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George C. Marshall
Born
Harvard University, June 5, 1947
Secretary of State George Marshall used Harvard's commencement day to propose what became the Marshall Plan, speaking to a crowd of 15,000 in Harvard Yard. It is dry and almost free of flourish, which is exactly the lesson: a plain statement of a problem and a willingness to act can change more than any rousing line. Its most famous sentence, that American policy was aimed "not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos," still works as a test for any big decision. Listen to it as proof that a graduation stage can carry real news.
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John F. Kennedy
Born
American University, June 10, 1963, "A Strategy of Peace"
Eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy asked graduates to rethink their own attitude toward the Soviet Union rather than simply blame it. He announced talks toward a test ban treaty and a halt to American atmospheric nuclear tests, and the Partial Test Ban Treaty followed within months. The line people remember, "we all inhabit this small planet," lands because it comes after careful argument, not instead of it. It is the best example here of a speech that asks listeners to change their minds about an opponent.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
Born
Oberlin College, June 14, 1965, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution"
Martin Luther King Jr. builds the whole address on Rip Van Winkle, pointing out that the remarkable thing is not that Rip slept 20 years but that he "slept through a revolution." The image is simple enough to remember for life and pointed enough to sting: the danger for comfortable graduates was not opposing change but failing to notice it. He also returns to two of his great lines, that all of us are "tied in a single garment of destiny," and that we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. For anyone starting out, it is a warning about drifting through history.
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Richard Feynman
Born
Caltech, 1974, "Cargo Cult Science"
Richard Feynman's address reads as well on the page as any essay. He describes South Sea islanders who built fake runways and control huts after the war, hoping the planes would return, and uses them to skewer research that copies the form of science without its substance. The idea to keep is his first principle: you must not fool yourself, "and you are the easiest person to fool." His call for an integrity that leans over backwards, reporting whatever might prove you wrong, applies far beyond a laboratory, to any job where honesty is inconvenient.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
Born
Mills College, May 1983, "A Left-Handed Commencement Address"
Ursula K. Le Guin thanks the class for a rare chance "to speak aloud in public in the language of women," then quietly refuses to give the usual speech about climbing to the top. Instead she urges graduates not to measure themselves against a world built on competition and power, and to claim the parts of life that world dismisses as weak. It is brief, wry and unusually poetic, building to the line "Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country." Choose it if you want a speech that questions what success means rather than how to get it.
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Fred Rogers
Born
Dartmouth College, June 9, 2002
Fred Rogers, a Dartmouth alumnus, gave the graduates what he called the gift of a silent minute to think about those who had helped them become who they were. Then he actually waited while the crowd sat in silence. It is the boldest structural choice in any speech on this list: the most memorable part has no words at all. He closed by reciting his song It's You I Like, telling a crowd of high achievers that they never needed to do anything sensational to be loved. It is the one to share with someone who feels they have not done enough.
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Steve Jobs
Born
Stanford University, June 12, 2005
Steve Jobs promised "three stories from my life," and the plain structure is half the reason the speech has lasted. One is about dropping out and auditing a calligraphy class that later gave the Mac its typography, one about being fired from the company he started, and one about a cancer diagnosis. That last story gives the speech its weight: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered" for making big choices. He closes with a line borrowed from the Whole Earth Catalog, "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Start here if you have never watched a commencement speech.
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David Foster Wallace
Born
Kenyon College, 2005, "This Is Water"
David Foster Wallace opens with two young fish who have no idea what water is, and spends the rest of the speech making the obvious visible. His argument is that a good education teaches you to choose what you pay attention to, because self-centeredness is "our default setting." The example everyone remembers is a miserable after-work trip to the supermarket, traffic and checkout lines included, recast as a test of how you decide to see other people. "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." It is the speech most worth rereading every few years.
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Bill Gates
Born
Harvard University, June 7, 2007
Bill Gates opens with the best joke a dropout could make, "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree," then turns the speech into an admission. His one big regret, he says, is that he left Harvard "with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world." The rest is an argument that the graduates should take on those inequities, quoting a line from his mother, "From those to whom much is given, much is expected." Pair it with Steve Jobs's Stanford speech: two tech founders, two years apart, with completely different ideas of what a life is for.
