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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, enduring advice for this year's graduating class, and for non-graduates, too.
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Michelle Yeoh: Class of 2023.
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Jon Batiste: Take a deep breath and drink some water 'cause you are now a graduate. [LAUGHS]
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Patton Oswalt: It's time to live.
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Angela Bassett: Boldly, courageously and unapologetically, get to work!
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Lin-Manuel Miranda: I wish you all the luck today, tomorrow, and all the precious days of your life. Thank you!
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Basu, Narrating: The commencement speech has been a staple of graduation ceremonies for well over 100 years. And while sometimes these speeches fall short - you know, too boring, too long, too not-at-all-about-the-graduates - every year, there are a handful of speeches that are truly great, that stick with not just the graduating class, but with all of us who listen to them.
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Basu, Narrating: So, we're turning to someone who's listened to hundreds of speeches over the years. Cristina Negrut is the creator of the website bestgraduationspeeches.com. That's where she's collected the greatest commencement addresses and picked apart the patterns to find what makes a good speech that stands the test of time.
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Cristina Negrut: There are many attributes that would make a good commencement speech, but I boiled it down to two attributes. So, I was interested in commencement speeches that are entertaining and inspirational.
Basu, Narrating: Cristina grew up in Romania, where speeches were not part of graduation ceremonies. So, when she moved to the U.S. for graduate school and was especially thinking about her young kids and what kind of advice she wanted them to carry through life, she began this process of cataloguing and analyzing memorable speeches. She says the best ones weave together universal wisdoms with personal narratives. This year, she heard plenty of stand-out speeches given to the graduating class of 2023, and we'll get to those, but first I asked her to break down some of the best speeches of all time. Cristina said, top of the list is Steve Jobs' speech from 2005 at Stanford University.
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Steve Jobs: I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
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Cristina Negrut: I find it a masterclass in the art of storytelling. It's emotional and inspiring.
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Steve Jobs: Truth be told, I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. [CHUCKLES]
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Jobs: Today, I wanna tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story… [VOICE FADES OUT]
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Cristina Negrut: He really opens up about his personal life, talking about being adopted, being laid off, his experience with the initial bout of pancreatic cancer. So, it's stories and then what he learned from this hardship in his life.
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Steve Jobs: The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
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Cristina Negrut: The speech has over 50 million views on YouTube alone.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] Wow.
Christina Negrut: So, I think it did resonate with a lot of people.
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Steve Jobs: Stay hungry, stay foolish, and I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
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Cristina Negrut: It was mentioned in the book by his wife Laurene in "Becoming Steve Jobs." She mentioned that he really practiced this speech endlessly. He was often talking out loud while he was around his house and with the family or friends. So, he really rehearsed this speech. He really cared about having a heartfelt and well-delivered speech.
Basu: Mmm.
Cristina Negrut: So, that definitely showed up. So, it's like everything in life. Preparation counts a lot in the outcome of whatever endeavor you have.
Basu, Narrating: Okay, let's move on to another great commencement speech that has gone down in history: David Foster Wallace speaking at Kenyon College, also in 2005, same as Steve Jobs. And he famously started that speech with this little story about fish swimming along and another fish swims up to them, past them, and says…
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David Foster Wallace: "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?"
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Cristina Negrut: So, this is a speech that, back then, I printed and I highlighted a lot of text from it. And I remember having it in my office and pulling it up from time to time. The speech really emphasizes the importance of paying attention to what is, and it's actually a really hard thing to do.
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David Foster Wallace: The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. Of course, the main requirement… [VOICE FADES OUT]
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Cristina Negrut: Like he says, it's hard to stay conscious day in and day out. And he encourages graduates to lean into our capacity to choose what we pay attention to, what we think, and how we perceive the world and live a mindful life.
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David Foster Wallace: The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness. Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over, "This is water. This is water."
