Thirteen Rules for an Effective (and Perhaps Even Inspiring) Commencement Address
1. Don’t compliment yourself. Don’t praise your accomplishments in any way. It is not your day. Even if you’re delivering the valedictory speech, it’s still not your day. It’s a day for every person in your graduating class. Don’t place your accomplishments ahead of theirs. You’ve already been recognized as valedictorian; that should be more than enough credit for one day. Make the speech about something other than the great things you have done.
2. Be self-deprecating, but only if it is real. Don’t ever pretend to be self-deprecating. Your audience will see right through you. This is even worse than being self-congratulatory.
3. Don’t ask rhetorical questions. These questions always break momentum and displace your authority as the speaker onto your audience. Also, audience members will sometimes answer these questions and interrupt you, which is never good.
4. Offer one granular bit of wisdom, something that is both applicable and memorable. Anyone can deliver a speech filled with sweeping generalities. Most people are capable of offering old chestnuts and choice proverbs. The great commencement speakers manage to lodge a small, original, useful, and memorable idea in the minds of the graduates. It’s the offer of one final lesson — a bit of compelling wisdom and insight that the graduates will remember long after they have tossed their caps and moved into the greater world.
5. Don’t cater any part of your speech to the parents of the graduates. As much as they may think otherwise, this is not their day either. This is a speech directed at the graduates.
6. Make your audience laugh.
7. Never mention the weather or the temperature. If it’s a beautiful day, everyone knows it. If it’s not, reminding your audience about the heat or rain is stupid. There is nothing more banal and meaningless than talking about the weather.
8. Speak as if you were speaking to friends. Be yourself. If your language sounds more formal than your normal speech, you have failed.
9. Emotion is good. Be enthusiastic. Excited. Hopeful. Even angry if needed. Anything but staid and somber. This is not a policy speech or a lecture. It is an inspirational address.
10. If you plan on describing the world the graduates will be entering, don’t. It’s ridiculous to assume that the world as you see it resembles the world that this diverse group of people will be entering. Your prognostications will most assuredly prove to be wrong. These graduates’ paths will be multifarious. Some will be moving on to higher levels of education. Others will be hired for jobs that may not even exist yet. Others will join family businesses, travel the world, launch their own companies, or return home to care for aging parents. Telling these people what the world will be like for them requires hubris on a monumental scale.
11. Don’t define terms by quoting the dictionary. “Webster’s Dictionary says” are three words that should be banned from all speeches and essays until the end of time.
12. Don’t use a quote that you’ve heard someone use in a previous commencement speech. Don’t use a quote at all, if possible. Instead, be quotable. Your job is not to recycle but to create something new.
13. End your speech in less than the allotted time.
A note on #4, which is probably the most important of the rules:
In 2016, humorist Mo Rocca delivered a commencement speech at Sarah Lawrence College and provided one granular bit of wisdom that is both applicable and memorable.
Some perspective: Your great-grandparents — and some of you may be lucky enough to have known them — survived the Great Depression and defended freedom during World War II, defeating Hitler and the forces of darkness, ensuring that their progeny could also enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There’s a very good reason the women and men of that generation are known in history as the Greatest Generation.
Well, I did some research, and it turns out that the life expectancy of that generation was just 54. Your life expectancy is 76. That means that you can take a deep breath, chill out — catch up on House of Cards and Narcos — and spend the next twenty-two years figuring out what you want to do — and you could still end up matching the achievements of the Greatest Generation.
This singular idea — that graduates today will live on average twenty-two years longer than those from the Greatest Generation — is a tremendous bit of wisdom. Rocca uses this fact to encourage graduates to relax and place less pressure on themselves to succeed immediately. He encourages them to take the time to explore the world. Try out many things. Consider all their options. Stumble into opportunities. Rocca says:
Some of you may not know exactly what you want to do or who you want to be. Your brain may be whiting out from too much possibility. Or maybe you’re simply drawing a blank. You haven’t found your passion. Well there’s no shame in that. Quite the opposite.
Rocca’s bit of wisdom will remain with me for a long time. I’ve already used it twice with people I serve as a life coach in order to remind them that it’s never too late to start something new. We have more time than we think.
This is exactly what you want from a commencement speech: one final lesson that graduates (and commencement-speech stalkers like me) can use.