A confession about my education
I want to confess something on the day you graduate. In four years of university, I did not have a single original thought sitting alone in my room. Every idea I am proud of arrived because I was standing near a shelf I had not planned to visit.
That is not a romantic way of describing research. It is a structural fact about how thinking works. You cannot look up what you do not know exists. You can only bump into it.
The gift of the wrong book
The library's great gift is not the book you came for. It is the three books next to it. The one with the cracked spine that somebody else abandoned on the table. The one whose title you would never have typed into a box, because you had no reason to believe you wanted it.
The internet is extraordinary at giving you the book you came for. It is almost perfectly useless at giving you the wrong one.
This matters more than it sounds. Most of the mistakes in my life were not made from ignorance; they were made from a very efficient search that never once surprised me.
You are now the curator of your own attention
After today, nobody will assign you a reading list again. That is the real graduation. And the dangerous thing about freedom is that it is invisible — you don't notice you have stopped reading widely, you only notice, years later, that all of your opinions have started to sound like each other.
So here is my ask, and it is small and boring and it works: once a month, read something you cannot use. Not for work, not for a class, not to be interesting at dinner. Read it because the shelf you did not plan to visit is where your next decade is hiding.
The last thing
Graduates, you are about to become very good at finding answers. Please stay good at finding questions. The answers are searchable now. The questions are still, and maybe always, something you have to walk into a quiet room and bump into.