It’s graduation season, which means two things: lots of inspirational speeches – the kind full of punchy quotes, poetic metaphors, and “Go change the world” “Follow your dreams” “You’re the future”declarations.- and lots of bad advice.
But here’s the quiet truth nobody says out loud:
You don’t need to change the world.
You need to change your relationship with it.
So, I’d like to offer a counterpoint.
Not because I want to be cynical – but because I’ve seen what happens when we feed people a steady diet of dreams without giving them the tools to live a real life. The world doesn’t break because we dream too small. It breaks because we dream without grounding.
If I were giving a graduation speech today – not that anyone has asked me to – I wouldn’t begin with lofty metaphors or borrowed quotes. I wouldn’t talk about climbing mountains or following dreams. And I definitely wouldn’t tell them to go change the world – not because I don’t believe they can, but because I know the pressure those words carry, and how often they distract from a deeper question: What kind of life are you actually building?
Here’s what mine would sound like:
Good afternoon, graduates.
This day is full of celebration – and it should be. You’ve crossed a milestone, and the world is opening up. You’ll hear a flood of well-meaning advice over the next few weeks. Some of it will be profound. Some will be poetic. Most will revolve around success, passion, achievement, and impact.
But I want to offer something else. Not a script. Not a soundbite. Just something I’ve come to understand, painfully and honestly, over the course of nearly three decades since I sat where you sit now.
Back then, I believed life was about becoming someone. A title, a name, a bank balance, a window office. I chased it hard. And for a while, it looked like I was getting it right. But over time, I began to realize that all the things I thought would deliver fulfillment – accolades, influence, approval – were largely hollow. Temporary. Dependent on performance and perception.
What no one told me – and what I want to tell you today – is that success, as we define it, is a poor life strategy. It’s too vague to be useful, too externally driven to be grounding, and too fragile to sustain you when the applause fades.
What I’ve learned – through wrong turns, lost sleep, burned bridges, and broken illusions – is that what matters isn’t the job, the prestige, or the brand. What truly matters is whether the life you build around your accomplishments can actually hold you when things get quiet. And they will get quiet.
So, let’s talk about what does hold. What lasts.
We’ve been raised to chase happiness. But happiness is volatile. It’s emotional weather – easily influenced, easily lost. It rises with praise and plummets with criticism. It changes with the season, the sleep schedule, the Wi-Fi signal. And while it’s beautiful when it visits, it isn’t strong enough to build your life on.
What you want – what you need – is peace.
But not the kind sold to you in wellness ads or five-minute meditation apps. Or the “burn-sage-and-sit-still” version of peace.
Real peace is not passive or fluffy. It’s hard-won. It’s clarity earned through subtraction, boundaries, and brutal honesty – by letting go of what doesn’t fit, by saying no to what looks good but feels wrong, by protecting the quiet parts of yourself from a world that profits off your noise.
Peace means knowing who you are when you’re not performing. And no one can give it to you. You have to fight for it – against comparison, distraction, and the subtle pressure to always do more, be more, prove more.
Now let me fast forward.
Ten years from now, your degree will be framed on a wall, or maybe stored away in a drawer. Your GPA will be a trivia fact, if you remember it at all. The jobs you thought would define you will blur together. But something else will take shape.
Twenty years from now, you’ll find yourself sitting at a dinner table – maybe in a city you didn’t plan on, beside a partner you didn’t expect, working a job that wasn’t part of your major. And in that moment, you’ll wonder: Did I build a life I want to keep living? Not a career, not a résumé, not a brand – but a life.
Thirty years from now, you’ll care less about the titles you held and more about the relationships you sustained. You’ll remember who showed up when things were hard. You’ll think about whether your daily life feels aligned with who you are – or whether you’ve become a stranger to yourself in pursuit of someone else’s idea of success.
And if you’ve been chasing happiness, you may find yourself empty. But if you’ve been protecting peace, there will be something unshakable beneath you.
That peace doesn’t come from being perfect. In fact, perfect is a trap. It’s where creativity dies and connection disappears. Perfect is brittle. It’s performative. It leaves no room for the mess that makes us human.
We live in a world obsessed with optimization – every inch of life is meant to be tweaked, polished, upgraded. But you’re not a product. You’re not an app. You don’t need to scale. You need to feel. You need to grow in a direction that makes sense to you, not to the algorithm.
Imperfect is where life actually happens. It’s where you fall down and learn to rise. It’s where you say the wrong thing, apologize, and build trust. It’s where you discover compassion, not just competence. And it’s where you begin to loosen your grip on control – and finally, start living.
At some point, you’ll feel pressure to constantly offer value. To solve other people’s problems, to say the right thing, to maintain the image. Don’t fall for it.
You don’t need to offer pleasure. Offer clarity.
You don’t need to give praise all the time. Offer presence.
You don’t need to fix everything. Learn to hold space.
And remember, life is not something to curate – it’s something to participate in.
Now, to the adults in the room – parents, mentors, educators – we need to hold ourselves accountable too. We raised this generation to be exceptional, but we didn’t always model how to be well. We pushed them to achieve, but didn’t always show them how to rest, how to reflect, how to be okay with uncertainty.
If we want them to live different lives, we have to start living them differently too.
And to you, graduates: you don’t need to build a perfect life. You need to build a true one.
One with boundaries. One with friendships that don’t just celebrate you, but challenge you. One that doesn’t disappear the moment your job title does. One that is quiet enough to hear your own voice, and strong enough to follow it.
Don’t waste your twenties trying to look successful. Use them to become someone solid. Someone kind. Someone who knows what matters.
Because the world doesn’t need more polished professionals.
It needs real people.
Grounded people.
People who are unafraid to live a little slower, feel a little deeper, and choose a little differently.
Congratulations. Now go cure cancer, save the planet, write a bestseller, release a chart topper. But whatever you build next – make sure it’s something you want to come home to.
Thank you.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus.
Girish
