TED英语演讲稿范文（精选31篇）
The answer is no. I could have brought myparents to a new place for buffet breakfast on an awesome autumn Sunday morning, I could have bought a SUV in Xiamen and move them around. I didn’t, due to various restrictions.
Would I choose a different path had we got achance to turn the clock back to the time when I was in my early 20s? I don't thinkso. Let me tell you why.
I quite agree with the following the quote fromB. J. Neblett.
“We are the sum total of our experiences. Thoseexperiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are, at anygiven point in our lives.”
Part of the reasons why we are who we are todayis those experiences and those people we have encountered over the years. In hindsight, I can’t even tell whether certain decisions I have made, certain paths I have taken, are right or wrong. We may regret for those things we didn’t do enough. What we can is to make up for it within our capacity while it is in time, while your parents are still alive, while your kids haven’t entered puberty stage.
Over to you, Toastmaster.
In 20xx — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good.The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political.You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important.
We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting — it's about a three-hour meeting — and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?" And he said, "No, we've been here about a year." And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom."So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different?
I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our rooma couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours — and our little blue notebooks — yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class."
Leaders with the academic preparation to solve mind-bending technological challenges. With the moral character to help society navigate times of blurringly fast change, in ways that are ethical, equitable, and humanistic. Most of all, with the inner strength to take on the burdens of high responsibility, and the heat, envy, and hostility that comes with them, and deliver the positive change that human progress requires.
You showed the quality of grit before you arrived here. That’s why we admitted you. I hope that your days here, with a faculty that pushed and stretched you, and classmates like Jordan and Seon to inspire you, built your reserves of resilience.
Toastmaster of the day, fellow toastmasters, awonderful afternoon to all of you. My name is Jeff. Today I want to share withyou part of my life experiences and I hope some of you will find it useful.
March 15, 20xx, Xiamen, China. My phone rang the moment when I stepped into themain entrance of our condominium. It was my 68-year-old mum. She said, “your dad and I are now at the boarding gate, but we couldn’t find your dad’s bag, which contains his IC and a few thousand dollars”. Just 35 minutes back, I saw my dadand mum off at the airport. They were about to board a domestic flight toPudong where they would join my sister to fly to Toronto and stay there for another one year. A couple of days before that, I purposely went back to Xiamen, my hometown to see my parents off. I asked my parents to board the airplane first and I would make a second trip to airport and fetch my dad’s bag home. We were so fortunate that my mum kept the passports of both in her handbag.I quickly called the airport and got to the team in charge of security check.They found the bag and verified my identity.
now stand firm and tall, make a fist, get excited, and yell it out: i must do it! i can do it! i will do it! i will succeed! i must do it! i can do it! i will do it! i will succeed! i must do it! i can do it! i will do it! i will succeed!english is a useful language all over the world. why are we began to learn english when we were little children beacause it is very important for us to learn it.in the world, if you cannot speak english you will lose half a chance to success. i began to learn english when i was 8 years old.at that moment,i do not like english.i connot remember all the words which i have learnt.i think it is very difficult for me to learn it well.so i cannot read english loudly and i never answer the questions in the english classes.
now, i like english very well and i still use the ways he tells me.i know i must learn english even hard.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
No one can imagine what our life would be like if we ran out of water. Many people ignore the fact that they waste a lot of water in their daily life. For example, people tend to do something else while the tap is still on or even forget to turn off the tap after using it.
Not until recently did people realize the serious water shortage. It is universally acknowledged that severe water pollution and waste result in water shortage. Therefore, it is high time that the public raised their awareness of saving water resources. In my opinion, we must take effective measures to deal with this problem. For one thing, population should be controlled and more sewage treatment facilities should be established to purify the polluted water. For another, it is our responsibility to develop a good habit to save water in our daily life.
Let's work together to protect and save water resources!
