Well, this is awkward. I’m not one for graduation speeches, frankly, because I think most of them are a waste of perfectly good time that could be spent reading or doing something useful, and now I’ve been asked to write one. I mean, what are you supposed to tell a group of students who are getting ready to head out into the big wide world? How do you make them understand that their entire school life has been about teaching them things they didn’t know they were learning?
Let’s be honest here—90 percent of the crap you learn in school is useless out in the real world. Will you ever need to know who Archduke Franz Ferdinand was in any rational social setting? No, you won’t (he was the ostensible trigger for World War I, if you’re curious). Will you ever be asked to find the cosine of an isosceles triangle at a dinner party? Nyet (unless you hang out with some really weird people, or mathematicians). The presumptive eating habits of the northern European aurochs? Seriously. Just no.
All the little facts, all the trivia, all the dates and places and names are not the reason you’re graduating. Everything you need to know to function in your job, you’ll learn at your job. Sure, there’s some general knowledge you’ve hopefully picked up—how to add and subtract so you don’t get shortchanged at the grocery store; the cardinal directions of a compass in case you get lost; that you shouldn’t piss upstream of where you get your drinking water—but, really, that’s applicable no matter what you choose to do.
No, the reason you’re graduating is that (hopefully) you’ve learned how to interact with other people, how to navigate social situations, and how to master new information, no matter what it might be. The world is made up of all sorts of different people, and it doesn’t matter what grades any of you got, what classes you took, if you didn’t learn the most important lesson of all.
People are complex. People are incredibly kind and amazingly selfish. People are altruistic angels and conniving sociopaths. People are smart, stupid, wise, foolish, funny, boring, and so many other things it would take me all day to list them. People were at the parties you went to, throwing up on the balcony, dancing on the tables, making questionable decisions, having a good time, and creepily eyeing the pretty girls (or pretty boys, whatever makes them happy).
Every conversation you had over a beer, or in your dorm room, or during class; every interaction with anyone you ever met was a lesson about the real world and what you’ll find in it. That asshole professor who said your work wasn’t good enough and who gave you lower grades than you deserved? Yeah, you’ll meet him again in life. He’ll probably be your boss, and he’ll be just as much of a dick.
Side note: If any of you professors out there realize that this applies to you, stop being such a dick. Seriously. I know you have to deal with a lot of students, but remember that your behavior influences them just as much as your subject matter does. You’re role models for children who will one day be role models for other children, and the lessons you pass down will continue long after you’re gone.
Back to the students. The classes you took—not important. What’s important is that you learned how to learn during those classes, how to distill information from a variety of sources to get at the small nuggets of truth hidden within. Don’t just blindly follow whatever a book says; examine who wrote it and what her agenda might have been, what biases she may have brought with her. Logic and reason are your friends, and if you can’t logically connect the dots in an argument, ANY argument, then your opinion is not worth listening to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations with people who base their arguments on “Because I think that’s the way it is” or “Because that’s the way it’s always been done,” or how many times I’ve heard people cite statistics without knowing what they actually mean or how they were acquired. These people never learned how to learn—they learned how to parrot. Please, don’t be a parrot.
Question everything, but don’t do it just for the sake of being contrary (though that can be fun at times). Question when the stats don’t line up with the conclusion being drawn, question when the ethical implications are clearly wrong, question whenever you think someone is trying to hide something or pass a lie off as the truth, because that’s what you should have been learning. How to think for yourself. How not to be a slave to someone else’s unthinking dogma. How to live your own life.
So go forth and live your own life. Whatever you choose to do, do it to the best of your ability, but never forget the people around you, the people you interact with. Our world is only as good as we’re willing to make it, and that means treating others how we want to be treated, letting others live in freedom so they’ll let us do the same. No matter how much or how little money you make, how successful (or not) your career is, all we have is each other.
All we have are the people we spend our lives with.
Good luck.