2017 commencement speeches The best work advice

2017 commencement speeches The best work advice 2017 commencement speeches The best work advice Part of the process of graduating is hearing unsolicited career advice about what you should be doing next with your life.Here at Ladders we sifted through the good, the great, and the tired cliches  to find you the best career wisdom commencement speakers gave the Class of 2017.1. Get used to failure. Failure is there to wake you up.Failure  was a common relatable theme many of the speakers gave in their speeches. It reminds us that many of these famous speakers were just like many of the graduates in the audience, full of ambition and unsure of what to do with it.As comedian Will Ferrell told University of Southern California’s Class of 2017, he was scared as a college graduate trying out sketch comedy  and he still gets scared now as a famous actor speaking to a crowd.But he learned how to overcome his fear of failure  by knowing it’s worse to never try at all: “My fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all?”Venture capit alist  Martin Casado, who sold his startup for $1.26 billion, told new grads  they need to embrace  failure because trying and failing means you’re “not stalling your own progress by hiding.” Failure is how you know you’re progressing, Casado believes: “get back up, apply what you’ve learned, and hit reset.”2. Get resilientAs the co-authors on “Option B,” a new book about resilience, both behavioral psychologist Adam Grant and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made resilience the theme of their commencement speeches.“Grit doesn’t mean ‘keep doing the thing that’s failing,'” Grant  told new grads. “It means ‘define your dreams broadly enough that you can find new ways to pursue them when your first and second plans fail.'”For Sandberg who discussed her husband’s death in her speech, resilience  was a personal message. As someone who cried every night after the first month of losing her husband, Sandberg said everyone should learn the “strength to rely on others” because “there are times to lean in and there are times to lean on.”Resilience is something we can all build “through shared experiences” and “through shared narratives,” Sandberg believes. “We are not born with a certain amount  of resilience â€" it is a muscle and that means we can build it,” she  said.3. Get paidWhile other speakers focused on dreams, Maria Bamford, a self-described “crass, money-grubbing comedian from Duluth,” discussed the gritty details of how to fund those  dreams.For her public salary negotiation lesson, she used the example of how she negotiated her commencement fee from zero dollars to $10,000.When her alma mater, the  University of Minnesota,  initially said it couldn’t pay her, Bamford countered, “Was the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts suggesting that I couldn’t get paid for the exact job that I paid them to teach me how to get paid to do?”Knowing to “never say no without a number,” she e ventually raised the fee from free to $10,000 and she gave the money that remained after taxes to a student in the audience. It’s a valuable lesson every graduating adult should learn: know your worth.4. Don’t compare yourself to othersStay in your lane, and don’t get jealous about what others are doing alongside you was another theme that emerged from speeches.“Please, please, oh please, don’t let yourself get caught up in the trap of comparison. You know what I’m talking about. Ignore the silly 30-Under-30 list,” actress Octavia Spencer told Kent State University. “Comparing yourself to other’s success only slows you down from finding your own.”For Pharrell Williams, staying focused means not getting caught up in fame and attention.  â€œThese great scientists, public servants, and activists cannot be bothered with building their Instagram followers,” he told New York University graduates. “Or how many views they get on Youtube…But they are the real influe ncers. Their work makes us healthier, safer, more enriched, and more intelligent.”5. Serve others“Summon your compassion, your curiosity, your empathy towards others and your commitment to service. Give more than you receive and I promise you, it will come back to you in ways you can’t possibly imagine,” is the advice former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had for graduates.That’s similar advice the woman who made a billion-dollar career out of giving advice, Oprah Winfrey, had for graduates. Winfrey urged Smith College graduates to  â€œshift the paradigm to service and the rewards will come.”Instead of focusing on individual gain, Winfrey believes  new grads should be asking themselves: “How can I be used? Life, use me. Show me through my talents and my gifts, show me through what I know, what I need to know, what I have yet to learn, how to be used in the greater service to life.”