Thanks to Youtube recommendations, right after I finished watching Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford in 2005, I was directed to Taylor Swift’s commencement speech at NYU. While I’d encourage people to watch it, I’ll highlight one segment that provided me with a precious perspective on life.
“I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism. So this might be hard for you to hear. In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong person, under react, 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 perdectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the step 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 gonna lie. These mistakes will cause you to lose things. I’m trying to tell you losing things doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the times when we lose things, we gain things too.”