Good Advice For New Graduates & Future Leaders From Robert Draper Commencement Speech-2015

"Hereafter, there's not a whole lot that you're going to be able to control. You can't control how people feel about you; you can't control market forces; you can't control ... how the floodwaters rise and fall in your life. What you do have total control over, 100%, is your own ambition."

"You can do with your ambition whatever you will; but the care and feeding of it is entirely up to you. This is the part of the speech that's very familiar to me, because I have been giving it about once a week, for 30 years, to myself. ... [Y]ou and you alone are the custodian of your own career. It is not just that you can't look to the people who love you and place value in you to tell you what to do next with your life -- it's that oftentimes it's against their best interests, as the people whose job it is to stabilize you, to tell you it's time to shake things up."