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J. K. Rowling
Born
Harvard University, June 5, 2008, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination"
J.K. Rowling's speech has two halves, and the second is the one people forget. The first describes her years of failure before Harry Potter and ends with "rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life." The second goes back to her early twenties at Amnesty International's London headquarters, reading letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes, and argues that imagination is above all the power to empathize with people whose lives you have never shared. That pairing of resilience and empathy makes it richer than a pep talk about bouncing back.
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Conan O'Brien
Dartmouth College, June 12, 2011
Conan O'Brien spoke not long after losing The Tonight Show, which he calls "a profound and very public disappointment," and the speech earns its serious turn by being very funny first. His real subject is what happens when the dream you chose falls through: "through disappointment you can gain clarity," and a perceived failure can become "a catalyst for profound re-invention." He ends on advice simple enough to remember in any job: "Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen." Pick it for anyone whose first plan has just collapsed.
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Atul Gawande
Born
Williams College, June 3, 2012, "Failure and Rescue"
Atul Gawande, a surgeon and writer, brings evidence rather than anecdotes. Hospitals vary widely in how many surgical patients die, he explains, yet the best ones do not have far fewer complications than the rest. What sets them apart is how they respond once something goes wrong: "They didn't fail less. They rescued more." The practical advice follows from that: plan ahead for how you will notice things going off course and what you will do about it. It is the most useful speech here for anyone about to take on real responsibility, in medicine or anywhere else.
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George Saunders
Born
Syracuse University convocation, May 11, 2013
George Saunders, the short story writer, gave the graduates of Syracuse's College of Arts and Sciences one confession instead of a list of tips: "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness." He backs it with a small, precise memory of a shy new girl in his seventh-grade class whom he never quite stood up for, and the smallness is the point. His advice, to "err in the direction of kindness" while still chasing ambition, is about as portable as advice gets. The speech went on to be published as the little book Congratulations, by the way.
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Oprah Winfrey
Born
Harvard University, May 30, 2013
Oprah Winfrey came to Harvard a year after what she calls "the worst period in my professional life," when nearly every media outlet had called her new OWN network a flop. That timing gives the speech its honesty. Her answer to a public stumble is that "there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction," and her practical advice is to steady yourself and "figure out what is the next right move." The other idea worth keeping comes from more than 35,000 interviews: when the cameras stopped, her guests kept asking "Was that okay?" Choose it as a reminder that almost everyone wants to be heard.
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William H. McRaven
Born
University of Texas at Austin, May 17, 2014
Admiral William McRaven, a Navy SEAL for 36 years and at the time the head of US Special Operations Command, turned basic SEAL training into ten lessons. The first is the one that stuck: "If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed," because one small task done well leads to the next. The rest are just as concrete, from being turned into a "sugar cookie" of wet sand for failing an inspection to the bell trainees ring when they quit: "don't ever, ever ring the bell." It is the most practical speech here, and the one most likely to change a morning routine.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Born
Wellesley College, May 29, 2015
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist, takes on something most speeches never name: the pressure to be liked. "All over the world, girls are raised to make themselves likable," she says, and her answer is blunt: "Please do not twist yourself into shapes to please. Don't do it." She also asks graduates to make feminism "a big ruckus, inclusive party" rather than an exclusive club. The advice was aimed at a women's college, but anyone who softens every opinion to keep the room happy will recognize themselves in it.
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Sheryl Sandberg
Born
UC Berkeley, May 14, 2016
"One year and thirteen days ago, I lost my husband, Dave," Sheryl Sandberg begins, and the speech never drifts into generalities after that. Instead of talking about success, the Facebook executive explains how she got through sudden grief, using psychologist Martin Seligman's three P's: personalization, pervasiveness and permanence, the ways we blame ourselves, let one loss spread into everything, and assume it will last forever. Her conclusion is a useful one for any setback: "You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up." Watch it when life has not gone to plan.
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Roger Federer
Born
Dartmouth College, June 9, 2024
Roger Federer's first lesson is "'Effortless' is a myth," and the rest of the speech proves it with a statistic every perfectionist should hear. Of the 1,526 singles matches he played, he won almost 80%, yet he won only 54% of the points. The champion lost nearly half the time, point by point, and what mattered was letting each lost point go and playing the next one. He also reminds graduates that the world is much bigger than a tennis court. It is the best recent addition to the canon, and the easiest to take into a job, a sport or an exam season.
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