<p>I have to give a speech at my upcoming graduation, and I was hoping to get some outside feedback on my attempt to be inspiring… Thanks for any help you can give!</p>
<p>Hi. I know you’ve heard and will hear a lot of speeches, so I’ll be brief.</p>
<p>Adults and authority figures tell you, you should do your best. They say you should follow your dreams. They say you have your whole lives ahead of you, and you shouldn’t let the choices you’ve already made limit your future. They’re right: the choices you’ve made don’t define or limit you. The future is always open, no matter what the past holds.</p>
<p>But maybe you’ve heard it so much it sounds trite, just another outworn phrase. You ignore them, ignore it as so much noise. Dreams are great, you think, but they don’t put food on the table, and as for all that change-the-world stuff, it doesn’t apply to me.</p>
<p>But they’re right, and there are two reasons why you should listen to them.</p>
<p>One is that the world demands your best. Look around, you can see that we live in a troubled time. Poverty, starvation, disease, pollution, environmental destruction, war, repression. These problems are not going to go away on their own. If this isn’t the world in which we want to raise our own children, if we want better for them, we have to make it happen ourselves. In fifteen or twenty years, our parents and their peers will no longer be running the world. We will. We will have to fix these problems, and nothing but our best will do it.</p>
<p>I know it seems overwhelming; it seems like the world is getting worse with each generation. But there are so many success stories! Sixty years ago, in your grandparents’ lifetimes, polio killed thousands of people and crippled hundreds of thousands more. Now it’s almost gone from half the world, because people worked tirelessly to fight it and would not give up, even when the odds seemed overwhelming.</p>
<p>History will remember us no matter what we do. But what do you want our generation to be remembered for? What kind of world do you want your children to grow up in? </p>
<p>Once when I was feeling down, a friend sent me a quote by a man named Carl Jung: “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” What light are you going to kindle? What are you going to do to make a difference?</p>
<p>But there’s another reason why you should listen when people tell you to hold onto your dreams, to give life your best and greatest effort, and that’s for you. We only get one chance at this life; what else are we saving our strength for? </p>
<p>If you fear failure, don’t. Everyone fails at something, but the worst failure of all is not trying in the first place. If you fear humiliation, don’t. No matter what you do, people should respect you for trying, and if they don’t-- maybe they don’t respect you at all. If people tell you you’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not talented enough, you’ll never make it-- don’t listen to them. Life isn’t about living down to the expectations of others, and they’re not in your shoes. They don’t know you as you as you know you, and even you won’t know what you can do until you try.</p>
<p>And that’s what life is about, is trying, and trying some more, and defying anything that stands in your path, because at the end of your span of days, you don’t want to look back and think, “I wish I’d done that. I wonder what would have happened.” When you die, you will have regrets for things that never happened, but don’t let them be because you didn’t try. You owe it to yourself to do the very best that you can do, because you deserve it. Of all the people to let down, the worst is yourself.</p>
<p>In closing, I’d like to read from two poems. The first is “Dreams” by Langston Hughes:</p>
<p>“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.</p>
<p>Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.”</p>
<p>The second is by Alfred Tennyson:</p>
<p>“Though much is taken, much abides… that which we are, we are, strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
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<p>Do you think I should switch the order of the points or possibly take out the Tennyson quote?</p>
<p>Thanks again.</p>