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We now find ourselves in the heart of commencement season, and I am focused on my own daughter’s graduation from high school in just a week and a half. With the advent of social media, we are now able to get a daily dose of terrible commencement addresses that are going on around the country, with an occasional good one sprinkled in for good measure. I honestly cannot remember a single thing that was said during the various commencement addresses that occurred when I graduated from several different levels of schooling, and further I cannot remember the names of the commencement speakers. I also did not have a camera available on my phone to record those commencement addresses for posterity or for gratuitous distribution to the wider world. In any event, this focus over the past few weeks on commencement addresses got me thinking about what I would say in the unlikely event that I was ever asked to speak to students at a commencement, and here are my thoughts:

1. Enjoy the Moment. As I am experiencing at the moment, there is an awful lot of build-up to the moment of graduation, and then all of the sudden it seems to have passed by and you are expected to magically embark on your new life after graduation. To avoid this phenomenon, it is important to stop and savor the moment. An enormous amount of hard work and dedication is required to get to graduation, and it is very important to recognize that effort and share the joy with your family and friends. Don’t miss the moment by focusing too much on the future.

2. Be Open to the Possibilities. We seem to live in an age today of increasing specialization, where high school students are expected to pick their colleges based on their anticipated career path. I am not sure how we can expect sixteen to eighteen year-olds who have never really experienced the world of work decide on their career path. I originally wanted to be a car designer because I was into cars. When I got to college, I studied accounting because my older brother was an accounting major. I then studied economics when I did poorly in my intermediate accounting class. At various points during my journey through higher education, I aspired to be a philosophy professor, economist and financial analyst. I never once considered being a lawyer until I was in graduate school for finance and the economy remained in bad shape, so staying in school seemed attractive. I think it all worked out for me in the end, because I remained open to the possibilities without operating exclusively on pre-conceived notions of what I was best suited to do with my life.

3. Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself. Young adults and kids have had it pretty hard these past few years. The one-two punch of the pandemic and the proliferation of social media has had an outsized influence on their lives. We all need to recognize that and do everything we can to support them. In my experience, they tend to be very hard on themselves, and they really feel the pressure. As someone who has always been subject to my fair share of self-doubt and self-loathing, my advice is to try to dial it back as best you can. A little bit of being hard on yourself is actually not a bad thing, but a lot of it can be overwhelming. Give yourself a break, it is going to be OK!

4. Build Your Brand. No matter what you do in life, it is important to have your own “brand.” That brand is something that you carry around with you forever, and, if your brand is properly managed, it will open doors for you in your professional and personal life. At the core of anyone’s brand should be honesty, integrity and ethical conduct. There is no way around building off of that foundation. Your brand should not just be about you, but also about how you help others in your profession, your community and the world at large. A brand takes an enormous amount of time and energy to build, and it can be destroyed in an instant, so do everything you can to nurture and protect your brand.

5. Be Yourself. I believe that one of the greatest lessons that I have learned over the course of my career is the importance of being yourself. When you are embarking on your career, there is so much pressure to conform to things like your work environment and customer or client expectations, and some level of conformance is inevitable and often times advisable to succeed. Ultimately, however, authenticity is critical to human interaction, therefore it is important to not lose yourself in the pursuit of success, however that is measured.

I could certainly go on, but no one is going to remember these words at any time in the future. I promise that AI did not generate this commencement speech, although I acknowledge that it might have actually come out better if I had let AI do the job.

– Dave Lynn