What’s the best graduation advice?

Like an opinion, advice is offered typically to those least interested in receiving it and most needing it.

I've learned, and of course the hard way, that advice and experience are the two things that come just one milli-second after I have needed them. But the good news is, I'm a fast learner. If I hear good advice, I file it away and use it often, or at least as needed. If I gain "experience" the hard way, I try not to have to learn that particular lesson again.

With graduation upon us in the coming weeks for area high school seniors and in the past couple of weeks for the area's college students, I was wondering: What advice do you have for the Classes of 2009?

Did you receive advice at any point in time in your life that you have put to use? Did someone say something that you have remembered from your graduations? Share a few wisdomism here. Before others actually need your advice, dispense it!

Like these snippets from Jon Stewart's 2004 commencement address that are still stored on the William and Mary Web site. Check his speech out in its entirety. What I can print of it is this part where he offers the following advice to that graduating class: "Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may."

That's good advice. Not surprisingly, it doesn't originate with Joh Stewart, but it was kind of him to put those phrases together in that way so I could borrow them for this blog.

More good advice comes from Anna Quindlen when she quoted George Eliot during her 1999 Mount Holyoke College commencement: "George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either."

And how about this from Oprah Winfrey's address at Wellesley College in 1997: "And it wasn't until I was demoted as an on-air anchor woman and thrown into the talk show arena to get rid of me, that I allowed my own truth to come through. The first day I was on the air doing my first talk show back in l978, it felt like breathing, which is what your true passion should feel like. It should be so natural to you. And so, I took what had been a mistake, what had been perceived as a failure with my career as an anchor woman in the news business and turned it into a talk show career that's done OK for me!
Be grateful..."

My personal preferences for life advice are "Live long and prosper" and "Nan-noo! Nan-noo!" Now, what are yours?

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