Lin-Manuel Miranda, the mastermind behind Broadway hits Hamilton, gave the Commencement speech at UPenn for the Class of 2016. It was full of advice and wisdom for graduating students. Here are five of the best nuggets:
1) Think before you tell a story: “Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative…This act of choosing – the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out – will reverberate across the rest of your life.”
2) Don’t try to avoid pain: “You’re trying to avoid going through pain, or causing pain. I’m here to tell you that you’ll have to survive it if you want to be any kind of artist.”
More: Full transcript of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s speech
3) Immigrants are dope: “In a year when politicians traffic in anti-immigrant rhetoric, there is also a Broadway musical reminding us that a broke, orphan immigrant from the West Indies built our financial system. A story that reminds us that since the beginning of the great unfinished symphony that is our American experiment, time and time again, immigrants get the job done.”
4) Your life will be blur… “There will be moments you remember and whole years you forget.”
5) …But there will be some celestial moments: “There will be blind alleys and one-night wonders and soul-crushing jobs and wake-up calls and crises of confidence and moments of transcendence when you are walking down the street and someone will thank you for telling your story because it resonated with their own.”