Several years ago, I read Charles Wheelan's excellent article on commencement speeches. As (at the time), a relatively recent college graduate, I'd become accustomed to accepting a lot of unsolicited life advice from well-intentioned Baby Boomers. With the exception of David Foster Wallace's beautiful 'This Is Water', it seemed to me that the commencement speech genre essentially constituted a string of trite exhortations toward realizing one's potential, ignoring, unsurprisingly enough, the socioeconomic quagmire in which my generation collectively floundered.
Wheelan's piece, in contrast, contained one line I'll never forget:
"You'll never read the following obituary: 'Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74.