Graduation/Commencement Speakers

yelena
Wed, 20 May 2009 14:43:55 +0000

I found the article quite interesting. Take a look on your own of you want.

…Eminence is the one universal precondition to being a commencement speaker, and an implied (often explicit) theme of the speeches is, “Here lieth the path to success and happiness.” There are two problems with this formula. The first is that any narrative of success is bound to be at least a little bit dull. The second is that successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so. Take Warren Buffet. Here’s a guy who must get asked five times a day how he became the most successful investor of his era. His answers—"Reinvest your profits," “Limit what you borrow,” etc.—are no different from what any fool could tell you. Buffet isn’t being cagey. He doesn’t know. Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don’t acquire wisdom from it.

Failure, on the other hand, is Harvard, Yale, and the University of Heidelberg rolled into one. We may not all possess the self-knowledge to absorb failure’s lessons, just as we may not all graduate with an education to go along with our diplomas. But people typically have a much easier time recounting, in often vivid detail, where they screwed up in life than they do explaining what they did right. Indeed, memoirs of spectacular failure have become a cottage industry—so much so that authors are sometimes tempted to embellish their narratives to make their stories even grimmer than they really are. Stories about life’s wrong turns are sometimes exaggerated but seldom dull.

You want a commencement speaker who can really tell a group of college graduates how to live their lives? Consider selecting from the following alternate list…

[The trouble with commencement speakers. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine](The trouble with commencement speakers.)

An online user said that Michael Vick should be on the list:

The lesson that he will teach the graduates?

“Don’t ever forget anyone who has hurt you. If someone kill your parents, your dogs, hate them forever because forgiveness is bad. No one deserve a second chance. You will never be a success in your life because you failed a semester or a class. You will not succeed because you are bond to live a miserable life because second chance does not exist in life. Screw every one who failed in their life” this is with a sarcastic tone.

Another one said" I agree with this writer…all the time (not sometimes) you see great speakers at any graduation or ceremonies, what happened to the others who failed to whatever those great speakers succeeded at? I was a failure, i’m not anymore. I don’t study until my brains pop, i just plain learn from my mistakes my failings.I don’t hold a degree in my hand i hold it in my pride. My life is more than enough now."