Life and Career Skills

This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen

at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was

awarded an Honorary PhD.

"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out

of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There

will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will

be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you

will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your

particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or

your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life

of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts

but also your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much

easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold

comfort on a winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or

lonely, or when you've received your test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried

never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no

longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I

listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried

to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my

friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to

you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on

the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best

mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you

are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house.

Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself

on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a

red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with

concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and

first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who

love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up

the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are

generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you

have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its

goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have

spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big

brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do

good too, then doing well will

never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our

minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids'

eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears

and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not

the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that

today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good

in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it,

completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling

others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies

of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the back yard

with the sun on your face.

Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if

you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be

lived".