John Green’s Commencement Speech 2013

John Green’s Commencement Speech 2013

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[John Green’s Commencement Speech 2013]

[James M. Danko – President of Butler University] Source: LYBIO.net
New York Times best selling author John Green is making a positive impact on a new generation through is books and educational videos, blogs, and social media, while John’s books have been written primarily for young adult audience they have been appreciated by young and old alike and now been published in more than a dozen languages. His latest novel “The Fault in Our Stars”, was Time Magazines number one Fiction book of the year in 2012 and will soon be made into a film by 20th Century Fox. Johns other best selling books include: “Looking for Alaska” and “An Abundance of Katherines”, and “Paper Towns”. He was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, the 2009 Edgar Award and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Time Book Prize.

In addition to his literary success John and his brother Hank, have become cultural icons through VlogBrothers, in exchange for YouTube video blogs between the two of them since 2007. The VlogBrothers channel has received over 300,000 million views and has created a world wide community of people called: “Nerd Fighters”. Any out there? Who celebrate intellectualism, empathy for others, and social justice. John and Hank have also recently started offering open online education through a YouTube channel called ‘crashcourse’. Hank teaches science and Hank teaches literature, U.S. History and World History. John performed an evening of Awesome to a sold out crowd in Carnegie Hall in January 2013. And appeared on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on March 2013.

While John’s professional success has been nothing short of astronomical, more importantly, he’s has committing to using his success to making the world a better place. He truly represents the ideals of Butler University.

John is an alumnis of Kenyon College where he earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree with a double major in English and Religious Studies. John will you please come forward.

(applause)

On the recommendation of the faculty with the approval of the Butler University Board of Trustees and by the authority vested in me, I confer upon you John Green the degree of doctorate letters of [Aurus Cauza] with all the rights and privileges and responsibilities there too.

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
Good morning it’s gonna take me a minute to unfold this. “Thank you President Danko”. This is the first words of my speech.

My own commencement speaker, who shall remain nameless, began with a lame joke about how these speeches only come in two varieties: Short and bad. And that raised my expectations, and then he went onto speak for 26 minutes, so I’m just going to tell you now: 12 minutes flat, 11:45 if you don’t laugh.

I do wanna congratulations everyone who is here today, and I do mean everyone, parents, families, friends, professors, coaches. Every single person in Hinkle today has given something to make this moment possible for the class of 2013, except for me, but everyone else has.

But I wanna will a special congratulations to you graduates today. Before we get to the Life Advice You’ll Soon Forget portion of the program, I want to engage in a time-honored tradition of American commencement addresses: That is stealing from other commencement addresses, in this case one by the children’s television host Mr. Fred Rogers.

I want you to spend one minute, which I know is an eternity in the age of the internet, but I want you to spend one minute if you will. Thinking of some of some of the people who helped get you to today, the people who’ve loved you and without whose care and generosity you might not have found yourself here, graduating from Butler, or watching someone you love graduate, or seeing your students graduate.

Think for just one minute of those who have loved you up into this day. I’ll keep the time.

(1 minute of silence)

Those people are so proud of you today.

I want to return to them soon, but first I have to deliver terrible news, which is that you are all going to die. This is another time-honored tradition of American celebration, the Raining on the Parade.

I remember when I got married, the priest devoted the majority of his homily to telling me how challenging and laborious and often miserable marriage would be, and I kept thinking, “That seems like something I could wait for TOMORROW?” But no, it can’t. You are going to die. Not only that, it gets worse. Everything you ever make and think and experience will be washed away by the sands of time, the Sun will blow up and no one will remember Cleopatra ruling Egypt or Crick and Watson untangling the structure of DNA or Ptolemy fathoming the stars or even that improbably wonderful game against Gonzaga.

So that’s unfortunate.

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
But I would argue that it’s good to be aware of temporariness on a day like today, when you are thinking about what you want to do with your life. The whole idea of this commencement speech is that I’m supposed to offer you some thoughts on how you might live a good life out there in the so-called Real World, which by the way I assure you is no more or less real than the one in which you have so far found yourselves.

But I can’t give any advice about how to live a good life unless and until we establish what constitutes a good life. Now, of course, that’s much of what you’ve been up to for the past four years or six, whether you have been studying dance or literature and I’m not going to swoop in here at the end with any interesting revelations.

I just would note that the default assumption is that the point of human life is to be as successful as possible, to acquire lots of fame or glory or money as defined by quantifiable metrics: like number of Twitter followers, or Facebook friends, or dollars in one’s 401k, which is thing that you guys don’t know about yet, but it’s coming.

That’s the hero’s journey, right? The hero starts out with no money and ends up with a lot of it, the hero starts out an ugly duckling and becomes a beautiful swan, or starts out an awwkard girl and becomes a vampire mother, or grows up an orphan living under the staircase and then becomes the wizard who saves the world.

We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

And here is the good news nested inside the bad news: Many of you, most of you, are about to make that journey. You will go from being the best-informed, most engaged students at one of the finest universities around to being (if you are lucky) the person who brings coffee to people, or a Steak n Shake waiter, as I once was.

Whether you’re a basketball player or a pharmacist or a software designer, you’re about to be a rookie. Your parents’ long-asked questions—what exactly does one DO with a degree in anthropology—will become a matter of sudden and profound relevance in your life.

