Ursula K. Le Guin

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.