivered an address that did few of the things commencement addresses tend to do. “In commencement addresses like this, people admonish us: take risks. Be willing to fail,” he said. “But this has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is “I like taking risks?” What distinguishes the best surgeons, he said, is their ability to prepare for risks and minimize or avoid damage should they occur. He noted that scientists now refer to deaths that happen in surgery when something goes wrong as “Failure to Rescue.”
Handling uncertainty is necessary in almost any career or life people choose to pursue, Gawande told the graduates. “So you will take risks, and you will have failures,” he said. “But it’s what happens afterwards that is defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it—will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.”