24 Sep 2015

Whether you’ve just graduated high school or you’re floating around in a gap year, whether you’re finishing up your last semester of university or you’re already out in the real world–sometimes you just need a little inspiration.

You know how sometimes universities in America get famous people to give speeches to their graduating classes? (Imagine if you were just sitting at your graduation and then Andy Samberg rocks up. Or Amy Poehler, or J.K frickin’ Rowling.) Despite many of them being technically “unqualified” to give extensive career advice to a bunch of nervous college graduates, their speeches are often great comedy routines with gems of brilliance thrown in. They’re always completely inspiring, because comedy is one of the realest and truest forms of communication.

For example, when Mindy Kaling told the Harvard Law School Class Of 2014 that “you are all nerds…you are the nerds that are going to make some serious bank, which is why I am here today: to marry the best looking amongst you.” Mindy Kaling is truly all of us.

But this one from Jim Carrey, addressing the Maharishi University of Management last year, is why we’re really here today. He may be wearing a dumb hat that kind of looks like it’s from Shakespeare times, but as he tells a sentimental story about his father’s career path, he drops a truth bomb that we here at Year 13 totally stand behind.

You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

Carrey talks about how we often base our career choices on fear: the fear that we’ll never be able to get what we really want out of life, so we end up doing things we don’t like, and not doing them well. He saw his father choose an accounting job he was later let go from over his dream of pursuing comedy, and mined that gem of wisdom from the experience. That one sentence could change lives right now.