Wise Graduation Advice From Someone Who Isn't Me

Not too long after I graduated from Georgetown University, my good friend Nestor mailed a copy of this speech to me. I held on to it and I recently uncovered it while preparing to move. My graduation was 26 years ago, but I'll be darned if this is about as good advice as one can get, and unwittingly the path I have followed. Enjoy.

Johnny, Don’t Ever Get a Job

The following remarks were offered at the Georgetown College Commencement Exercises in May, 1991, by playwright John Guare whose works include The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degree of Separation.

The greatest misconception is you have just finished the happiest days of ‘your lives. If these past 4 years have been the happiest days of your lives, what are the next sixty supposed to bring? I think the blurb “the happiest days of your lives” was a phrase invented by alumni fundraisers to make us all feel guilty. I say “pick up your degree, move on and don’t look back.” Thoughts of college should be not as some gnawing, mournful memory of a time now lost. No, college, to be successful, should tremble in our memory like a dazzling blur of energy. A successful education must make you hungry for today, hunger for tomorrow.

I can’t stop thinking of my father who worked hard to put me through Georgetown. It was not easy. But he wanted me to have the education he never had. He worked at Wall Street and, boy, did he hate it. This was the advice he gave me that I pass on to you, in honor of my father, Eddie Guare. He said “Johnny, promise me one thing--Don't ever get a job. Don’t be like me and wake up in the morning and hate what you have to do the rest of that day, hate where you have to go the rest of that day. Don’t be like me and hate your life. I’m not paying for this education for you to be a wage slave. I want you to have this education so you can be your own boss.” This is the important part of the advice--"All I ask is you keep it legal and fun.”

When I told my parents I was going to be a writer they did something amazing. They bought co-op apartment to which they moved so if anything happened to them I would always have a place to live. After all, I was going to be a playwright. I have to tell you something. They have been dead for many years and I still can’t get over their unswerving loyalty.

So much of why I'm up here speaking today came from their support, from their belief that an education is the simple placing of a bet that you can handle your life and you should make life as interesting and useful a proposition as you can. Because, Shirley MacLaine aside, this is the only life we have. Why live anybody else's life? Unless you want to, of course. But isn't that the purpose of an education? To know in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years time, the life you'll be leading then is the life you chose--openly and happily.

Don’t make either the cost of your education or the loans to pay for the cost of that education your excuse for fear-- ”I have to take this job to pay off my debts. I cannot live a life I'd like because I have this obligation.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it many years ago in this very city at the outset of his administration--"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I dare to repeat that cliche because it still is the greatest cancer we have to fight. Fear. Fear of our minds. Fear of the consequences of our choices. Fear of failure. Fear of being laughed at. Fear of life. Fear. But isn’t the true purpose of Education simply this? To set our minds free from that demon Fear.

If you're graduating today paralyzed with fear or getting ready to walk in pre-made footsteps only because you’re afraid to explore any other route, if fear is in that tassel swinging against your head like a nervous horse's tail, then go to the Better Business Bureau and ask for your money back because you did not get an education. Place a bet on yourself. What do you have to lose? Because what this country needs now are not more bankers or lawyers or businessmen. This country needs dreamers. Now you have to strew commencement addresses with inspirational quotes; I strew the title of Delmore Schwartz's great story “In Dreams Begin Responsibility.” Because our dreams tell us what we must be. What we must do. The world has a million problems. Our purpose in being alive is to try to solve at least one of them in our time here. For that, we have to use our organ of dreaming, the imagination, which is our rescue ship out of Torpor. What is evolution but imagination made visible? We must be agents of evolution and remember our connection to the rest of the world. And live in the world, but always with the fuel of our imagination, our dreams, put into action. Dreams without action are shadows. I'm asking you to live in the fierce high noon light of the best part of you. You have an education. Is this so much to ask? To believe in yourself as much as the rest of us do?

So these are the quotes I want you to highlight--Delmore Schwartz: In dreams begin responsibilities; FDR: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And Eddie Guare: Johnny, Promise me one thing. Don't ever get a job.”