Good evening, graduates. Are you happy to be here? Are you happy to be here? All right, that's a good thing because commencement speeches are a really strange thing. Unless you're lucky enough to get some famous entrepreneur, an athlete, or maybe a comedian, you're likely going to be stuck listening to a string of ramblings that somehow confer some wisdom none of you were able to acquire on your own. But really, it's just a bunch of crap that worked for some old person that you don't even know or have never met. But I'm here, so I got to say something. And hopefully I can say something you remember for more than 10 minutes.
So as someone that was once young, I can say with conviction that youth is not unwise. But it is a bit narrow in its wisdom, and it tends to be a little bit more impulsive in its application. And as someone that is now old, I can say with conviction that age is not uniquely wise. But it is broader in its wisdom and maybe a little bit more measured in its application. So if you're predisposed to tune me out because of my age, my daughter does, so you might want to, too. My race, my gender, my social status, or some ideology or stereotype haunting your brain, I ask you only this: 5, 10 years from now, just listen to this speech again. Give it one more chance. Because here is something that I know to be true about all of you. You have more grit than most. And you need to use it. Your difference is your superpower and you need to leverage it. And you have a path to impact. And all of you need to follow it.
Now, I know all of these things. Use your grit, leverage your difference, and follow your impact are important. And if you do them, you will live a good life. You may or may not get rich. You may or may not be famous. You may or may not even do the things you expect to do. But you will have what you need. You will be surrounded by people that love you. And you will be fulfilled. I know all of this because I am one of you. And I know very few of you. But I believe in all of you. All of you.
Now, as for grit, it comes in many forms. All of you know what form it comes in for you, and each of you know how to use it. Now, when I left CSUN, my summer internship turned into a job at Lockheed. It was my first job. Now, while I was there, I had the chance to work with engineers from UC Berkeley, Caltech, all manner of lofty places. Some were my mentors. Some became my friends. But one decided to be my nemesis. For him, I was an insult to his existence, to his life efforts. He criticized my pedigree. He minimized my work. He found every flaw and ignored every success. When I came to work one day wearing a pink tie, he belittled me like a high school bully.
Now, grit isn't without feelings. You know, that hurt. All of it hurt. It made me doubt myself. It made me feel small. And yet my professors at CSUN, you know, they believed in me. My Caltech-educated manager believed in me. You know, my friends believed in me. And so it came to pass that day after day I wore that pink tie. Now, how long I wore that tie gets longer every time I tell this story. Okay, by the time I'm 80, that tie will have been on my neck for an entire year. But what stays true is that I wore that tie until no one looked at it anymore. And everyone looked at me differently.
So sadly, despite what media attention says, small acts of defiance rarely change the world. But they always change how the world sees you. They always change how the world sees you. So choose your acts of defiance carefully because they will define you.
Now, you will likely meet many people in your life that hurt you. And when you do, I encourage you to do this. You go home. You stare at your wonderful, hardworking face in the mirror. You give yourself a big smile. And you say, 'Fuck them.' Now, can you do that? So what are you going to do? I suspect that's a first. Sorry. Sorry for those of you who are offended by that. But then, more seriously, I want you to do something that's a little bit more difficult. I want you to forgive them. Okay, these people don't know what they do. They're trapped in this weird illusion, one where the system always rewards people that follow a checklist. Let me tell you, it does not. Ray, I forgave you decades ago, and I hope your career has been everything you wanted it to be. Forgive them, and they have no power over you.
Having grit means you don't see yourself as a victim. Having grit means you don't let others define who you are. Having grit means you take a stand, even if it's an absurd one.
Now, as for your difference, it truly is your superpower. All of you will see the world differently from many people around you, and all of you will need to learn how to tap into that difference if you want to shape the ideas around you. Not everyone is going to appreciate your difference, and sometimes you'll adapt to the expectations of others as you navigate their world. And that's okay. But if you adapt too much, you lose connection to what makes your ideas special. People often make the mistake that being liked is critical to their success. But you can't stay true to yourself, true to your difference, and be liked by everyone. If you did, you would always be adapting to others, and you wouldn't be different at all. In reality, it's more important to be respected than liked.
