- [John] Thank you very much. (applause)
Thank you to the provost for that introduction.
Good morning.
- [Voice in Crowd] Good morning.
- And congratulations. (cheering)
Now I'll try to be brief this morning.
As a musician, (audience laughing)
as a musician, this is about 10 hours
before I normally go to work,
so I'm gonna need a nap soon.
(audience laughing)
And you've also got degrees to receive.
And I also have a feeling some of you
are already tired of me.
The thing about pop radio in America.
Somehow they've scientifically determined
that the public is only capable of liking
the same 10 songs at any given time.
So they simply play those songs
over and over and over and over.
Until you're finally completely exasperated.
Then they move on.
Now I've had a 10 year career as a major label solo artist
and none of my songs has ever been one
of those 10 songs until this moment.
And now... (cheering)
And now, ♪ all of you (cheering)
♪ are so over me. (audience laughing)
♪ You're tired of hearing that I went to Penn.
♪ Why'd they bring him back again? ♪
(audience laughing) (cheering)
(laughing)
That was my humblebrag way of saying
I have the biggest song in the country right now.
(audience cheering and applauding)
But honestly, I am truly humbled
and honored and grateful to be here
at the commencement of the University of Pennsylvania,
one of the finest universities on the planet.
(audience cheering and applauding)
I first visited this campus as a high school senior
named John Stephens in 1995, 19 years ago.
And I would have never thought at that moment
that I would be standing here
as John Legend speaking to you today.
The reason I'm here,
the reason I've had such a wonderful journey so far,
is I've found love, yes love.
We were all made to love and I've found
that we live our best lives,
we are at our most successful,
not simply because we're smarter,
but because we hustle harder.
Not because we become millionaires more quickly.
The key to success, the key to happiness
is opening your mind and your heart to love.
Spending your time doing things you love
and with people you love.
My life could have gone differently, though.
At first, I had a pretty good childhood.
I grew up in a small, blue collar
city called Springfield, Ohio.
I was surrounded by family, including two loving parents,
who cared so much about our education
that they home-schooled us for
several years during grade school.
And they took the time to teach us more than just academics.
They taught us about character,
about what it meant to live a good life.
My father often talked to us about
his definition of success.
He told us that it wasn't measured
in money and material things.
But it was measured in love and joy
and the lives you're able to touch.
The lives you're able to help.
And my parents walked the walk.
They gave of themselves to our church.
They took in foster kids and helped the homeless,
even though we didn't have much money ourselves.
Growing up in the Stephens house
also meant you were immersed in art and music
and encouraged to be creative.
We had a piano and a drum kit in the house.
I begged to take piano lessons when I was four.
I started singing in the church choir and
in school plays by the time I was seven.
I fell in love with music at a very young age.
My family was like a model family
in our church and our local community.
My parents were leaders raising intelligent,
talented kids in a loving environment.
We even had a little singing group called the Stephens Five.
(audience laughing)
But things started to fall apart when I was 10.
My maternal grandmother passed away that year
when she was only 58 years old.
And her death devastated my family.
She was our church organist and on Sundays after church,
I would go to her house just to hang out with her.
She would make chicken and collard greens and cornbread.
And she would teach me how to play gospel piano.
She was one of my favorite people on the planet.
She and my mother were also very close.
And her death sent my mother into a deep depression
that eventually tore my family apart.
My mother disappeared into over a decade
of drugs and despair after my parents got divorced.
And I was confused and disoriented.
After the initial shock of my family breaking apart,
my outward response wasn't very emotional.
I coped by being stoic and seemingly unaffected.
I thought if I didn't expose myself
to anymore pain and vulnerability,
I could never get hurt.
If I didn't fall in love, no one could
ever betray me like that again.
I busied myself with schoolwork and lots of activities
and tried not to think too much about my family situation.
Tried to avoid pain whenever possible.
A big reason I only applied to colleges on the East Coast
was to make sure I had no reminders
of home in my daily life.
The only thing I allowed myself
to really love without reservation was music.
I put all of my passion into it.
I spent so much of my spare time working on it
that I barely got any sleep.
At night, I was doing community choir,
show choir and musicals in high school.
A capella and church choir here in college.
I wrote my own songs, played in talent shows.
I put a lot of energy into becoming a better artist,
a better writer and a better performer.
