Bill Gates | Speech |

 President Bok, former President Rudenstine,incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, membersof the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates: I’ve been waiting more than 30 years tosay this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.” I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. 

I’ll be changing my job next year … andit will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume. I applaud the graduates today for taking amuch more direct route to your degrees.

For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimsonhas called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of myown special class … I did the best of everyone who failed. But I also want to be recognized as the guywho got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at yourgraduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewerof you might be here today. 

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience forme. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’teven signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dormroom late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about gettingup in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of theanti-social group. 

We clung to each other as a way of validatingour rejection of all those social people. Bill Gates addresses the Harvard Alumni Associationin Tecentenary Theater at Harvard University’s 2007 Commencement Afternoon Exercises. Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most ofthe guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds,if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson thatimproving your odds doesn’t guarantee success. 

One of my biggest memories of Harvard camein January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun makingthe world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was justa student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready,come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the softwareyet. 

From that moment, I worked day and night onthis little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginningof a remarkable journey with Microsoft. What I remember above all about Harvard wasbeing in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimeseven discouraging, but always challenging.

 It was an amazing privilege – and thoughI left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and theideas I worked on. But taking a serious look back … I do haveone big regret. I left Harvard with no real awareness of theawful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunitythat condemn millions of people to lives of despair. 

I learned a lot here at Harvard about newideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances beingmade in the sciences. But humanity’s greatest advances are notin its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education,quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. 

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Jeff Bezos | What Will You Be |

 As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparentson their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle,and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon,especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club,a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to mygrandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents andI really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 yearsold.

i was rolling around in the big bench seatin the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hatedthe smell. At that age, I’d take any excuse to makeestimates and do minor arithmetic. 

I’d calculate our gas mileage -- figureout useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basicallythe ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: Ithink it might have been two minutes per puff. 

At any rate, I decided to do the math formy grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days,estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up witha reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmotheron the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nineyears off your life!” I have a vivid memory of what happened, andit was not what I expected. 

I expected to be applauded for my clevernessand arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates,figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know whatto do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather,who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. 

He got out of the car and came around andopened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quietman. He had never said a harsh word to me, andmaybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in thecar and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with mygrandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. 

My grandfather looked at me, and after a bitof silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harderto be kind than clever.” What I want to talk to you about today isthe difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts ifyou’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices. This is a group with many gifts. 

I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift ofa smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case becauseadmission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the deanof admission wouldn’t have let you in. Your smarts will come in handy because youwill travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonishourselves. 

We’ll invent ways to generate clean energyand a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machinesthat will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but alsoinevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesizeit, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. 

I believe you’ll even see us understandthe human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- allthe curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts,just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me. How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pridein your choices? I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage wasgrowing at 2,300 percent per year. 

I’d never seen or heard of anything thatgrew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- somethingthat simply couldn’t exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’dbeen married for a year. 

I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted toquit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startupsdon’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sittinghere in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer outof cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrellaand tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. 

I’d always wanted to be an inventor, andshe wanted me to follow my passion. I was working at a financial firm in New YorkCity with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted tostart a company selling books on the Internet. 

He took me on a long walk in Central Park,listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, butit would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convincedme to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficultchoice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. 

I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be hauntedby a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the lesssafe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life-- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins. 

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide, or will you followyour passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease, or a lifeof service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will youfollow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong,or will you apologize? 
Will you guard your heart against rejection,or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a littlebit swashbuckling? When it’s tough, will you give up, or willyou be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others,or will you be kind? I will hazard a prediction. 

When you are 80 years old, and in a quietmoment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story,the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices youhave made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck! 

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Steve Jobs | Stanford Commencement |

 I am honored to be with you today at yourcommencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’veever gotten to a college graduation.

 Today I want to tell you three stories frommy life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. I dropped out of Reed College after the first6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I reallyquit.

 So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed collegegraduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
 She felt very strongly that I should be adoptedby college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyerand his wife.


Except that when I popped out they decidedat 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do youwant him?” They said: “Of course.”

 My biological mother later found out thatmy mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated fromhigh school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

 She only relented a few months later whenmy parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almostas expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on mycollege tuition.

 After six months, I couldn’t see the valuein it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with mylife and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money myparents had saved their entire life. 

