What Failure Teaches Us in the Best Opening Speeches
If there is one thing in common among some of the best college admission speeches, it’s failure. It turns out that college is easy compared to the rest of life, and to prepare you for that, everyone from Denzel Washington to J.K. Rowling dedicated their alumni time to help all of us remember this.
J.K. Rowling: “Failure meant eliminating the irrelevant.”
When you think of a writer like JK Rowling, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably not “failure,” but that’s what she devoted her 2008 opening speech at Harvard to . Rowling even admits the absurdity of such a topic, given the privilege of graduating from a university like Harvard: “Indeed, your idea of failure may not be too far from the idea of the average person’s success, you have already soared so high.” In the end, she understands her own failures and why they are so important to her:
So why am I talking about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant eliminating the irrelevant. I stopped pretending that I was someone other than who I was and began to channel all my energy into completing the only work that mattered to me. If I had really excelled at something else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the arena that I believed I really belonged to. I was relieved because my biggest fear was realized and I was still alive and I still had a daughter that I adored and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. Thus, the stone bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Failure as freedom is an incredibly common theme in opening speeches, and while Rowling keeps it quiet as just part of his longer thesis on failure, Conan O’Brien uses it as his entire thesis.
Conan O’Brien: “Your perceived failure could be a catalyst for deep rethinking.”
While Rowling tackles his personal problems to share his advice with alumni, Conan O’Brien details his public experiments in the aftermath of his departure from The Tonight Show. Without failure, you have no reason to reinvent yourself, which is far more essential to creativity than many of us think. O’Brien recounts this in his 2011 opening address at Dartmouth:
Back in the 1940s, there was a very, very funny man named Jack Benny. He was a giant star, one of the greatest comedians of his generation. And a much younger man named Johnny Carson really wanted to be Jack Benny. In some ways he was, but in many ways he was not. He imitated Jack Benny, but his own quirks and mannerisms, along with his changing environment, pulled him in a different direction. Yet his inability to fully become his hero made him the funniest person of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be Johnny Carson but didn’t want to, and as a result, my generation of comedians wanted to be David Letterman. And none of us are. My peers and I have all missed this mark in a thousand different ways. But the point is this: our failure to become our perceived ideal ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your unhappiness and deal with it correctly, your perceived failure can be a catalyst for deep rethinking.
In every person’s career, whether you are creative or not, there comes a point when you need to step back and reconsider what you are doing. For many, this time is perfect for a massive retooling of their career path, when you can finally shed the shackles of “where you thought you were” and take the next step with greater impartiality.
Ira Glass: “I would like someone to tell me that it’s okay to feel lost for a while”
Talking about these next steps, Ira Glass shares the story of her self-doubt during her introductory speech at Gusher College in 2012 :
I think I was as ambitious as any of you in this class. At 20, I worked on the network news show All Things Count. And even I am confused. I am very lost. I had one skill as a person in my 20s and that’s all. For some reason, I was a good editor; I was a very decent editor from the start. But despite everything else that makes me worthy at work now — how to write a story, how to structure a story, how to find a story, how to communicate — I was a terrible, terrible writer. I was one of those writers who write a paragraph and then look at it and think, “Oh no, now I’m going to rearrange all the words,” and then rewrite it over and over again.
I spent years in my 20s writing mediocre stories that should have taken days, but in reality it took me months. For many years I wondered whether I should just become a journalist by going to journalism school or graduate school. Instead – and this is just a little practical tip, I just decided … – I’ll just take NPR reporters and pay them $ 50 to watch the scripts I worked on, which was a lot cheaper than graduate school.
As a live performer, I was completely motionless; and I want to say that this is not some strange false modesty. Like, I was bad – there is evidence on the Internet. Google, and you will see it. I made very little money: my personal financial goal was “your age multiplied by a thousand,” which I did not achieve until I was 30. Over the years, I made between $ 12,000 and $ 18,000. I have to say that it was very sobering for me to read in The New York Times last week (they had this series of articles on college debt) that people graduate from college with $ 900 a month in student loans they have to pay. … This was all my income for several years.
It’s hard to imagine Glass as anything other than level-headed these days, but it clearly took him years to get there, with many setbacks along the way. The glass covers a lot here, but the general idea is a good reminder that you won’t know what to do with your life until you try and fail at a few things. Even so, you probably won’t end up where you think.
Aaron Sorkin: “The world doesn’t care how many times you fall if it is one less than the number of times you go up.”
Like Ira Glass, it’s easy to look at someone like Aaron Sorkin and assume that he just spontaneously appeared in the world as the perfect writer. However, in his 2012 opening speech at Syracuse University , Sorkin details his own failures, the failures of those around him, and even his days of cocaine addiction. These tidbits are marked by two main points: you are dumb and fail, but nobody cares:
And make no mistake, you are dumb. You are a group of incredibly educated fools. I was there. We’ve all been there. You hardly work. There will be several mistakes on your way. I wish I could tell you that there is a trick to avoid getting fucked up, but screw it up, it’s coming for you. It’s a combination of an unpredictable life and your super-stupidity …
… The rehearsal is over. You’re going there now, you’re going to do it. How you live matters. You’re going to fall, but the world doesn’t care how many times you fall, as long as it’s one less than the number of times you go up again.
It is, as always, a good reminder that we all fail all the time. You just have to keep going.
Ursula K. Le Guin: “Success is someone’s failure”
Author Ursula C. Le Guin takes a different approach than most, reminding us that failure is not just something to learn, it is an experience to be valued. Here’s how Le Guin talks to Mills College in 1983 :
Success is someone else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can dream of because most people in most places, including our 30 million ourselves, are awake in the dire reality of poverty. No, I don’t wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.
Since you are human, you will face failure. Disappointment, injustice, betrayal and irreparable loss await you. You will find yourself weak where you thought you were strong. You will work for the property, and then you will find that they own you. You will find yourself – as I know you have already been – in dark places, alone and in fear.
I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, that you can live there in a dark place. Living in a place that our rationalizing success culture denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, alien.
It’s a darker speech, but even now, 34 years after she gave this opening speech, the issue she raises is important to remember and ponder. Failure is perhaps not just a lack of success. This is the place where we all live from time to time.
Denzel Washington: “If You Don’t Fail, You Won’t Even Try”
Like others, Denzel Washington decided to dedicate his 2011 opening speech at the University of Pennsylvania to the idea of failure. Washington breaks it down into three parts. First, you will fail in life. Secondly, this is a sign that you are on the right track:
Here’s my second thesis on failure: if you don’t fail, you don’t even try. My wife told me this wonderful expression: “To get what you never had, you have to do what you never did.” Les Brown, a motivational speaker, made an analogy to this. Imagine that you are lying on your deathbed with ghosts around him, personifying your unfilled potential. Ghosts of ideas you’ve never acted on. Ghosts of talents you haven’t used. And they stand around your bed angry, frustrated, and upset. They say, “We came to you because you could revive us,” they say. “And now we are going to the grave together.” So I ask you today, “How many ghosts will there be around your bed when your time comes?” You have invested a lot in your education, and people have invested in you. And let me tell you, the world needs your talents, man, always like that.
Washington ends with the same sentiment shared by many of the speakers at the opening ceremony, and what we hear over and over again. “[Bad luck] is the best way to figure out where you are going.”