i am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
truth be told i never graduated form collega. and this is the closest i've ever gotten to a college graduation.
today i want to tell you three stories from my life,that's it no big deal just three stories, the first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of reed college after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for anther 18 months also before i really quit.
so why did i drop out?
It started before i was born, my biological mother was a young unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption, she felt very strongly that i should be adopted by college graduates. so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his life, except that when i popped out. they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
so my parents who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night, asking we got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him? they said of course, my biological mother found out later. that my mother had never graduated from college, and my father had never graduated from high school, she refused to sign the final adoption papers. she only relented a few months later. when my parents promised that i would go to college.
this was a start in my life. and 17 years later i did go to college, but i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford , and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition, after six months i couldn't see the value in it. i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. and here i was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. so i decided to drop out.
and trust that it would all work out OK.
it was pretty scary at the time,but looking back, it was one of the best decisions i ever made. the minute i dropped out I could stop taking the rquired classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones. that looked futher more interesting,It's wasn't all romantic I didn't have a dorm room,So I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,I returned coke bottles for the 5cent deposite to buy food with.and I would walk the 7 miles,and I would walk the 7 miles, across town every sunday night to get on good meal a week. at the hare Krishna temple.
I love it and much of what I stumbled into by following my couiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
let me give you one example/3:31
truth be told i never graduated form collega. and this is the closest i've ever gotten to a college graduation.
today i want to tell you three stories from my life,that's it no big deal just three stories, the first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of reed college after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for anther 18 months also before i really quit.
so why did i drop out?
It started before i was born, my biological mother was a young unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption, she felt very strongly that i should be adopted by college graduates. so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his life, except that when i popped out. they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
so my parents who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night, asking we got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him? they said of course, my biological mother found out later. that my mother had never graduated from college, and my father had never graduated from high school, she refused to sign the final adoption papers. she only relented a few months later. when my parents promised that i would go to college.
this was a start in my life. and 17 years later i did go to college, but i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford , and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition, after six months i couldn't see the value in it. i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. and here i was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. so i decided to drop out.
it was pretty scary at the time,but looking back, it was one of the best decisions i ever made. the minute i dropped out I could stop taking the rquired classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones. that looked futher more interesting,It's wasn't all romantic I didn't have a dorm room,So I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,I returned coke bottles for the 5cent deposite to buy food with.and I would walk the 7 miles,and I would walk the 7 miles, across town every sunday night to get on good meal a week. at the hare Krishna temple.
I love it and much of what I stumbled into by following my couiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
let me give you one example/3:31