I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce,who don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college?
in a recent mimicking study at the university of clermont-ferrand in france, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth, when they could not mimic the smile they saw, their judgment was impaired.in addition to theorizing on evolution in the origin of species, charles darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. his theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better -- rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. in his study, darwin actually cited a french neurologist, guillaume duchenne, who used electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. please, dont try this at home.
i think my dad was a hero for me when i was a young child. wed go fishing, walks, and other fun things for a kid.
every child has a good and great father, and so do i. my dad played a very important role in my daily life`````exactly speaking, in my past 16 years.
my father always stands in the center of my life， from past till now and possibly in the future.
my family was rather poor when i was in my childhood. we didnt have our own house and had to live in a shabby， small room rented from my fathers factory. the room was so small that there was little space for people to walk. i didnt have my own bed and had to sleep with my parents. this is terrible both for my parents and me.
but father made this all different!he works very hard on his own business, now we have our own 2 housese,surly,i have my own room.and he take our family so much happiness, richer and richer.
when i was little, i did everything with my dad. you could always find me sitting on his knee or walking and doing everything with him. every night he would read me a bed time story and make the voices of each character.
i learnt a lot from my daddy. i learnt to never take things to seriously and to always smile.
years pasted, my father is over 45 now. it is time for me to look after him and i am sure i will do and we will live an even better life. and i will say,i really love you dad,cause you are the hero in my mind.
thank you so much!
how many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? raise your hand if you do. oh, wow. outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. in fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children who smile as many as 400 times per day.have you ever wondered why being around children who smile so frequently makes you smile very often? a recent study at uppsala university in sweden found that its very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. you ask, why? because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically help us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.
Here’s what I mean:
Reggie Jackson struck out twenty-six-hundred times in his career—the most in the history of baseball.
But you don’t hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs.
Fall forward.
Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that?
I didn’t either—because1,001was the light bulb.
Fall forward.
Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.
You’ve got to take risks. And I’m sure you’ve probably heard that before.
But I want to talk about why it’s so important.
I’ve got three reasons—and then you can pick up your iPhones.
First… you will fail at some point in your life. Accept it. You will lose. You will embarrass yourself. You will suck at something. There is no doubt about it.
That’s probably not a traditional message for a graduation ceremony. But, hey, I’m telling you—embrace it.
Because it’s inevitable.
I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunitiesmore than women?" We've got to get women to sit at the table.Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.
Integrating and empowering women is not just good corporate policy, it’s good business.
Second, in addition to changing the corporate culture, we must advance public policies that address the composition of our modern workforce.
In the United States, while single women without children make 95 cents for each dollar earned by a man, married mothers earn only 81 cents. Too many women in the United States are forced to leave the workforce following the birth of a child.
We must ensure that federal policies support working mothers and enable them to reach their full potential. This is how we will create an environment where closely bonded families can flourish and our economy can grow at unprecedented levels.
That is why in the United States, we are working to pass sweeping and long over-due tax reform that will afford families much needed relief. We are seeking to simplify the tax code, lower rates, expand the child tax credit, eliminate the marriage penalty, and put more money back in the pockets of hard-working Americans.
Our administration is working to address the high cost of childcare in the United States which currently outstrips housing expenses and state college tuition in much of the Country. It cannot be too expensive for the modern working family to have children.
Throughout my entire life, I have witnessed his empathy and generosity towards others, especially those who are suffering. It is just his way of being in your corner when you’re down. My father not only has the strength and ability necessary to be our next President, but also the kindness and compassion that will enable him to be the leader that this country needs.
I’ve learned a lot about the world from walking construction jobs by his side. When run properly, construction sites are true meritocracies. Competence in the building trades is easy to spot and incompetence is impossible to hide.These sites are also incredible melting pots, gathering people from all walks of life and uniting them to work towards a single mission. There have always been men of all backgrounds and ethnicities on my father’s job sites. And long before it was commonplace, you also saw women.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter)
He quitted from school at grade 10 (16 years old). This super star seems a little bit low self-esteem in front of MBA crowd.
Not owning a "piece of paper" (certificate) + too young affect business. That's true in real world!
I'd found my own business too. At that time, those experienced people just didn't trust a kid like me, although they think my product is great and prudence.
I think he doesn't need to regret his education. It's only different kind of life. And I doubt if a person is fully educated and have a comfortable life, will s/he brave enough to try something new? Or create something that is not exists in the world?
He found Post Production Office Limited (PO) when he's 22. PO is a company to do video post-production business. It captured more than 50% market share. Although it's based on geographical shortage, it is still a crazy figure. In the post-production industry, PO is the first company to enter the mainland market (China).
