The Commencement Address
Speak carefully, promise sparingly, keep faithfully
Graduates, families, colleagues, and the one small child in the third row who has, , decided that this is the moment to sing: good morning.
I have been asked to offer you wisdom in fifteen minutes, which is roughly fourteen minutes more than most wisdom deserves.
So let me begin by confessing that I remember almost nothing of the speech given at my own graduation, forty years ago, on a lawn much like this one.
I do not remember the speaker's name, nor his argument, nor a single one of his surely excellent jokes.
What I remember is the light, and the feeling that the future was a room I had not yet been allowed to enter.
You are standing, this morning, in the doorway of that room.
And I want to tell you three things about what you will find inside, none of them original, all of them true.
The first is that the world will ask you, constantly, to speak before you have understood.
It will reward the quick answer, the confident summary, the opinion delivered with more force than it has earned.
Resist this, gently and for a lifetime.
Learn to say I do not yet know, which is the bravest sentence in any language, and the rarest.
The second thing is that you will be tempted, often, to make yourself sound cleverer than you are.
There is a kind of language that exists only to , that hides a small thought inside a large vocabulary, that mistakes fog for depth.
Do not learn that language, or if you have already learned it here, as I fear we may have taught you, it.
Say the true thing , and let those who prefer fog mistake your clarity for simplicity; they will be wrong, and you will be free.
The third thing is the hardest, and I have spent my life failing to master it.
It is that every word you speak makes a promise, and that a life is nothing more, in the end, than the sum of the promises one has kept.
When you say you will call, call.
When you say you understand, understand.
When you say you are sorry, mean it so completely that the word itself is almost unnecessary.
These are not lessons in ; they are the entire curriculum of a decent life, as good manners.
You will forget them, of course, exactly as I forgot that speaker on the lawn.
You will forget them tomorrow, and next year, and in the long ordinary afternoons when nothing seems to matter and everything, quietly, does.
But somewhere, years from now, in a room you cannot yet imagine, one of these forgotten sentences will return to you.
It will arrive , in your own voice, at the exact moment you need it.
And you will not remember that you first heard it here, and that will be entirely as it should be.
For the best teaching, like the best light, is the kind you stop noticing because you have begun to see by it.
Go, then, into the room whose door is standing open behind me.
Speak carefully, promise , keep , and be, above all, answerable for the truth you choose to carry out of this place.
The world is waiting, the child in the third row is still singing, and you, graduates, are exactly on time.