Commencement Address at Villanova 2000

Commencement addresses are one of the most commodified forms of public speech — most of them recycle the same ten observations in slightly different clothes and are forgotten by the time the graduates reach the parking lot. Quindlen's Villanova address is one of the exceptions. It is short, direct, and structured around a counter-cultural argument for the time and audience she was addressing: that the pursuit of professional achievement is not a life, and that building one requires a different set of priorities from the ones most business-school-bound twenty-two-year-olds have been encouraged to develop.nnThe central claim is delivered without apology: 'Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.' The speech then offers what sounds like a conventional list of virtues — be a good parent, be a good partner, be a good friend — but its effectiveness comes from the precision with which Quindlen applies the word 'show up' to each one in sequence. The virtue she is actually describing is not warmth or generosity but presence: the specific, unglamorous act of being somewhere that is not work, for someone who is not your employer, on a schedule that does not benefit your career.nnThe second and more memorable move is the Coney Island boardwalk scene, which Quindlen uses to end the speech. Doing a December story on the homeless in New York, she sits at the edge of the boardwalk with an old man who panhandles in summer and sleeps in churches in winter. She asks why he doesn't go to a shelter. He stares at the ocean. 'Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.' The sentence carries the speech's entire argument: that the quality of the ordinary view available to anyone at any moment is the thing being squandered in the pursuit of the extraordinary achievement available only to some.nnWe picked this because it is one of the handful of graduation speeches that actually says something — useful for anyone who has not read it yet. The question it plants is not how to succeed but how much of the view you have been walking past on the way there.