By Greg Dardis / Guest Column
The truth is, if you’re delivering a commencement address, your speech is just one box on a long checklist your audience has to slog through before they can go back home, sink into the couch and turn on the TV.
By the time you step up to the podium, a good portion of your audience is already bored. Some are on a diet, on a deadline, or on the clock with a babysitter. Someone is asleep. Someone is parked illegally.
And so, flattered as you must be by the opportunity to impart wisdom to the masses, the greatest gift you can give them is brevity. That’s one of the key ingredients if you want to deliver a memorable graduation speech: keep it simple and entertaining.
You can do both at once by telling stories that illustrate your core message – the one you’ve painstakingly boiled down from ample notes and ideas. Your speech should feel personal and serve two functions – telling your audience more about you and more about the graduates. We want to walk away with a clearer understanding of both, a sense of connection to the speaker and to the group of young people about to take on the world.
It should be easy for your audience to identify your central point because you’ve boiled down your message and repeated that core takeaway – sometimes with the exact same wording, other times as a paraphrase.
Steve Jobs used repetition to great effect in his 2005 commencement address to Stanford, an impassioned speech given just one year after he was diagnosed with cancer. He talked about getting fired from Apple and finding the courage to follow his dreams.
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do,” he said. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
He chose two ordinary words to capture his core message: “Don’t settle.” It was easy to come away from that speech and be able to repeat them.
J.K. Rowling, bestselling author of the Harry Potter series, had also done the hard work of simplifying her message before she spoke to Harvard graduates in 2008. She’d been reflecting on the 21 years that had passed since she graduated from college and, in doing so, had come up with two themes: the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. Two takeaways culled from two decades is good preparation.
Ms. Rowling was also entertaining, providing a much-needed dose of levity amid a lot of pomp and circumstance. This doesn’t mean you’re aiming for stand-up comedy – far from it. It means you are entertaining the audience through storytelling, humor and heart. You’re working up there for their benefit – and you don’t take yourself too seriously. A self-deprecating joke can make a welcome antidote to your big role on a big day.
“Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor,” J.K. Rowling said at the beginning her address, “but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation!”
Warren Buffett drew laughter from the University of Georgia’s 2001 grads when he told a simple story: “We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb. I mean, you don’t want a spark of energy out of them.”
Entertain by keeping it real, by acknowledging the small comedies or absurdities present in the moment, be it at the commencement ceremony or in culture at large.
Doing a little research on the graduates always pays off. Find out an inside joke among them. Read their student newspaper for a nugget to share. Surprise them with your savvy.
You don’t have to say much more once you’ve provided some entertainment and a clear takeaway. As we tell our clients: “Be brief, be bright and be gone.”
Greg Dardis is the CEO of Dardis Inc., located at 2403 Muddy Creek Lane in Coralville. For more information, visit www.dardisinc.com.
