When I started reading author Anne Lamott’s 2003 Commencement speech that made its way to my Facebook feed this month, I couldn’t stop.  Besides being thoroughly entertaining, I thought: what a fun and wise career counselor she would make!  I try to balance dreams and reality in my career counseling work, and like that she put some weight on the dreams side of the scale.

Here are two of my favorite paragraphs:

“I bet I’m beginning to make your parents really nervous — here I am sort of bragging about being a dropout, and unemployable, and secretly making a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what they want is for you to do well in your field, make them look good, and maybe also make a tiny fortune.

But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”

Click HERE to link to Anne Lamott’s Substack and full speech.