When you leave the safety of this campus, this faculty, this community, keep hoping, keep dreaming, keep striving, keep giving, keep failing, and keep fighting. The future of this small world rests on your shoulders. Just as it rested on mine, and on my parents’, and their parents’.
I wish four things:1. That you are bold and have good fortune. Fortune favors the bold. 2. That you give and get the feedback you need. Feedback is a gift. 3. That you empower everyone. Nothing is somebody else’s problem. 4. That you support equality. Lean In!
I hope you will carry with you MIT’s tradition of taking – and making – moonshots. Be ambitious in every facet of your life. And don’t ever let something stop you because people say it’s impossible. Let those words inspire you.
It’s not enough to be technologists — we have to make sure that technology serves people. It’s not enough or even possible to be neutral — tools are shaped by the minds that make them and by the hands that use them. And it’s not enough to have a good idea — you have to know when to stop a bad one.
There’s never a clear path to the top. But what makes it all worth it is learning that you are often stronger than you imagined, and that if you ask for help, you’ll be amazed by the people who will be there to keep you steady and on course.
One of the greatest joys in life is the feeling of using your skills to the limit, to do something important for others: your community, your discipline, your institution, your country – or even the whole human family and our fragile planet.
This has given me a mine of precious materials from which to draw, from the national to the quotidian. I love each, and I love them all together. I still do not understand all I need to, but as they intersect, I understand each better. I hope and expect you will find the same is true in your lives.
We are living in science fiction times, and our fate is in your hands. I think I shouldn’t say congratulations; I should say welcome to the battlefield.
Leaving here, you carry with you the respect of your fellow citizens. You will represent a nation with history and hope on our side. Your charge, now, is not only to protect our country, but to do what is right and just. As your Commander-in-Chief, I know you will.
I have no doubt that you will have added your name to the book of history. I have no doubt that we will have prevailed in the struggles of our times. I have no doubt that your legacy will be an America that has emerged stronger, and a world that is more just, because we are Americans, and our destiny is never written for us, it is written by us, and we are ready to lead once more.
I hope you all will keep seeking these kinds of experiences. And I hope you’ll keep teaching each other, and learning from each other, and building bonds of friendship that will enrich your lives and enrich our world for decades to come.
The one last piece of advice, though, that I would have that has been useful for me is the people who I admire the most and are most successful, they’re not just thinking only about themselves but they’re also thinking about something larger than themselves. So they want to make a contribution to society. They want to make a contribution to their country, their nation, their city. They are interested in having an impact beyond their own immediate lives.
Over the many years of practicing, I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.
Take care of each other. Take care of those under your command. And as long as you keep strong that Long Blue Line, stay true to the values you’ve learned here — integrity, service before self, excellence — do this and I’m confident that we will always remain one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
With your proud service, I’m absolutely confident that the United States of America will meet the tests of our time. We will remain the land of opportunity. And we will stay strong as the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known.
If we remember this — if you stay true to the lessons you’ve learned here on the Thames, if we hold fast to what keeps us strong and unique among nations, then I am confident that future historians will look back on this moment and say that when we faced the test of our time, we stood our watch. We did our duty.
I’m asking you to pay them back by seeking to have the same kind of impact with your own lives; by pursuing excellence in everything you do; by serving this country that you love.
Young people, they’re asking, well, why do I have to do it that way? Let’s try it this way. And that kind of willingness to accept challenges and try things in a new way, to not be stuck in the past, or to look towards the future, that’s what all of you represent.
Pursue success. Do not falter. When you make it, pull somebody else up. Preserve our dream. Remember your life is richer when people around you have a shot at opportunity as well. Strive to widen that circle of possibility; strive to forge that big, generous, optimistic vision of America that we inherited; strive to carry that dream forward to future generations.
We met the moment. That democracy and hope, truth and justice, did not die on our watch but thrived. That our America secured liberty at home and stood once again as a beacon to the world. That is what we owe our forebearers, one another, and generations to follow. So, with purpose and resolve we turn to the tasks of our time.
