Search results for: “commencement speech”

  • The Art of the Commencement Speech

    The Art of the Commencement Speech is a project by The Humanity Initiative to collect the best commencement addresses since 1936. To date there are 29 speeches available, from John F. Kennedy (American University, 1963), Václav Havel (Harvard University, 1995) and The Dalai Lama (Emory University, 1998). The commencement ceremony affirms each student’s search for…

  • Our Self-Centered ‘Default’ Worldview: DFW’s Commencement Address

    Recent talk of the correspondence bias (here) reminded me of possibly the best commencement speech that I’ve not yet written about (and I’ve written about quite a few): David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only public talk concerning his worldview, was adapted following…

  • Top Speeches and Motivational Videos

    American Rhetoric is a “speech bank” holding over 5,000 full text, audio and video on some of the most famous speeches, lectures, debates and interviews of all time. Recently they released a list of the top 100 speeches in American 20th century politics (complete with transcript and audio). Martin Luther King, Jr. – “I Have…

  • Great Speeches: Oprah and Obama

    A couple of speeches currently getting rave reviews: Oprah’s Stanford Commencement, 2008 Barack Obama’s Father’s Day Speech, Chicago Stanford always seem to nail that commencement speech. via Ramit’s del.icio.us links and 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise

  • Medicine, Specialism, and the Scientific Education

    In the commencement speech he delivered to the graduates of Stanford’s School of Medicine earlier this year, Atul Gawande eloquently (as ever) examined the state of modern medicine (in the U.S. specifically, the world generally), the problem with specialism, and the problem of specialists trying to fit into a system not necessarily designed for it.…

  • Entrepreneurial Reads and Annual Reads

    I’m a real sucker for book lists. Entrepreneurial Reads is a wiki list of suggested reading for entrepreneurs. The list contains books written specifically for entrepreneurs (e.g. The E-Myth Revisited) in addition to much fiction containing entrepreneurial lessons (e.g. The Fountainhead). That link came via What Books Are Worth Reading Once Per Year?–a post by…

  • Year One in Review

    366 days, 616 posts and 15,144 spam comments later, I am happy and proud to announce that Lone Gunman is now one year old (founded on February 29th 2008, I suppose it’s not even that, is it?). LG has evolved into something completely different to what I had first envisaged and the whole experience of…

  • Evaluating Decision-Making

    With a hat tip to Robin Rubin’s commencement speeches at NYU (1999) and Harvard (2000), Venture Hacks implores us to evaluate decisions by the decision-making process itself, rather than the results produced. Decisions tend to be judged solely on the results they produce. But I believe the right test should focus heavily on the quality of…

  • Randy Pausch Lectures

    By now I’m sure everyone has watched, listened to, or at the very least heard of, Randy Pausch’s lecture Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams which he gave at Carnegie Mellon University a year ago today (the lecture is more commonly referred to as The Last Lecture). Since then I’ve watched two more speeches by Pausch…

  • Don’t Follow Your Passion – Fix Your Lifestyle

    Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there. A novel take on the typical inspirational graduation speech. It’s not about following your passion or not taking yourself too seriously. They’re important, but this is different. The idea is to not think of your ideal job, but to think of your ideal lifestyle. To…