Rethinking The Commencement Speech

I’ve often thought about what I would say if I ever had the chance to give a Commencement Speech at a graduation. The commencement speeches I’ve witnessed are often filled with encouragement and optimism (“Don’t be afraid to dream big dreams.” “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” “The future is what you make of it.”). It’s as if the main theme of many of these speeches can be summed up by saying: “Hey Graduates, you did it. You’ve accomplished this great goal. Now continue to ride this wave of achievement into the future and make the world a better place.” A sweet sentiment and a worthy charge to a class on the precipice of a major life transition. But I’ve often questioned the lasting relevancy of these messages.

Can the message resonate and be just as true on our hardest days as it is on the best of our days?

There is no doubt that a graduation is what we could call a “mountaintop experience.” You’ve reached the apex. Everyone is in a celebratory mood. But the failure of many commencement speeches is that they don’t take into account coming down off the mountain. The downslope that everyone in life experiences. The journey through the valleys on the way to life’s other mountain tops.

But what you can see is that the common commencement speech is just a snapshot of a larger societal focus on accomplishment and success. As a culture, we overvalue achievement and we overemphasize the perils of failure. The result: we are more anxious and feel more pressure to be perfect leaving many paralyzed with fear of failure and fear of being judged. But in reality, these priorities are misplaced. If you were to reflect on the times you learned the most and grew the most would they be times of success and celebration or would they be times of hardship and adversity? We tend to learn more from our mistakes and shortcomings than our successes and triumphs.

So what would I want to say in a commencement speech? I’m not entirely sure, but I would want to speak to the journey through valleys and peaks. I’d want to stress that the lessons learned in the valleys are just as important (if not more so) than the accomplishment of reaching the mountaintop. I would charge the class to have the right mindset to learn from these experiences and to develop grit and perseverance. I would want to empower the audience to use their unique gifts and position to seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly.

And I would probably want to keep it short because we all know how long graduations can be.