Find Your People

Summary

Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025! Watch the speech on YouTube.Thirty-two years ago I was sitting where you are now. At least, I assume I was. I can't really remember anything about my own graduation. I was too hung over. The main thing I remember from that time in my life is that I had no plan. I had a degree in English, no job, and no idea what I even wanted to do. I would have liked to work hard on something I cared about. But I didn't have anything I cared about, and it took me a decade to find one.Maybe I can help you do that faster. Maybe I can help you figure out what to work on. You fall into three groups. Some of you already have all kinds of ambitious plans. You're already admitted to med school for the fall, or whatever. Others of you have no ambitious plans and no desire to have any. You just want to have a happy life, and that's cool. But in the middle, there's a group who wish they had ambitious plans, but don't. This speech is for you. I'm going to tell you how to get ambitious plans.The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.This fact is so terrifying that a lot of people try to remain in denial about it. (I certainly did.) But it's also exciting. You can go in any direction now.I didn't realize that, so I looked for more tracks. I looked for a job at a big, well-known company that I hoped would train me to do something, but I didn't know or care what, really, just so long as I was on some new set of tracks. The fall after graduation I was on the night sh...