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Basu, Narrating: Another one of Cristina's favorite past speeches is from 2014, from director Jennifer Lee, the screenwriter behind Disney's "Frozen," speaking at the University of New Hampshire.
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Cristina Negrut: She talks about overcoming self-doubt. And this is something that I believe a lot of us struggle with.
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Jennifer Lee: When they asked me to be the commencement speaker, my first reaction was, "[SCOFFS] I'm way too young." And then my sister so kindly pointed out that I was 42, which I then realized made me pretty much exactly twice your age, and that pretty much sucked.
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Lee: But then I moved to a worse thought, which was, "I'm not good enough to be the commencement speaker. And ultimately, it was that horrible thought that made me say yes."
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Cristina Negrut: She feels like she wears lenses of self-doubt and they're nasty and they're impossible to see past. And she talks about one thing that helped her is when she went to film school, she realized that, you know, in all the great movies and classic movies, the characters are not perfect. They're flawed, but they're authentic.
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Jennifer Lee: So, while at film school, I met a friend named Phil Johnston. He said, "You can be insecure if you want. But just promise me to leave it out of your work. Just know you're good enough and move on." And I promised him I would. Six months later, I had my… had two film options, my first paycheck as a screenwriter. A year later, we were writing "Wreck-It Ralph," and then came "Frozen."
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Cristina Negrut: So, she encourages the graduates to really think about what makes them unique and focus less on failures.
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Jennifer Lee: Think about all the crazy ways you feel different from everyone else. And now take the judgment out of that. And what you are left with is such a wholly dynamic, one-of-a-kind character, the kind that could lead an epic story.
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Basu: I know that there's another commencement speech that you have mentioned that you particularly thought was excellent. That was from Admiral William H. McRaven, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL. He spoke in 2014 to the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin.
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William H. McRaven: It's been almost 37 years to the day that I graduated from UT. I remember a lot of things about that day. I remember I had a throbbing headache from a party the night before.
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Basu: What about that speech was so sticky to you?
Cristina Negrut: It's one of those that stands the test of time. One thing I really liked about it, it's short. It was less than 15 minutes, and he gives practical advice. And I think it's memorable because of the surprising advice that he gives.
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William McRaven: To me, basic SEAL training was a lifetime of challenges crammed into six months. So, here are the 10 lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.
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Cristina Negrut: One of the advice that really stands out, he says, "Make your bed every morning."
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William McRaven: If you make your bet every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride. And it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right.
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Cristina Negrut: And if by any chance you had a miserable day, at least you come home to a bed that is made by you.
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William McRaven: And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. So, if you wanna change the world, start off by making your bed.
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Cristina Negrut: I have to say, in my household, we do encourage, especially my husband tells my teenage sons to do that. And yeah, it works.
Basu, Narrating: Okay. So, those were some of the greatest hits from the past. Let's turn now to this year's speeches. Cristina says she noticed a few trends: more women speakers, more people of color, more speeches that talked about challenges that this generation specifically is facing like disinformation, distortion of reality and facts, isolation and loneliness. The actor Patton Oswalt talked about some of these things in his commencement address at the College of William and Mary, still keeping it funny.
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Patton Oswalt: To the graduating class of 2023, I say three words: You poor bastards.
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Oswalt: Your concerns, as you stumble out into reality tomorrow, are massive. Democracy's crumbling, truth is up for grabs, the planet's trying to kill us, and loneliness is driving everyone insane.
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Oswalt: Okay, um…
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Cristina Negrut: He references the movie "Blade Runner," that has apparently a great closing, and that just came out unprepared, was an improvisation. And so, he encourages graduates to take the time to wander easy, noting that sometimes everything extraordinary in life comes from wandering.
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Patton Oswalt: And they let chaos and creativity and humanity punch through, and it made the most memorable scene in a movie about androids with no humanity. That is the wandering and the chaos and the madness that you have to seek out.
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Basu, Narrating: Another honorable mention, Tom Hanks speaking to this year's graduates of Harvard.
