Mohit Just's Public Library

Today is May 13th, and today you graduate, and today you already know what I know: to get where you’re going, you have to be good, and to be good where you’re going, you have to be damned good. Every once in a while, you’ll succeed. Most of the time you’ll fail, and most of the time the circumstances will be well beyond your control…
Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt…
it seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less of each other, and that’s got to change. Your friends, your family, this school expect more of you than vocational success.
Today is May 13th and today you graduate and the rules are about to change, and one of them is this: Decisions are made by those who show up. Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world.
Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You’re too good for schadenfreude, you’re too good for gossip and snark, you’re too good for intolerance—and since you’re walking into the middle of a presidential election, it’s worth mentioning that you’re too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy…
Don’t ever forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has…
How you live matters. You’re going to fall down, but the world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.

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All in all, I would urge readers to not pay too much attention to big prestigious literary prizes. In a perfect world, I would wish for every writer a magical bag of money that is never empty (to level the financial question) and simply do away with them all: no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, no National Book Award, no PEN/Faulkner, no Man Booker, no Nobel Prize in Literature. Let writers write, let critics have their say, let readers read, let time decide.
It doesn’t really matter, though. Even without the magic moneybags, and even with the swells of cacophonic hype surrounding all the literary prizes and all the literary darlings of any given moment, history will plod on, and the Ozymandias of now will be the half-sunk and shattered visage of later. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who never won a Pulitzer, will remain F. Scott Fitzgerald, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington will remain Booth Tarkington. And anyway, I am absolutely certain there have been many writers the equal of Fitzgerald who, through their own bad luck or other people’s bad taste, were never published and never read, let alone given prizes, and it’s especially to these unknown soldiers of literature that I raise my glass. John Kennedy Toole killed himself believing he was doomed to be one of them, and he most certainly would have been, had his mother not accosted Walker Percy years later with his manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces, which went on to win a twelve-years-posthumous Pulitzer Prize. It was a nice gesture.

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If someone asked me to prove my undying love for my daughter, I would tell him that I have pretended to be over fifty different Pokémon characters. I have watched an entire Pokémon Advanced Battle DVD, which is essentially like roasting your soul on a spit...
Lately, though, perhaps because at age 41 I'd begun feeling less like the captain of my life and more like its deckhand, I'd started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one—a person who encapsulates everything you've ever dreamed of becoming. Let's call him your Cooler Self. All those dreams that got lost along the way, the ones that were casualties of chance or duty or cowardice: There's a "you" out there—a mountain climber or war photographer or race-car driver—who brought them to fruition...
"Still, I can't help thinking what else I might have accomplished if I hadn't had children. Like I'm wasting my talent or something."
"There's always something else you could be doing," he said. "We're wasting a life as we speak."...
There's a reason we drift toward attachment, I think, as we get older— attachment to people, to work, to things. As death moves closer, we try our hardest to dig in. We pound in the stakes so that our tents don't blow away. Still, it makes sense to me that the perceptions we once had of ourselves would be hard to cast off. We miss our youth, our freedom—which is not the same thing as wanting it back. We may think it is, but it's not...
When I got home, my daughter was still awake, and I kissed her good night and sat on her bed longer than usual. I told her a story from my childhood, one of her favorites, and she corrected me when I got a detail wrong. She knew the story better than I did. Miniature plastic planets hung from her ceiling, meant to mimic the geography of the solar system. A few of them—like Saturn—had fallen off, but the earth still dangled above us, hanging literally by a thread. If someone told me I was going to die tomorrow, I thought, I would still want to be sitting right here. Because it was going to happen someday—very soon, in fact, in cosmological time—and it mattered immensely where I was. There was no time not to waste.