And in some ways it made me a better student
and a better leader because when
you actually care about something,
you want to lead.
Apathy's not so cool anymore.
When I graduated from Penn, I had many of
the traditional opportunities in front of you now.
And I took a job at the Boston Consulting Group, as he said.
But I couldn't shake my passion for music.
I followed that path that the Penn
graduate was supposed to take,
but I didn't fall in love.
I immediately started thinking about
how I could leave BCG and become a full-time musician.
I spent hours during the day preparing
Powerpoint presentations and financial models.
And I spent almost as many hours at night
writing songs and performing at small gigs
around New York and Philadelphia.
I always believed that my big break
would come sooner, rather than later.
In fact, for six years, from 1998 while I was still at Penn,
to early 2004, I spent each of those six years
always thinking that I would get that
big record deal within the next few months.
I always thought my moment was just around the corner.
But I was rejected by all the major labels.
Some of them rejected me multiple times.
I played for all the giants of the business,
Clive Davis, L.A. Reid, Jimmy Iovine.
You name it, I played for them
and all of them turned me down.
But I did find a young producer
from Chicago named Kanye West who believed in me.
(cheering)
Kanye happened to be the cousin
of my good friend Devon Harris,
a classmate and roommate of mine here at Penn.
Devon introduced me to Kanye in 2001
and we've been working together ever since.
Our collaboration has been a huge part of my career
and it had a lot to do with me
finally getting a major recording contract in 2004.
Now Kanye and I have very different personalities.
(audience laughing)
As you might have guessed.
But what unites us is our true love for music and art.
We love to create and at no point in our creative process
do we stress about what's gonna sell
or what's already popular.
We think about making something beautiful.
Something special, something we can be proud of.
We truly do this because we love it.
We put all of ourselves into it.
And it turns out that love requires
that level of commitment from you.
Half doing it is not doing it right.
You have to go all in.
And yes, your personal relationships require that too.
I know what it's like to be all ego in your 20s.
I know what it's like to be selfish
and just focus on your immediate wants and desires.
I know what it's like to protect your heart
from pain and disappointment.
I know what it means to be all
about the rat race and winning.
But years from now, when you look
back at your time here on Earth.
Your life and your happiness will be way more defined
by the quality of your relationships, not the quantity.
You'll get much more joy out of depth, not breadth.
It's about finding and keeping
the best relationships possible with the people around you.
It's about immersing yourself in
your friendships and your family.
It's about being there for people you care about
and knowing that they'll be there for you.
I know it's not easy to go all in on love.
I'm 35 and I'm married and I'm still
learning how to do this completely.
But I found someone who makes me want to try.
Someone who makes me wanna take that risk.
And it's made all the difference.
Now I've already talked about the power of love
in your work and in your personal lives.
But I also want to talk about how love changes the world.
There are seven billion other people out there.
Seven billion strangers.
I want you to consider what it means to love them too.
What does it mean to love people we don't know?
To see the value in every single person's life.
Think about that.
It's a pretty radical notion.
It means your daughter or son,
your neighbour's daughter or son
and the daughters and sons of people
who live thousands of miles away.
All deserve the right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It means we let go of fear. (applause)
And we see each other's humanity.
It means we don't see Trayvon Martin
as a walking stereotype, a weaponized human.
(applause)
We see him as a boy who deserves a chance
to grow into a man, even if he makes
boyish mistakes along the way.
It means that American lives don't
count more than Iraqi lives.
(applause)
It means we see a young Palestinian kid
not as a future security threat
or a demographic challenge, but as
a future father, mother and lover.
(applause)
It means that the nearly 300 kidnapped
girls in Nigeria aren't just their problem.
They're our girls too. (applause)
It's actually quite a challenge for me
and quite a challenge for you to love humankind in this way.
Professor Cornell West gives us a word
for what that kind of love looks like in public.
That word is justice.
If you're committed to loving in public,
it requires that you believe in justice.
That you open your eyes to injustice.
That you see the world through the eyes of another.
This is not a passive activity.
You have to read, you have to travel
to other neighbourhoods, other parts of the world.
You may have to get your hands dirty.
You have to allow people to love you
and you have to love them back.
My team and I met a young girl named Rose
from a small, impoverished village in Ghana.
Now when you're working with development organizations
and visiting the communities they work in,
you're not really supposed to single out
one child to fall in love with.