Cristina Negrut: Great delivery. He's an actor. Great content.
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Tom Hanks: Now listen, it's not fair, but please don't be embittered by this fact that without having done a lick of work…
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Hanks: …without having spent any time in class, without once walking into that library, in order to have anything to do with the graduating class of Harvard, it's faculty or it's a distinguished alumni, I make a damn good living playing someone who did.
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Basu, Narrating: And Cristina says, her favorite speech from this year might just be Oscar-winning actor Michelle Yeoh's address to the graduates of Harvard Law School.
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Michelle Yeoh: This moment conjures up the exciting image of a high diver, poised to leap into the void.
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Basu, Narrating: Michelle Yeoh is known not just for her acting in films like "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," but also for the incredible grace and skill that she brings to her fight sequences.
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Michelle Yeoh: I happen to have some experience leaping off high perches into scary voids. So, do allow me to offer some simple pointers that I've picked up along the way in my career full of leaps and dives.
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Basu, Narrating: She told the graduates that her first love was actually dance. And there are lessons she's learned from dancing and from fighting that can be applied to life at large.
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Michelle Yeoh: "How to Survive the Fall in Three Easy Steps, by Michelle Yeoh." The first one is pretty obvious, but not always easy: Stay loose.
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Cristina Negrut: Starting with her passion for dancing and then not being able to continue on that path, but really staying soft and staying open to other possibilities.
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Michelle Yeoh: When falling, the tendency is to tighten up to brace for impact. But in truth, the safest thing one can do is remain calm, even curious about the shifting world around you.
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Cristina Negrut: She also says that learning how to fall teaches you how to land, which is a really nice way of saying it. And then if you know how to land, you have courage to jump higher.
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Michelle Yeoh: And today, you leap. Stay loose, be smart and go with love. And then leap. And then leap again and leap again. I look forward to living in the world you'll all help build, and I am honored to have been one small voice at the beginning of your journey. Thank you all, and I wish you… [VOICE FADES OUT]
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Basu, Narrating: For Cristina, the thesis of all of these speakers is not so much about school or career, but remaining curious about life and yourself, and trusting that you have everything you need to make things work out. It's advice that she wants her sons to internalize, roughly 15 years after she began her commencement speech collection project.
Cristina Negrut: I think it's very important to try to be authentic, to really start loving yourself and know who you are and not let the outside world put a label on who you are and what you can do. Fear will be there, but do not let it take over. And do the stuff you love and really be introspective and really try to see what makes you excited. Coming back to the Steve Jobs speech, right? Because if you are excited and love what you do and you persevere towards it, I think things will work out well.
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Basu, Narrating: There is so much good stuff from this year's speeches we didn't even get to touch. Incredible speakers with super inspiring personal stories, trying to land on the perfect, magical words of advice to tell this year's graduates. Speeches from Angela Bassett, Idina Menzel, Jon Batiste, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Oprah.
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Angela Bassett: Class of 2023, I want to leave you with this crown of wisdom.
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Idina Menzel: Don't hold back. Harness any tension you feel and let your voice be heard.
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Oprah: We need you to dream big. We need audacious thinkers.
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Jon Batiste: Kindness and empathy is a superpower.
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Lin-Manuel Miranda: Do what you have to do that allows the most space for what you want to do. Tomorrow is not promised. Make plans anyway. You are opening doors, shouting, "Here we are!"
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Angela Bassett: Life is a cascade of building blocks. Even at times you may feel like you're leaning towards a fall, the goal is to keep building and standing tall.
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Oprah: It's okay to be scared. In fact, if you weren't scared, I'd be scared for you. But let me repeat something that one of the most extraordinary men I've ever known said, "May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears."
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Idina Menzel: Let your voice heard! Congratulations Class of 2023, thank you!
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Basu, Narrating: We've included a few more of our favorite commencement speeches from this year on our show notes page. And if you're enjoying this podcast, "Apple News In Conversation," please subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
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