Your student loans will come due and you will have a hard time and you will need a very good answer for why you exactly you went to college in the first place, which answer you will have a hard time coming by as you sit at your job, provided you are lucky enough to find a job, and suffer the indignity of people calling you by the wrong name or, if you are forced to wear a name tag, people calling you by the right name too often.

And that is the true hero’s errand—the journey from strength to weakness. And because you went to Butler, you will be more alive to the experience, better able to contextualize it and maybe even find the joy and wonder hidden amid the dehumanizing drudgery.

For example, when I graduated from College for a while I worked as a data entry professional, And I would often call to mind William Faulkner’s brilliant letter of resignation from the United States Postal Service, which went like this:

As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation. William Faulkner.

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
Having read that letter in a Faulkner biography in college had nothing to do with my job typing numbers into a database, but it was still profoundly useful to me. Education provides context and it provides comfort and it provides access, no matter the relationship between your field of study and the trajectory of your post-collegiate life.

But still, you are probably going to be a nobody for a while. You are going to make that journey from strength to weakness, and while it probably won’t be an easy trip, it is a heroic one. For in learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk. And for the rest of your life, if you are able to remember your hero’s journey from college grad to underling, you will be less of a jerk. You will tip well. You will empathize. You will be a mentor, and a generous one. In short, you will become like the people you imagined in silence a few minutes ago.

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
And let me submit to you that this is the actual definition of a good life. You want to be the kind of person who other people—people who may not even born yet—will think about in their own silences years from now at their own commencements. I am going to hazard a guess that relatively few of us closed our eyes and thought of all the work and love that Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber put into making this moment possible for us.

We may be taught that the people to admire and emulate are actors and musicians and sports heroes and professionally famous people, but when we look at the people who have helped us, the people who actually change actual lives, relatively few of them are publicly celebrated. We do not think of the money they had, but of their generosity. We do not think of how beautiful or powerful they were, but how willing they were to sacrifice for us—so willing, at times, that we might not have even noticed that they were making sacrifices.

So with that in mind, I’d like to share a few pieces of what I believe to be rock solid advice about like proper adulthood or whatever:

First, and perhaps most importantly, do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find out that almost every adult American devotes tremendous amounts of time and energy to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can’t eat. I think you to choose better obsessions.

Also, you may have heard that it is better to burn out than it is to fade away. That is ridiculous. It is much better to fade away. Always. Fade. Away.

And keep reading. Specifically, read my books, ideally in hardcover. But also keep reading other books.

(applause)

You have probably figured out by now that education is not really about grades or getting a job; it’s primarily about becoming a more aware and engaged observer of the universe. If that ends with college, you’re rather wasting your one and only known chance at consciousness.

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
Also a word about the Internet: Old people like myself are terrified by their ignorance of the internet, which you can and should use to your advantage by saying things at your job like, “You don’t have a tumblr? Oh you should really have a tumblr. I can set you up with that.”

Try not to worry too much about what you are going to do with your life. You are already doing what you are going to do with your life, and judging by the fact that you are wearing a gown, you’re doing pretty well. That’s not a sentence you hear much in life.

On that topic, there are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. And in fact, your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told College Me that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would’ve been like, “That doesn’t seem like a word.”

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
And lastly, be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy. A couple years after I graduated from college, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with four friends, one of whom was this Kuwaiti guy named Hassan, and when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hassan lost touch with his family, who lived on the border, for like six weeks. By the way, some of you already heard the story before, but I have a microphone you’re seated so you’re gonna hear the rest of it.

So my friend Hassan, responded to this stress by watching cable news coverage of the war 24 hours a day. And the only way to hang out with Hassan was to sit on the couch and watch the news with him, so one day, we were watching the news and the anchor was like, “We’re getting new footage from the city of Baghdad,” and a camera panned across a house that had a huge hole in one wall covered by a piece of plywood. And on the plywood was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spraypaint, and as the news anchor started to talk about the anger on the Arab street or whatever, Hassan started laughing for the first time in several weeks.

And I said: “What’s so funny?” I asked him.

“The graffiti,” he said.

“What’s funny about it?”

And he looked to me and he said:

“It says, Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.”

For the rest of your life, you are going to have a choice about how to read graffiti in a language you do not know, and you will have a choice about how to read the actions and intonations of the people you meet. And I would encourage you as often as possible to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility, the possibility that the lives and experiences of others are as complex and as unpredictable as your own, that other people—be they family or strangers, near or far—are not simply one thing or the other—not simply good or evil or wise or ignorant—but that they like you contain multitudes, to borrow a phrase from the great Walt Whitman.

[John Green] Source: LYBIO.net
That’s difficult to do—it is difficult to remember that people with lives different and distant from your own even celebrate birthdays, let alone with gifts of graffitied plywood.

You will always be stuck inside of your body, with your consciousness, seeing through the world through your own eyes, but the gift and challenge of your Butler education is to see others as they see themselves, to grapple meaningfully with this cruel and crazy and beautiful world in all its baffling complexity. I know that we haven’t left you with the easiest path, and I’m sorry, but I have every confidence in you, and I wish you a very happy graduation, despite the circumstances. Thank you. Thank you.

John Green’s Commencement Speech 2013. New York Times best selling author John Green is making a positive impact on a new generation through is books and educational videos, blogs, and social media. Complete Full Transcript, Dialogue, Remarks, Saying, Quotes, Words And Text.