A Graduation Speech

It's been a long time since I graduated high school, but my graduation speaker, and her commencement address, have always been in the back of mind. I thought about it today, almost nine years later, and how all the blogs I follow seem to be about following your dreams. 
Lee Boudreaux, former editor at Random House, now Editorial Director at Ecco, was the first person to tell me to follow my dreams. And now, hopefully, she'll help you follow yours...

Commencement 2003
Lee Boudreaux ’86
Follow your dreams, but don’t get a tattoo! 

Good morning. I’d like to thank all of you, and Mrs. Broad in particular, for having me here today. It really is an astonishing honor. To tell you the truth, I always hoped that one day I might find myself back at St. Margaret’s. After the hubbub of New York City, what could be more soothing to the soul than sitting up there in a classroom, overlooking the river, teaching avid young minds about the pleasures of a good book? But then I realized that in my day, faculty members at St. Margaret’s had certain extracurricular duties and the one that worried me the most was called Bush Patrol. I seem to remember faculty members fanning out across the campus after May Ball, wielding flashlights and rescuing girls from the clutches of their Woodberry Forest dates with the kind of single-minded determination I didn’t see again until Tom Hanks decided to save Private Ryan. I wasn’t sure I was really cut out for that line of work. So, while I’m truly amazed to find myself standing here today (dressed like Sandra Day O’Connor, no less), I’m greatly relieved that a flashlight will play no part in my duties after the ceremony.


When I told one of my best friends that I had been asked to be the commencement speaker, she said, “Really? We had Diane Sawyer.” Then, in an effort to make me feel better, I guess, she said, “But don’t worry. I don’t remember a single thing she said.”

And that did make me feel better, because as unlikely as it is that I’ll say anything memorable, it’s every bit as unlikely that you’ll remember any of it. So that takes the pressure off all of us, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, I asked a couple of my authors who were also giving commencement addresses this year what memorable things they’d come up with to say. I asked Adriana Trigiani, a woman who’s sold over a million copies of her books, and she told me, “I’m going to tell them to follow their dreams.” Then I asked Suzan-Lori Parks, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright, and she said, “I'm going to tell them to follow their dreams.” I was going to ask Stephen King, but I thought he’d suggest I tell you about some possessed car as a metaphor for life, and I wasn’t sure I could tackle that at 10 o’clock in the morning, so I didn’t call him.

By this point, it had become very clear to me that anyone who stands behind a podium during the month of May feels compelled to tell their audience to go out and follow their dreams. There’s probably some fellow down at the Moose Lodge at the other end of town telling a bunch of deer hunters that they should follow their dreams even as we speak. So, sure, it’s a cliché. But it’s also true.

If you’re lucky enough to do something you love for a living, it becomes an end in itself, no matter what you’re paid, or how thankless the job is, or how hard you have to work. And you will have to work hard. But doing something you love is at least like doing the homework in your favorite class. It’s still work. It’s not like you’re just lying on a beach somewhere, but there’s still a great deal to like about it. Doing something you don’t love is like spending your entire life doing your chemistry homework. At your age, that’s like doing chemistry homework until the year 2075. People will tell you life is short. But it won’t feel short enough if you spend your whole life doing chemistry.


So we’ve established that you should follow your dreams. But when I sat where you’re sitting, I didn’t have a dream. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a road map. I didn’t have a clue. How do you figure out what your dream is? 

It might be easier than you think. All I ever liked to do was read, but that doesn’t sound like a job description, does it? Certainly at no point in my academic career did I sharpen a bunch of No. 2 lead pencils and take a standardized test that indicated there was great job out there for a girl who liked to sit around eating brownies and reading all day. But it was out there. I just had to find it.

My brother is another great example of someone who loves what they do for a living. You may recognize him from the St. Margaret’s Class of 1985 picture, when he made quite a name for himself as the only boy in school here. All he ever wanted to do as a kid (when I was inside reading) was run around outdoors, building forts and making things with his hands. Now he’s a blacksmith and a furniture maker. And you can bet that no standardized test ever told him, “You know what? There’s an antiquated profession that no one’s actually taken up since 1845, and we think you’d be great for it!” But he found his perfect job, too.

Here’s what you have to remember: No matter how silly, or unprofessional, or unprofitable your interests seem to be, don’t be dissuaded from seeing where they might lead you. In my job I’m surrounded by other people who simply liked to read all day. I’m surrounded by people who sat in the back of the classroom doodling, and now they design book jackets. I’m surrounded by people who loved to tell funny stories to their roommates, and now I publish their novels.

Here at St. Margaret’s, and for four years in college, you are surrounded by people who are paid to look out for your best interests. Their job is to help you go from being the person doodling in the back of the classroom to the person who gets paid to do it for a living. Take advantage of them. Ask them questions. Borrow their books. Ask them how they got where they are. It took me four years to get from college to New York, but it will take you a lot less time to get where you want to go if you start asking the right questions now.

This brings me to the second thing I want to tell you about following your dreams. A lot of people mistake “Follow your dreams” for “Let your parents pay all of your bills for the next seven years while you work on a screenplay about that really funny thing that happened last year on Spring Break.” If your parents can do that, you’re very lucky, and when you sell your screenplay, you should buy them a very big house. As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to do whatever it takes. The only reason I’m still at Random House when most of the people I started with aren’t, is that I knew if I walked into my boss’s office and said, “I didn’t go to college to earn minimum wage and make Xerox copies all day,” she would have opened a drawer, filled with 712 resumes, and said to me, “Really? Because this girl went to Harvard and she seems to think she did go to college to make my Xeroxes all day.”

I don’t have the job of my dreams because I was the best, or the brightest, or the most connected, or the most ambitious. I’m there because I really, really wanted to be paid to eat brownies and read all day. And if you want something that badly–and you’re willing to persevere, and be patient, and use your imagination–there’s nothing you can’t do. Just think about what you love doing. Then think big.

As an editor, I evaluate a lot of memoirs. I turn down about 75% of them right away simply because I say to myself, “This person is 30 years old. Who wants to read their life story?” And I feel a certain amount of self-consciousness on that score as a commencement speaker. But I have learned two things that might help these graduating seniors navigate the next few years.

First, college is the reward for getting through high school. It’s actually fun. If you have chosen your college wisely and well–and I’m sure you have–you will find it challenging and interesting in all sorts of ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the things you might find interesting is that there are boys around. And don’t think going to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College will solve this problem, because there were more boys there on a Saturday night than there ever were at William and Mary.

What I’m trying to say is that when your mid-term exams roll around next October, Chaucer might not have had your undivided attention. Give yourself time to adjust. Get your sea legs. You are supposed to have fun in college. Unfortunately, they also insist on having classes. Don’t take the hardest classes you’re allowed to take, and don’t try to take them all at once. I took twelve credits both semesters of freshman year. The fact is, if you get C’s and D’s your freshman year because you think it’s freshman year and it doesn’t really count, you will make it a mathematical impossibility to graduate with the kind of grades that will inspire your parents to send you to Paris for six months and buy you a convertible. On the other hand, if you make A’s and B’s your freshman year, you have given yourself a GPA safety net for later on when the classes are harder and the stakes are higher. 

And my parting piece of advice to you–and this is undoubtedly the most important thing I have learned out there in the Real World: Do. Not. Get. A. Tattoo. You really will get tired of looking at it by the time you’re thirty-five.

Thank you all very much for having me here today. Thanks especially to my fellow St. Margaret’s girls who’ve come back to see me today: Jayne and Betty and, of course, Eddie. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.