How can he do that? I truly believe that it's because of his passion, management style and split of never-give-up.。
i started my journey in california with a uc berkley 30-year
longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. by measuring their student smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subjects marriage will be, how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others. in another yearbook, i stumbledupon barry obamas picture. when i first saw his picture, i thought that these superpowers came from his super collar. but now i know it was all in his smile. nother aha! moment came from a 20xx wayne state university research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of major league players. the researchers found that the span of a players smile could actually predict the span of his life. players who didnt smile in their pictures lived an average of only years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.
first, i want to ask you a question; what does family mean someone told me: it means father and mother, i love you.
today i am very happy to stand here to express my opinion to my dear parents. first, i want to say thank you to my mom and dady .without you, i would not enjoy such a colorful life. you both love me for ever and never leave me alone when i was in trouble. thank you. mom and dady, thank you. when i was in my hard time, you are my tender sunshine which encourages me to hold on and never give up. and now i am too excited .i dont know how to express my true feeling with limited words. what i know is that without you my life will be filled with endless suffering and mistake .
it’s a very intresting topic today.
I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." "What do you mean?"She said, "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself,"Wow, if it's me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk.
Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" And I said, "What speech?" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" "It's usually in the big hall." And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled
people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah.
I should know: In the acting business, you fail all the time.
Early in my career, I auditioned for a part in a Broadway musical. A perfect role for me, I thought—except for the fact that I can’t sing.
So I’m in the wings, about to go on stage but the guy in front of me is singing like Pavarotti and I am just shrinking getting smaller and smaller...
So I come out with my little sheet music and it was “Just My Imagination” by the Temptations, that’s what I came up with.
So I hand it to the accompanist, and she looks at it and looks at me and looks at the director, so I start to sing and they’re not saying anything. I think I must be getting better, so I start getting into it.
But after the first verse, the director cuts me off: “Thank you. Thank you very much, you’ll be hearing from me.”
The next part of the audition is the acting part. I figure, I can’t sing, but I know I can act.
But the guy I was paired with to do the scene couldn’t be more overdramatic and over-the top.
Suffice to say, I didn’t get the part.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t quit. I didn’t fall back.
I walked out of there to prepare for the next audition, and the next audition, and the next one. I prayed and I prayed, but I continued to fail, and I failed, and I failed.
But it didn’t matter. Because you know what? You hang around a barbershop long enough—sooner or later you will get a haircut.
You will catch a break.
Last year I did a play called Fences on Broadway and I won a Tony Award. And I didn’t have to sing for it, by the way.
And here’s the kicker—it was at the Court Theater, the same theater where I failed that first audition 30 years prior.
The point is, every graduate here today has the training and the talent to succeed.
But do you have guts to fail?
Here’s my second point about failure:
If you don’t fail… you’re not even trying.
My wife told me this expression: “To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.”
Les Brown, a motivational speaker, made an analogy about this.
Imagine you’re on your deathbed—and standing around your bed are the ghosts representing your unfilled potential.
The ghosts of the ideas you never acted on. The ghosts of the talents you didn’t use.
And they’re standing around your bed. Angry. Disappointed. Upset.
“We came to you because you could have brought us to life,” they say. “And now we go to the grave together.”
So I ask you today: How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes?
You invested a lot in your education. And people invested in you.
And let me tell you, the world needs your talents.
Man, does it ever.
I just got back from four months of filming in South Africa—beautiful country, but there are places with terrible poverty that need help.
And Africa is just the tip of the iceberg.
On Monday, tomorrow, during your commencement ceremonies, I will confer on you all the “rights and responsibilities” of a Yale degree. Yours is a great responsibility. You will have to know what you are for.
What are you for?
“Surely in the light of history,” Eleanor Roosevelt said, “it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.”
Yale has prepared you, as a scholar and a human being, to try; to face challenges with courage and determination. And I trust you are leaving Yale with a sense of your own responsibilities to one another, to the planet, and to our shared future.
By serving others and our communities with the many gifts you have been given, you will live a life that is for something, a life of meaning and purpose.
There is no time to waste; there are no words to waste: As a young Bob Dylan sang in 1965, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” We must give life to new ideas, imagine new ways of being in the world, new answers to the problems that vex us and our neighbors.
Now is the time.
Members of the Class of 20xx, please rise:
We are delighted to salute your accomplishments, and we are proud of your achievements. Remember to give thanks for all that has brought you to this day. And go forth from this place with grateful hearts, paying back the gifts you have received here by using your minds, your voices, and your hands to imagine and create the new worlds you wish to see.
