My daughter graduated from Trinity College last week – and here’s a glam picture of her and her happy mother who doesn’t have to pay college tuition anymore! 
But I have to tell you . . . I felt completely ripped off with the choice of commencement speakers. I can honestly say that her college had one of the worst speakers in commencement history: an unemployed actor who droned on and on about passion to several hundred affluent and conservative East Coast families. You can see how bored the kids were — okay, maybe not so much bored as hung-over from the major alcohol consumption the previous night. 
College graduation is a memorable day, and finding a good speaker to mark this milestone is a delicate undertaking. No matter how socially networked and technologically evolved we’ve become, delivering a speech to a group of people hasn’t changed.
We still expect some poignant and meaningful message that will go down in commencement speech history, and we hope we get Bill Clinton (who spoke at the NYU graduation) or Arianna Huffington (who spoke at Sarah Lawrence) or Tom Hanks (who spoke at Yale). Here’s more of the best in 2011.
The strength and structure of the speech is most important. My all-time favorite commencement speech was the one delivered by J. K, Rowling in 2008 at Harvard. This speech is well organized and developed. It has humor, it has a message, it is inspiration, and it’s very memorable. Hmmm . . . just like the best sales calls you’ve ever made!
Listen to this video and what she says about failure.
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