JanBeek

Taylor’s Wisdom

Kill sterotypes!
She is young, blond, beautiful
AND intelligent!!

In a graduation speech at the New York University back in 2022 where she was awarded a doctorate, Taylor Swift’s message captivated the audience. It was so impactful that I decided to find it on-line, download it, and read it to really digest some of the points she was making. Below is only the last part of it, but it will give you a small picture of why this “blond bombshell” has taken the world by storm. If you have not witnessed one of her concerts, you probably don’t understand “the whole package.” I didn’t… until I watched her concert (see below). I urge you to take some time and log in to her Era tour’s grand finale in Los Angeles. You’ll be amazed at the dancing, the staging, the lighting, the cast of supporters, the whole sheebang!

Here is the last part of her speech to the graduates and their families at New York University:

“Sometimes, everything just feels completely pointless. I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism, and I know that I’m talking to a group of perfectionists because you are here today graduating from NYU. So this might be hard for you to hear.

In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong person, underreact, overreact, hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self-sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat. And I’m not going to lie. These mistakes will cause you to lose things.

The Silver Lining

I’m trying to tell you that losing things doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the time, when we lose things, we gain things, too. Now you leave the structure and framework of school and chart your own path. Every choice you make leads to the next choice, which leads to the next, and I know it’s hard to know which path to take.

There will be times in life where you need to stand up for yourself, times when the right thing is actually to back down and apologize, times when the right thing is to fight, times when the right thing is to turn and run, times to hold on with all you have, and times to let go with grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to sit and listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. How will you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments?

Embracing Uncertainty

You won’t. How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices? I won’t. The scary news is you’re on your own now.

But the cool news is you’re on your own now. I leave you with this. We are led by our gut instincts, our intuitions, our desires and fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes.

Final Thoughts

So will I. And when I do, you will most likely read about it on the Internet. Anyway, hard things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it. And as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. (And you need to have seen her smirk here as she kiddingly said:) And I am a doctor now, so I know how breathing works.

I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you. We’re doing this together. So let’s just keep dancing like we’re the class of 22. We’re doing this together.”

Cheers, my friends!
Yes, young, blond, beautiful,
and intelligent…
You can be all that and talented, too.
Taylor sure is!

Love,
JanBeek