What are you for?
Congratulations, Class of 20xx!
Thank you. Thank you.
That is why this summer, at the G20 conference, the United States and Japan were founding members of a bold, new initiative with the World Bank – the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative. This facility is the first of its kind to empower women entrepreneurs in developing countries. It will provide access to the capital, networks, and mentorship needed to thrive and will dramatically impact the ecosystem of women’s entrepreneurship globally.
And we are just getting started!
As we gather in Tokyo today, I can’t help but think of some of the great women pioneers in this country who have inspired our generation.
Women like Yoshiko Shinohara
She survived World War Two, started as a secretary and went on to open a small business in her one-bedroom apartment. Her company grew into a world renowned business in over a dozen countries. Today, as you all know, Yoshiko is Japan’s first female self-made billionaire. Now, she helps young people afford the education they need to pursue their dreams and contribute to society.
Because of pioneers like Yoshiko, women in this country – and around the world – aspire to greater feats, climb to higher positions, and pave new pathways forward.
Today, we are redefining success. We’re discarding the old formula of the ideal woman-the ideal worker -the ideal mother. We are helping to shape a more realistic and complete picture of what it is to be a woman who thrives – and who helps her business, community and family do the same.
The fact is, ALL women are “working women.” Whether they make the commute to work each morning, or spend each day with their children at home, or some combination of both. Truth be told, on Sunday nights, after a messy and wonderful weekend with my children, I am far more exhausted than on Friday evenings, after a long week of work at the office. I deeply admire women who choose to work inside the home raising their children and respect this decision.
i've had an interesting experience. i'm an entrepreneur, having started my own business, also worked in the context of a family business that was highly entrepreneurial.i've had both, working in a large family business, that grew to be arather large business. i think for me, one of the challenges wasmanaging the competing demands of raising a family and, and running a business, working in a family business. and then politics got layered on top of that. then i got pregnant with my thirdchild in the midst of that. one of the things, there is no right answer. people ask about balance a lot. i don't think you can plan for balance. you can structure your schedule to avoid worktravel, coming home and having an event or you have to be out.you can manage things like that. we are one kid illness away from losing balance. there's no way you can plan for certain things. i have found every time i think a challenge is large and will behard to overcome that has been put in my path, if you grindthrough it, you look back in retrospect and it feels much more manageable than it was in the moment. this perspective, staying in the moment, keeping a laser focus on what your priorities are. i tell people not to architect their life for balance, but aligned with what their priorities are. and fully measure yourself againstpriorities to ensure you are where you needed to be in the long term. give yourself a little slack in the short term. i will say as anadministration, we are focused on thinking about how weempower the american working family and empower people to achieve a balance through policies around making child caremore affordable and accessible, advocating strongly for paid family leave. to support the reality of of the dual income modernworking family. thinking through policies that support the family is informed by what i have seen and what i have witnessed.
So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them.But all that aside, we still have a problem,and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any professionanywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 20xxand are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.
Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women,"Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School studyon a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist.
The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job,they'll say, "I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard.
Good Morning.
Thank you.
Well, it’s a privilege to be here with all of you.
Let me thank President Price, for the opportunity to address the 20xx Graduates. It’s certainly a privilege and my great pleasure.
To my fellow trustees, the Faculty of the University, the Administrative teams, the parents, the guardians, significant others and friends, thank you for not only enabling this occasion, but also joining us to celebrate the fruits of your labor.
And to our Honorary Degree Recipients, thank you for your incredible contributions and achievements. There’s a reason you now hold ‘Laudable Blue Devil’ status. Give them some love, ya’ll.
Now, I’m from the South, so we’re going to offer a whole lot of gratitude today. And when I call you to respond to what I’m saying, do you have me, graduates?
I love it. I love it.
And most importantly, let me start with gratitude for the graduates, thank you for the work you’ve put in and the contributions that you’ve made to Duke. We are absolutely thrilled that you had...and I quote… “the courage to start, the strength to endure, and the resolve to finish.”
Somebody say amen.
And because of that, you are about to be awarded all the rights and privileges of minted Blue Devils. So, congratulations to you! I’m going to give you some love.
I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters?Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes.