A 60 Second Commencement Address

We live in very interesting times and as a young person you are going into a very turbulent and fragile economy that is going to get better. It’s going to take a while. When you’re going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community.

Things in traffic make you mad. People are getting a little desperate. They might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. In the worst of times the best among us never lose their moral compass and that is how they emerge relatively unscathed.

This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic, to be morally upstanding, to have a great civic backbone and a great civic true north, to be helpful, almost Boy Scout-like, presidential, to be altruistic because desperate people are scared.

That is the main ingredient which makes them do what they do. Don’t let this fear sidetrack you, blind you and minimize your potential. And now more than ever is the time to extol these great qualities which you have. Now it’s time to magnify them, personify them and inspire others with them and there has never been a time where they are needed more than right now. 

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio. 

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