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Mark Zuckerberg | Find Your Purpose

 President Faust, Board of Overseers, faculty,alumni, friends, proud parents, members of the ad board, and graduates of the greatestuniversity in the world. I’m honored to be with you today because,let’s face it, you accomplished something I never could.

 If I get through this speech, it’ll be thefirst time I actually finish something at Harvard. Class of 2017, congratulations! I’m an unlikely speaker, not just becauseI dropped out, but because we’re technically in the same generation. We walked this yard less than a decade apart,studied the same ideas and slept through the same Ec10 lectures.

We may have taken different paths to get here,especially if you came all the way from the Quad, but today I want to share what I’velearned about our generation and the world we’re building together. But first, the last couple of days have broughtback a lot of good memories. How many of you remember exactly what youwere doing when you got that email telling you that you got into Harvard? I was playing Civilization and I ran downstairs,got my dad, and for some reason, his reaction was to video me opening the email.

That could have been a really sad video. I swear getting into Harvard is still thething my parents are most proud of me for. What about your first lecture at Harvard? Mine was Computer Science 121 with the incredibleHarry Lewis. I was late so I threw on a t-shirt and didn’trealize until afterwards it was inside out and backwards with my tag sticking out thefront.

I couldn’t figure out why no one would talkto me—except one guy, KX Jin, he just went with it. We ended up doing our problem sets together,and now he runs a big part of Facebook. And that, Class of 2017, is why you shouldbe nice to people. But my best memory from Harvard was meetingPriscilla. I had just launched this prank website Facemash,and the ad board wanted to “see me”. Everyone thought I was going to get kickedout. My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going-away party.

As luck would have it, Priscilla was at thatparty with her friend. We met in line for the bathroom in the PfohoBelltower, and in what must be one of the all-time romantic lines, I said: “I’mgoing to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly.” Actually, any of you graduating can use thatline. I didn’t end up getting kicked out—I didthat to myself.

Priscilla and I started dating. And, you know, that movie made it seem likeFacemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t. But without Facemash I wouldn’t have metPriscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life, so you could say it wasthe most important thing I built in my time here. We’ve all started lifelong friendships here,and some of us even families. That’s why I’m so grateful to this place. Thanks, Harvard.

Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standardcommencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding yourpurpose isn’t enough.

The challenge for our generation is creatinga world where everyone has a sense of purpose. One of my favorite stories is when John F.Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walkedover and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’mhelping put a man on the moon.” Purpose is that sense that we are part ofsomething bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better aheadto work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness. You’re graduating at a time when this isespecially important.

When our parents graduated, purpose reliablycame from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminatingmany jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed,and are trying to fill a void.

As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat withchildren in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could haveturned out differently if they just had something to do, an after-school program or somewhereto go. I’ve met factory workers who know theirold jobs aren’t coming back and are trying to find their place. To keep our society moving forward, we havea generational challenge—to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose.

I remember the night I launched Facebook frommy little dorm in Kirkland House. I went to Noch’s with my friend KX. I remember telling him I was excited to connectthe Harvard community, but one day someone would connect the whole world. The thing is, it never even occurred to methat someone might be us. We were just college kids. We didn’t know anything about that. There were all these big technology companieswith resources. I just assumed one of them would do it. But this idea was so clear to us—that allpeople want to connect.

So we just kept moving forward, day by day. I know a lot of you will have your own storiesjust like this. A change in the world that seems so clearyou’re sure someone else will do it. But they won’t. You will. But it’s not enough to have purpose yourself. You have to create a sense of purpose forothers. I found that out the hard way. You see, my hope was never to build a company,but to make an impact.

And as all these people started joining us,I just assumed that’s what they cared about too, so I never explained what I hoped we’dbuild. A couple years in, some big companies wantedto buy us. I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to see if we could connect more people.

We were building the first News Feed, andI thought if we could just launch this, it could change how we learn about the world. Nearly everyone else wanted to sell. Without a sense of higher purpose, this wasthe startup dream come true. It tore our company apart. After one tense argument, an advisor toldme if I didn’t agree to sell, I would regret the decision for the rest of my life. Relationships were so frayed that within ayear or so every single person on the management team was gone. That was my hardest time leading Facebook. I believed in what we were doing, but I felt alone.

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