I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities
in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've
ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.
That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as
a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college
graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very
strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all
set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when
I popped out they decided at 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 you want him?" They
said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had
never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from
high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented
a few months later when my 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 almost
as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being
spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no
idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help
me figure it out.