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Nearly 25 years later, I’m a little more grown-up and the idea of banning things, especially creative works, still makes no sense to me. These days, what’s coming on the ban radar seems more ridiculous than ever before...
I’m not sure what is more difficult to explain—that Reliance Entertainment thought Dangerous Ishq would have box-office earnings, or that anyone would want to waste bandwidth, time and storage space on the film; or that Vimeo, a favourite with indie filmmakers and known for hosting a lot of original content, was considered a threat. Meanwhile YouTube, the shady den that has everything from puppy videos to pirated films, remained unaffected because that’s where all the Bollywood trailers and song videos are put up. On the other hand, if you want to see some award-winning short films or see what’s the latest upload at the official White House channel on Vimeo, you’d learn that there’s a John Doe order preventing you from accessing the site...
To give Sibal the benefit of doubt, maybe he was referring to the freedom enjoyed by politicians because in that case, he’s absolutely right. For instance, it’s difficult to imagine an elected representative killing time watching pornography while attending the European or American equivalent of Parliament. And that’s just a trivial example. We all know that politicians are truly free to do anything they want in this country. The laws are as flexible as flubber for them. They’re enacted inflexibly for the benefit of us humble, everyday citizens, and it is to preserve our delicate innocence that Sibal wants a draconian set of rules that will regulate the content we can access on the net.

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If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet...
I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work...
The problems of failure are hard.
The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them...
I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful...
You get work however you get work.
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you...
When I agreed to give this address, I started trying to think what the best advice I'd been given over the years was.
And it came from Stephen King twenty years ago, at the height of the success of Sandman. I was writing a comic that people loved and were taking seriously. King had liked Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines, all that, and his advice was this:
“This is really great. You should enjoy it.”
And I didn't. Best advice I got that I ignored.Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn't a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn't writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn't stop and look around and go, this is really fun. I wish I'd enjoyed it more. It's been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed, because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on.
That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: to let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places...
So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.

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The Video

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Reality-avoidance is the dark side to the pursuit of excellence. It’s ironic: when leaders drive for results at all costs, making it difficult for their people to point out unrealistic objectives, they actually get further away from achieving their objectives. There is a fine line between challenging a team to achieve beyond all expectations and living in a fantasy world. The only way a leader can discern the boundary between “all-out effort” and “this is total make-believe” is to create a culture where team members feel empowered to push back on their leaders’ demands...
“You can do it!” isn’t motivating and it’s not productive. Show your team that you live in the Land of Reality, not the Land of the Overly Optimistic, by encouraging a culture that’s that say it’s OK to speak up.

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For years, you’ve wasted your time on Facebook. Now here’s your chance to waste your money on it, too...
Facebook is the most successful social network in the world, enabling millions to share information of no interest with people they barely know.Finally, if you invest in Facebook, you’ll be far from alone. As a result of using Facebook for the past few years, over 900 million people in the world have suffered mild to moderate brain damage, impairing their ability to make reasoned judgments. These will be your fellow Facebook investors.

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The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free...
At its most effective, the censor’s lie actually succeeds in replacing the artist’s truth. That which is censored is thought to have deserved censorship. Boat-rocking is deplored...
You will even find people who will give you the argument that censorship is good for artists because it challenges their imagination. This is like arguing that if you cut a man’s arms off you can praise him for learning to write with a pen held between his teeth. Censorship is not good for art, and it is even worse for artists themselves...
Even more serious is the growing acceptance of the don’t-rock-the-boat response to those artists who do rock it, the growing agreement that censorship can be justified when certain interest groups, or genders, or faiths declare themselves affronted by a piece of work. Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend, but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.
This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

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One of those whatevers is us. Time is what we measure, not just with our external Einsteinian clocks but with our internal Roennbergian ones: heart rate, hunger, breath, sleep. Like almost every other species, we humans are a kind of mobile timepiece. Unlike other species, we’ve overrun our niche in the temporal ecosystem, just as we have in the physical one. We move as freely from time to time as we do from place to place—working nights, jetting three hours into the past for a long weekend. That remarkable temporal suppleness, like our adaptiveness more generally, both rewards and imperils us. We live in all time but, unlike De Mairan’s mimosa, we live uneasily in it, struggling to balance our inner self with the demands of nature and each other.

And we live uneasily in time in another way, too. Time is what all creatures measure, but humans are the creatures who measure time. That is a remarkable but not a comfortable ability. If human culture is delightful but disrupts our sleep, the same could be said of human consciousness. It’s wonderful, thank heavens for it—and yet we are the only species kept awake at night by the thought that time is passing, that its quantity, for us, is finite. This is the fundamental pathos of being, in effect, a conscious Swatch. Our internal clocks do what we cannot: keep time

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I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a night owl. As a kid, I read in bed until hours that would have horrified my parents, had they known...I pulled my first all-nighter halfway through sixth grade. I was 11.
There was no particular reason for it, that first time. I didn’t have homework, wasn’t behind on any project, wasn’t in the grips of preadolescent angst. I just wasn’t tired...
Predictably, getting up in the morning—not that morning; every morning—was a misery. By seventh grade I walked to school, and I was never not late, which was unfortunate, because I hate being late. (As an adult, I am scrupulously punctual; but then, I also scrupulously avoid early-morning meetings.) On weekends, liberated, I routinely slept until eleven or noon...Even more annoying, though, were family vacations, when my parents, sister, and I would all share a hotel room.

