Commencement 2026
Words for the future
When done well, wedding toasts and commencement speeches make for good listening. Each occasion presents the opportunity to pair the right words and delivery with a life-changing moment. That can leave a lasting impression.
I remember my sister’s college graduation. The speaker was a Hollywood screenwriter. He said two things I still remember to this day:
The secret to life is how well you deal with Plan B.
Man, isn’t that the truth? As Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Then it’s on to Plan B. (In my experience, most of life is Plan B.)
The speaker also said this:
Everything in life, absolutely everything, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
We treat life as if it is a generic, repeating cycle with only a few special unique moments. But no, this moment, right now - with you reading this where you are at this age, it will never come again. The next interaction you have with someone will be the only time that interaction ever happens. So how’s it going to go? Approach life like that and suddenly it starts to feel more magical and full of possibility. It changed my whole perspective.
Both of these quotes have, in small ways, helped guide and direct me through countless situations over the past twenty years. They made a lasting impression. That’s what great graduation speeches have the power to do.
Great wedding toasts are even better than great graduation speeches because they are so personal. In my own life I’ve learned a few thing about wedding toasts:
Have a little fun at the groom’s expense, not the bride’s.
Always end sincerely.
When giving toasts, never follow a charismatic Irishman.
This is Mid-June so we are at the tail end of commencement speech season. As a connoisseur of the genre, I thought I’d recommend a couple of my favorites from the year.
Eric Church at UNC Chapel Hill
This speech when viral, and for good reason. It was poetic and thoughtful. He spoke about the “six strings of life”: faith, family, partnership, balancing ambition and resilience, putting down roots, and being yourself.
Six strings: When all six are in tune, the chords they make can stop a conversation cold, carry a broken person through the worst night of their life, or make a room full of strangers feel for three minutes like they’ve known each other forever. But if even one is off, the whole chord unravels. Not gradually, not politely. The moment you strike it, you know.
Church urged the graduates to keep their six strings in harmony with constant because over time each one can fall out of tune.
Your faith will go quiet when you need it loud. Your family will get complicated in a way only the people who love you most can complicate things. You will go through hard seasons with your spouse. Your ambition will hollow out, and your resilience will wear thin. Your community will start to feel like an obligation, and your world will try to sand down the edges of exactly who you are.
He added that this is “not failure. … It’s the inevitable, universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn’t stop to let us tune up.”
The difference between a life that sounds like music and a life that sounds like noise is whether you stop and listen. Whether you’re honest enough to hear which string has drifted out of tune and humble enough to make the adjustment instead of just turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices.
This speech was beautiful in a way I didn’t see coming.
Conan O’Brien at Harvard
I can’t believe that Conan graduated from Harvard 41 years ago. Can he be that old? He came back to deliver this address, with a lot of humor, much of it self-deprecating. He said he had a lot in common with the world leaders and Nobel prize winners who had shared this podium, but he had one thing they didn’t have: “a role as the voice potty training underpants in the new Toy Story 5, in theaters everywhere June 19th.”
Conan said his ambition has been to make his Harvard degree the least important thing people know about him. And that was his wish for the students as well.
I honestly believe that community, spontaneity, and a real commitment to humility has helped me build a rich life that means much more to me than any diploma. And believe me, I’m not saying the goal is to renounce accomplishments, but rather to metabolize them. If you carry your victories lightly, other qualities – kindness, originality, courage, humor, and humanity – have room to emerge…
I understand that I am preaching modesty and connection at a time when this is not in style. We are living through a period of extreme narcissism. Our current leadership in Washington believes that empathy is a weakness and that our nation stands supreme and alone. Add to that, everyone here today has a phone in their pocket that is algorithmically programmed to celebrate you and you alone by making you the protein-maxing hero of your own special journey.
Much has been written about how isolated and siloed we’ve become, but for me, the antidote is quite simple. By de-emphasizing what makes us special — in your case, a prized degree — we can really find one another, not as an exercise in virtue, but as a path towards greater laughter, love, and real growth.
David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College (2005)
This speech is a cheat, of course, because it is from 2005, not 2026, but it is my favorite commencement speech. I’ll quote only a small selection but I recommend it to you in its entirety. Wallace’s core premise is that the automatic default setting of our lives is to operate as if we are the center of the universe. What an education provides us with is not knowledge, but with the opportunity to make a choice - the choice to step outside our own heads and consider that we might not be the center of the story.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Wallace goes on to describe the “grind” of day to day life that is boring and stressful and frustrating and how you can go about seeing people as just objects that exist to frustrate you (a concept that is explored brilliantly and at-length in a book I recently read called Leadership and Self-Deception). Or you can make a different choice.
You can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
What other options do you want to consider?
I’ll close with a thought from another 2026 commencement speaker, Carolina Anderson, my daughter, who spoke at her high school graduation this week. The touched on the topic of purpose in our present age.
I recently listened to a lecture on AI that raised the question: where does our sense of meaning and purpose come from if artificial intelligence eventually takes over much of what we consider “work” - the area from which many of us derive purpose? And beyond that - how can we find meaning in a world that feels politically fragmented, socially accelerated, and constantly comparing itself through follower counts and micro-trends that somehow make everyone both unique and identical at the same time?
This is a question we’re all wrestling with now but that this year’s graduates will face throughout their lives. What to do? My daughter counseled that maybe the answer is not in pursuing greatness but in pursuing kindness.
In a world that constantly pressures us to compete, compare, and prove ourselves, kindness remains one of the few things that never diminishes a person’s greatness, only strengthens it.
That is a sentiment I can get behind. It may, in fact, be the most important thing I learned this year.
Congratulations class of 2026.
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
Thank you Max! Great stuff. Carolina does not know me, but tell her I am proud of her and her words.
Jody