You Need to Calm Down

 

Being a fan of Taylor Swift, I recently watched her commencement speech for NYU's Class of 2022. Appropriate, of course, since she has a song called "22," and "Welcome to New York" for that matter. Not surprisingly, in Swiftian fashion, she embedded song titles and lyrics throughout her roughly 20-minute speech. 

She is obviously a talented and thoughtful person so of course the speech was very good. I particularly appreciated the through line of not being afraid of failure. She has a great perspective from which to offer such sage advice, having both ascended to the highest heights of success and been subject to near-constant scrutiny.

We tend to think of famous people in revisionist ways, as if Taylor Swift or Barack Obama or Warren Buffet or Diana Taurasi were destined for greatness from the moment they were born and simply had to walk a predestined path to actualize it. Of course, this is not true. Each success story will tell you they encountered hardship, opposition, defeat, and doubt along the way, that their path to success was often foggy, never guaranteed, and certainly ever winding. 

Furthermore, wrap your head around the thought that for each success story, there are countless others that perhaps could've attained to similar heights but didn't. Why do some succeed and others don't? God-given talent alone can only explain so much. Luck is a bigger factor than we'd like to admit given our longing for neat and tidy reasons. Of what we can control, what does it take?

I submit to you an important factor is a willingness to try. Anything worth pursuing in life is not easy and is certainly not mastered on the first go. Indeed, in the really precious things in life, you are likely to be quite terrible quite often. Which means that if you refuse to put yourself out there, you will end up leading a life that is far more constrained than it could be. What a loss for you and for the world that longs for your contribution!

Since I like her music, I'm glad Taylor Swift was willing to endure all of the lonely nights, rejections, and criticisms, and not only endure them but subsume them into her story. We may never be as famous as she, but we are equally presented with the opportunity to try or to hide, to work ourselves up over an actual or possible failure or alternatively to brush it off and live to do it again. How amazing would our world be if we were this fearless?