So, after graduate school, I worked at a startup. At startups, if you don't need to be in a meeting, you're not in the meeting. So, decisions get made quickly. Everyone that needs to know knows. Now, when I moved to a big company 30 years ago, Autodesk in fact, I learned that people that don't need to be in meetings want to be in meetings anyway. Now, as you might imagine, this annoyed me. Because people that don't need to be in a meeting, they slow everyone else down. So, I started telling people to leave meetings. Not long after I joined the company, I asked the chief marketing officer to leave a meeting. That did not end well for me. In fact, it ended so badly, the CEO called me an [__] in front of hundreds of people. Spoiler alert, [__] is not how I view my identity. I was a crusader for executional velocity, a courageous champion of the right and the just. Thank you for seeing that. And it was courageous to tell people to leave meetings. But I didn't do the scholarship to understand how the company worked. And I didn't have the empathy to know how my actions would land. The result was that I was disliked and dismissed. You can be impactful when you're disliked, but you can't when you're dismissed. My difference wasn't making a difference. I was courageous, but courage without scholarship is reckless. And without empathy, it's just mean. So I took the feedback. I stuck to the unpopular change I wanted to make, but changed how I made it. 28 years later, the company accepts that not everybody needs to be in a meeting. And though I'm not universally liked, I am respected for helping the company move faster. Carol, if you're out there somewhere, thank you. Feedback is a gift.
We all need to be liked by someone some of the time. That's called being human. But we don't need to be liked by anyone all of the time, or certainly by everyone all of the time. And yet, to be impactful, you must be respected by most of the people all of the time. Lose respect, and you lose everything. If you want to leverage your difference, remember, it's more important to be respected than liked.
Which brings me to impact. Some say you should follow your passion. Some say follow your talent. Follow your passion is what someone says when all their difficulties are behind them. They've already made it, and they think they followed their passion to get there. Follow your talent can leave you barbecuing ribs on the patio for a living. We all have many talents, but only some of them impact our lives in meaningful ways. That's why I like to say follow your impact. Follow the path where you find yourself making a difference over and over again. The path that leverages your passions and your talents. So I want to challenge all of you to find out what your impact is. And honestly, you're going to need every bit of your grit and difference to do it. Because today's world is a lot tougher than the world I knew at your age. You have AI reshaping every career you will explore. You have a strained and dangerous political environment. And you have the very real risk of global conflict in your lifetime. But despite all of that, I know you can do it. I know you can do it.
I found my impact by doing a variety of jobs. Jobs I loved, jobs I didn't love, jobs I knew how to do, jobs I had to learn to do, and I did them all with 100% of my effort. Nothing was beneath me, and nothing was above me. Variety gave me room to explore and room to fail. I found my impact by failing, by being willing to fail, and failing many times. Failure was a feature, not a bug. It showed me where my abilities mattered and where they didn't. Failure taught me about myself, and it taught me humility. I stand here today doing a job I neither aspired to nor knew I could do, and I got there by keeping track of where I made a difference, and then taking on challenges that I thought would make the next difference. One decision after another, leading to the next and the next. Sometimes with a plan, and sometimes completely unsure where it all ended. Always chasing impact. And I want you to remember this, because it's really important, that the people around you help you find that impact. Your friends, your partner, your co-workers, the people you work for and work for you. They all make you who you are. Choose them wisely and honor them because no one rises alone. Honor them and they will lift you up.
With that in mind, I want to tell you something about this speech. When I first sat down to write it, I did imagine myself in this moment looking out at all of you and I visualized reaching every one of you with what I had to say. But I knew that reaching just one of you would have an impact. That one was enough. So, with that confession and the acknowledgement that you face a very uncertain world, I encourage you, all of you, to imagine the life you hope to live knowing all you imagine will not come true but that many things you can't imagine will, and their sum total will define your impact. You have more grit than most and you will use it. Your difference is your superpower and you will leverage it. And you have a path to impact and you will follow it. And because of that, you will never be lost.
Now, before I go, I want to acknowledge that many of you have traveled far to get here. You've sacrificed, you've overcome, you've triumphed. You know, that's worth celebrating. So, for those of you who can stand, please stand. Okay? Please stand. Come on. Now if you don't want to dance, kind of do the church choir thing because you know, NO ONE'S JUDGING YOU, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THEY'RE JUDGING ME! You can do it. I want to see.
