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10 1/2 Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said (2012)

by Charles Wheelan(Favorite Author)

3.98 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0393074315 (ISBN13: 9780393074314)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: This is a good book on what commencement speakers could say. The most intriguing to me was 'don't be great' be 'solid'. This as noted in the book will help you to be great. Solid performances lend themselves to improvement. You can analyze a solid performance and examine what was done well and what you could do better next time. This can happen for any kind of work that you do. Also important as noted in the book was to take time and enjoy life. This is one I really need to work on. I love my work, but need to extract myself from it from time to time.
review 2: This was a good book by a guy who gave a speech at Dartmouth’s class day (the day before commencement) and the book is based upon that original speech. Overall it was interesting as he gives yo... moreu life lessons that he wished other commencement speakers would have given him. A couple of things that really impacted me was that, “Your parents don’t always know whats best for you”. He explained how the three most important things that defined his life was deciding to take a year off after graduation to travel the world, becoming a writer, and one other thing that I can’t remember now – it is no coincidence that each of these 3 things were things that his parents objected against profusely. He explained how parents don’t want to see their kids fail and the analogy he used is that parents would love to see their kids get tenure like a professor get – meaning they would love them to have a safe job that is well renown and guaranteed to provide them with income for the rest of their life. Even whenever one of his writing friends goes on to win a Nobel Prize, her father who was a tenured professor expressed some concern about stability for her and so he makes the point that if you want to be a Nobel Prize winner, you probably are going to have to take some risks as opposed to always taking the safe option. He also discusses in the book enjoy the ride to trying to achieve success. He talks about how we may set a goal for ourselves to become CEO of a company one day and work 20+ years to do so. However, it may never work out for us and if we just had 20 miserable years, not only are we not CEO but we also spent 20 miserable years for nothing. It is fine for us to put our head down and work hard to achieve our goals, but we must all realize that there is a chance that things might not work out so we should enjoy the ride up. Also, he discusses reading the Obituaries. He had a close friend in college who was brilliant and bound to do amazing things with her life. 10 years after graduation, she unfortunately died of a rare heart cancer. These examples are things that we should use to remind ourselves to always live our lives to the fullest. We must accept the fact that tomorrow or a week or a year etc. could be the last day that we live and you don’t want to have any regrets when that day comes. Finally, the thing I remember the most about this book is he talks about when him and his now wife were traveling around the world after college and they were in San Fran. They had 24 hours to get from San Fran to LA to catch their flight so they started to hitch rides and they came across one nice old guy who they asked to give them a ride to the bus station. The guy asked them where they were going and insisted to drive them all the way to LA. He first drove them to his house while they waited in the living room and he got changed and some of his things. He then drove them to LA leisurely stopping for ice cream, lunch, dinner, etc. before dropping them right off at LAX in time for their flight. When they asked him, “Why did he take them all across California down to LA instead of just dropping them off at the bus station?” He responded that because when he first saw this young 21 year old blonde kid with a crew cut standing on the side of the road with a backpack hitching a ride, it reminded him of the young American soldiers who freed him from a concentrate camp back in Poland. He said he tries to do small things to help out whenever he can as a token of his thanks to those young soldiers. What an incredible story this guy had and makes you really appreciate how good some people are out there. Finally, he talks about doing something good in your career. He talks about the memory of 7 men dressed in suits standing in front of congress who worked for Tobacco companies in the 1990s and gave sworn testimony that nicotine and cigarettes were not addictive. 5 of those 7 people went to Harvard so he makes the point that these were brilliant people, who unfortunately went into a career that damaged people and society. Don’t devote your career to harm people / damage people which makes complete sense. less

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