Major Cancellations to June ACT: What Happens Now?
May 29, 2020Ask for Your Letters of Recommendation Now! Here’s Why, Who, & How.
June 1, 2020
Steve Jobs, Entrepreneur
The founder of Apple & Pixar talks about his failures, passions, and mortality. It's a wonderful lesson about prioritizing through passion.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've discovered for making the big decisions in life....Remembering you're going to die is the best way to avoid the trap that you have something to lose.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Author
Adichie really nails identity in her speech. Often, people become their professions, or at least their idea of their profession. She advocates retaining your authentic self and making big, risky choices.
Please do not twist yourself into shapes to please. Don’t do it. If someone likes that version of you, that version of you that is false and holds back, then they actually just like that twisted shape, and not you. And the world is such a gloriously multifaceted, diverse place that there are people in the world who will like you, the real you, as you are.
Admiral William McRaven, Navy SEAL
Through a series of anecdotes about Navy SEAL training, McRaven elucidates a simple and demanding philosophy. Perhaps no speech better brings home the notion that there are things in our control and things that are not in our control better. Ultimately, what is in our control is character. It’s also the only commencement speech that includes a section on taking on sharks in hand-to-hand combat.
If you can’t do the small things right, you can never do the big things right....If you want to change the world, start each day with a task completed…
John Roberts, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court
The Chief Justice uses beautiful symmetry to point out the value of misfortune in our lives--how the bad stuff can make us better and more grateful people. The speech starts at about the six minute mark, but the first few minutes is probably the best introduction given by a middle school principal in history.
...From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty….
David Foster Wallace, Author
Wallace focuses on the value of education. To Wallace, it's all in the ability to be uncertain and to create greater empathy for others by shifting perspective. It's not teaching you how to think, it's teaching you to choose what to think about.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
….The point is that the obvious, important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.