You're supposed to stick to the program
and focus on the interventions
that lift the community as a whole.
But we couldn't help it.
We fell in love with Rose.
Something about the spark in her eyes
and her indomitable spirit made us
wanna go the extra mile to help her.
So we decided to use our funds
to sponsor her tuition to secondary school.
We stayed in touch with her over the past seven years.
And we're so proud to see what she's done individually.
But we're also happy that she inspired us to formalize,
as in expand our scholarship program
to many girls in communities like hers throughout Africa.
Communities where the parents often invest
in the boy's secondary education,
but do not do the same for the girls.
In my travels around the world,
I've looked in the eyes of many young girls and boys
from Africa, to Southeast Asia, to South Central, to Harlem.
Kids who have had big dreams and
needed someone to believe in them
and invest in their future, in their education.
What would our schools look like if
we were committed to love in public?
If we cared about every kid in our school system,
we would make sure they didn't go to school hungry.
We would make sure they had proper
healthcare and counselling. (applause)
We would make sure they had excellent
teachers in every classroom. (applause)
We would make sure we weren't unfairly
suspending them and criminalizing them
for minor behavioral problems.
And we'd make sure all of them had the resources they need.
Every religion has this idea of philanthropy.
Love for mankind at its core.
But you shouldn't do this just to make sure
you get into the pearly gates.
Look at the work of Marty Seligman here at Penn,
who has literally written the book on happiness.
Look at the work of Adam Grant,
whom I hear is the most highly rated professor here at Penn.
He has the data to show that giving works.
There's an increasing body of research and knowledge
that tells us that living a life of love
and compassion is the true path to success and contentment.
So what's gonna stop you?
What's gonna stand in your way?
What's gonna keep you from achieving your success?
What will prevent you from going all in on love?
We're taught when we're young that
the opposite of love is hate.
But it's not.
Hate is a by-product, hate is a result.
Being a hater isn't cool.
Nobody wants that.
But hate comes from one thing, fear.
And fear is the opposite of love.
It's not a coincidence that when we talk about bigotry,
we often talk in terms of fear.
Homophobia, xenophobia, fear is what blinds us.
Fear is corrosive, fear makes us hold back.
It whispers to us, tells us that we'll fail.
It tells us that our differences are too much to overcome.
Fear locks us in place.
It starts fights, it causes wars.
And fear keeps us from loving.
Even though we're made to love, we're often afraid to love.
We're afraid of being hurt deeply.
Afraid of feeling the pain I went through
when my parents were divorced.
But you're never going to really love something
or someone unless you put those fears aside.
Don't hold back, being in love means
being ready to give freely and openly
and being ready to risk something.
Risking pain and disappointment.
Conquering your fears and becoming anew.
Alice Walker once said "the more I wonder, the more I love."
Love calls you the open your eyes.
To seek, to search, to wonder.
Love is all-consuming, it infiltrates your body.
It allows you to experience bliss,
joy and true friendship.
You'll be more disappointed when something goes wrong.
You might fall harder, but the only way
you reach any height in life and in love
is by taking that chance that you might fall.
You have to give your all.
Yes, I've been not so subtly working in
my song lyrics in my speech today.
(audience laughing)
And some might think it's all a bit too much.
Here I am, this R&B singer with
an album called Love in the Future,
who's recently married and wrote
the biggest love song of the year.
And what did I choose to talk about?
Love. (audience laughing)
It's so corny, isn't it?
It's much cooler to be detached and apathetic, right?
We all like a little snark and cynicism and irony,
especially from our favorite artists
and comedians and writers, I get it.
But that cool detachment only gets you so far.
Passion gets you a lot further.
It makes you a better entrepreneur,
a better leader, a better philanthropist,
a better friend, a better lover.
I want you to live the best life you can.
You can be world changers.
When you leave here today,
you're gonna look for a lot of things.
Security, money, friendships, sex, all kinds of things.
But the most important thing you'll find is love.
So love yourself, love your work,
love the people around you.
Dare to love those who are different from you.
No matter where they're from, what they look like,
and who they love. (applause)
Pursue this life of love with focus and passion.
Ambition and courage.
Give it your all.
And that will be your path to true success.
Congratulations to the class of 2014
and thank you so much. (applause)
Thank you.
Thank you very much. (cheering and applause)