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As the world grows more open, religions have turned more dogmatic and stringent. Instead of letting them evolve and adapt with modern life, the human race has turned religion into something complex and grotesque. These days religion is less about finding the meaning of life and more about competing with each other...
Also, pretending to defend god is also pure human hubris. What the self-appointed defenders of faith are essentially saying is that not only is their god the most omnipotent, the most powerful, the king of every other god, but this very same powerful entity needs them, the average Joe – the guy who gets confined to the bed for five days because he was dumb enough to leave home without an umbrella even though it was drizzling outside-to defend them. Talk about your delusions of grandeur.

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But holes are interesting things. As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes. Pleasure, love, compassion, fulfillment; these things do not leak out of holes of any size. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.
This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: The facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things which ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

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Through reading, then, a young person can try out the prospect of illicit freedom—disobedience, overindulgence, parentlessness—but can ultimately make a willing return to home sweet home.
When fairy tales flirt with trouble, but avoid real consequences, they really work. And yet the possibility of straying too far—the Lindbergh scenario—haunts Sendak's work. "Certainly," Sendak told the Caldecott audience, "we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and intensify anxiety." The child must return home safely for the story to have ameliorative power; Sendak criticized Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Andersen for veering into unnecessary cruelty. Still, he insisted that children are more complicated, tolerant readers than we think, and that they will surprise us in their ability to respond to difficult literature.
Eventually, we all endure a startling transformation, if we are lucky—the transformation from child to adult, or from child to parent. We can lose touch, along the way, with the people we once were. In this light, we should be grateful to Maurice Sendak: His work reminds us that we contain many selves, and that there can be fluidity among them. He was dark and light, innocent and experienced, playful and morose. He opened a roiling window into childhood, he cast the shadow augury of growing old.

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Exactly what it says!

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“What has happened to leadership? With all the crises and challenges we face and the increasingly risk-averse environment in which we operate, leadership has become generic, ephemeral, and bland...
The problem is we’re no longer leading. We’re hiding behind committees. We’re using the crutches of data and metrics to make our decisions for us. We blame policies and corporate culture for the problems our teams face rather than delivering the tough messages with a sense of ownership.
The result of all of this is our people don’t trust us anymore. Work has become transactional. They do the work and we pay them. It’s a fee-for-service mindset. When they find someone who will pay them more for their services, they’re gone. And when we no longer have need of their services, we simply cast those people aside. It’s a toxic environment. It’s hard for people to trust their leaders when they feel like they’re simply a cog in the machine.”

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You will never feel like you know what you are doing, so don’t wait for it.
Outside of your small circle of family and close friends, no one cares what you wear, what you do, what you read, or what you watch. This can be both liberating and terrifying. Choose liberating.
The more you enjoyed your time here, the more the memory of it will sting.
It is easy to make decisions about your life without even knowing you are making them. You will regret the decisions you did not make a hell of a lot more than the decisions you knew you were making.
What you will turn out to be will probably not bear much resemblance to what you thought you would be. Try not to mourn this overmuch.
The small patch of understanding and meaning you can create for yourself will be the anchor of your happiness. Grow and guard it.

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How can CEOs learn from Kodak’s failure? Historically, Kodak was built on a culture of innovation and change. It’s the type of culture that’s full of passionate innovators, already naturally in tune to the urgency surrounding changes in the market and technology. It’s these people – those excited about new ideas within your own organization – who keep your company moving ahead instead of falling behind. One key to avoiding complacency is to ensure these innovators have a voice with enough volume to be heard (and listened to) at the top. It’s these voices that can continue to keep a sense of urgency in your organization. If they are given the power to lead, they will continue to innovate, help keep a culture of urgency and affect change.
As Kodak became more successful, complacency grew, leaders listened less to these voices, which made complacency grow some more. It can be a vicious cycle. It certainly was at Kodak. And if you don’t address it first… good luck.

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Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

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