Instructive As The Abattoir
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Class of '26:
There are two things you must understand to make sense of graduation speeches.
The first is that humans are incapable of internalizing how different other people's experiences are. Every graduation speech is basically the life story of one specific person, masquerading as a universal truth.
If they just told their story, simply but honestly, it might be irrelevant for you but at least you could learn something. But instead of just admitting that we're talking about our own experiences and letting other people salvage whatever they can from it, the official Graduation Speech Register requires framing everything as a Truth of the Universe. You will face this repeatedly, and you will find that it sucks.
The tricky part is that people really do learn and grow from experience, and older people looking at you really do feel sometimes like they're looking at an oncoming disaster in slow motion, desperately wishing they could nudge the train onto different tracks, but not knowing how.
Ezra Pound used to critique all of TS Eliot's poems, supposedly, and Eliot said that wherever Pound made an edit he definitely needed to fix something, but the specific suggestions Pound made were always wrong. And this is basically my synthesis: try really, really hard to be open and un-defensive when people tell you that something you're doing might lead you to pain,[^1] but don't assume their solution is the right one for you. Pound and Eliot were two people successfully engaged in the same activity and they still didn't give each other good suggestions; "living the good life" is a far harder and broader activity, so don't expect anyone's specific suggestions to be good for you.
The second thing to understand about graduation speeches is that people LOVE giving advice. Look at what rich people do once they're rich and successful and can spend their time on anything: a surprisingly large share of them choose to go on the internet and shout unsolicited advice for free.[^2] [Leans forward on podium] Heck, people love giving advice so much that I'm pretending to give this graduation speech while actually writing a blogpost to a bunch of people who are decades past graduation! [Smattering of uncomfortable laughter].
More broadly, I think people give advice 1) to allow themselves to believe that the treasures they squandered through incompetence or cowardice might still have some positive consequences for someone, or 2) to convince themselves that what they did in life was Good, despite all the damage they caused along the way.
You don't have to take them seriously or literally, but please have some sympathy for the sinner. You are too young to have genuinely and irrevocably wasted your life yet, despite what it feels like when some godforsaken 16 year old becomes a celebrity and you think "it's too late for me, now; if you haven't done great work before puberty, it's never going to happen." And perhaps this is true at all ages, perhaps it's never too late for anyone, but man does the wreckage keep piling on wreckage. Maybe advice is more helpful if you treat it in that same Eliot-Pound way: not what specific things is this person suggesting I do, but what is the wound that this person is trying to save me from, and what is my personal version of a life that's less likely to cause this wound? [^3]
Alright, so. With more throat-clearing than an aging smoker, having claimed that there's no good universal advice: how can I now give any kind of advice at all? Of course, I'm giving meta-advice about how to receive advice, so that's completely different.
First, here's a story. When I was 22 I graduated from college and didn't have a job lined up. I truly thought I'd blown it in life, because all my friends were going to McKinsey or Goldman or Yale, and I didn't even know how to tell people I didn't have a job at all. So I spent a few months writing a book, since "I'm working on a book" seemed at least less embarrassing to a juvenile striver than "I'm not doing anything." And since this just so happened to be the moment in history when Amazon opened its platform to let random people put something labelled "a book" into the world, within maybe six months of graduating I had become a (self)-published Author. And then it took off much more than expected, and I got to live off royalties for a while, and got all kinds of other opportunities as a result.
And there's two normal ways that this experience would manifest as Advice:
1) "publish a book! I did it and look what happened."
2) "take a bet on yourself! I did it and look what happened."
That is: people will either advise you to do the exact specific thing they did, or an abstract embodiment of the thing they did. And I hate this for so many reasons, the biggest of which is selection bias: it's nice that it worked out for you, but you're speaking at this graduation, and if it hadn't worked out for you you wouldn't be speaking here. It's simultaneously true (I think) that more people should take more chances on themselves; that those of us who say "selection bias!" at everything are potentially harming you by lowering your ambitions instead of raising them; but also that "it worked for me!" is dumb and fatuous and I don't understand how people keep saying it.
But I digress. What I really wanted to say was: looking back, I think the real secret to my book's success was catching a wave at its beginnings. I got onto Kindle right after its glasnost, when uploading a book required formatting some kind of structured html file, which was fiddly enough that I bet it stopped lots of people from ever getting round to publishing. Within a decade it genuinely felt like everyone and their grandmother had self-published a book or two, and also many people had made careers out of gaming the algorithm, and I fear that the number of true surprise successes has gone down even while the number of books has gone up.
I was self-aware enough that even when I was succeeding my main thought was "maybe I got lucky here", in the sense that "many books never really take off and surely there's a lot of chance in which of them do."[^4] But I think most likely the way I actually got luckiest was a thing I didn't consider at the time: just being on a platform while it was in its growth phase. And even a few years later, in retrospect, the right advice to give someone in similar shoes would probably be "make YouTube videos" rather than "publish a book." But that wasn't obvious at the time: frankly, it felt already then like I was Too Late for YouTube, even though in retrospect I was there at the perfect time.
What's the lesson of all this? I guess don't take advice from guys who write imaginary graduation speeches on their blog works as well as anything [uncomfortable laughter intensifies]. But seriously folks: when Seamus Heaney was giving his Nobel Prize lecture – a kind of graduation speech for people who'll never graduate? – he said it's hard to repress the feeling that history is about as instructive as the abattoir. What did he mean by this? I don't really know. In the context of the speech, it's probably either something about how 1) violence is ultimately the force that moves the world, 2) violence ultimately isn't the the force that moves the world, 3) you can't learn much from history because it's a bunch of carcasses.
But my personal interpretation is something like: there's a limit to what we can learn from history, and to the extent we can learn from it it's by either 1) seeing a piece of steak and adding it to our mental library of possible steak outcomes, without over-privileging any one in particular, 2) having someone who truly cares about us AND has worked at the abattoir for a while actually come with us when we're killing the soft animal of our lives and try to help make the cuts better. Receiving a piece of sausage – pre-processed remnants of somebody else's life experiences, packaged to be palatable – seems not especially useful to me, despite what I'm doing now. [Confused, disturbed murmurs]. To the Class of '26!
[^1]: this isn't true exactly either: my big fear is that it acts as a kind of homogenizing pressure, and that some people are just sufficiently unique that the things they should do are indeed the opposite of what 99.9% of people should do. E.g. I know some people who are absolute workaholics, and I think in many people that's a sign of a deeper unhappiness that's being neglected, but maybe some people just really love working that hard for that long, and convincing such a person that they should Work On Themselves instead is actually kind of criminal? That's my fear, anyhow.
[^2]: there's a bit of selection bias here, admittedly, since the people who go online and shout advice are way more prominent than the people who quietly but happily frolic on their estates with their close personal friends and their collection of endangered animals.
[^3]: while knowing that we live in a 9 dimensional strait of messina, with scyllas and charybdis on all sides. Opportunity fleeting, experimentations perilous, judgment difficult.
[^4] to avoid false modesty: I did, and do, think the book was good! And I don't think it would have succeeded if it were bad. But I mostly thought it was 7/10 good not 9/10 good, and I don't think it succeeded primarily because it was good.