With 50 million albums sold and billions of views on YouTube, Taylor Swift is a superstar and she now has an unexpected reward on her list: an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of New York to salute his texts and his compositions. For the occasion, the 32-year-old singer was invited to deliver the opening speech at the graduation ceremony, in front of thousands of students gathered at Yankee Stadium. A speech enormously taken up, commented on, applauded on social networks and which proposes to take a positive look at the trials of life. Or how not to lose ground these days.
“Learn to live alongside cringe.” Taylor Swift gives a commencement speech after receiving an honorary doctorate from NYU.
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— The Associated Press (@AP) May 18, 2022
“First of allshe says, don’t try to carry the whole world on your shoulders, it’s impossible, learn to sort out what you keep and what you leave. (…) Then, never hide your enthusiasm. I know that, in our society, it is often frowned upon to show too much that we want it, that we are determined, but success without effort is a myth, so never be ashamed to try. »
And Taylor Swift goes on like this for twenty minutes.
She tells young people to be wary of perfection, especially self-imposed perfection. She says that a mistake, a failure is not a failure, that often moreover, it is the missteps that make you move forward, “because falling and having to get up, it allows you to see who is always there to laugh with you.“Obviously it’s her life that she’s talking about, that of a teenager who didn’t study, who stopped going to school at 12 to make music, who became a star at 15 who, in parallel with her planetary success, suffered humiliation, criticism, and massive harassment on the internet.
“Hard things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it.”
Read our full recap of Taylor Swift’s NYU commencement speech #22GraduatesVersion: https://t.co/NPrZgdPFYi
— Consequence (@consequence) May 18, 2022
When asked how not to get caught up in negativity, she knows pretty well what she’s talking about. And if his advice may seem dispensable, think again. After two years of pandemic, illness, death, distance learning, confinement, loneliness, doubt, sometimes depression, in the United States as in France for that matter, these positive words are precisely what many young graduates need to hear. And on social networks, the thousands of thank you messages confirm that she hit the nail on the head.