Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech that broke the internet
“I went to college. I went and worked out 5 hours a day. And I was working in construction. Because in those days in bodybuilding, there was no money. I didn’t have the money for food supplements or anything.
So, I had to go to work. So, I worked in construction. I went to college and worked out in a gym. And at night from 8 o’clock at night to 12 midnight, I went to acting class 4 times a week. I did all that. There was not one single minute that I wasted.”
J. K. Rowling’s Harvard commencement speech
“Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.
An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”
Will Smith in pursuit of happyness
“Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something—not even me. You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can’t do it. You want something? Go get it. Period.”
Steve Jobs stanford commencement speech
“And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So, I decided to drop out and trust that it was all going to work out ok. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.”
AL Pacino in any given sunday
“I don’t know what to say really. Three minutes till the biggest battle in our professional lives, and it all comes down to today. Either we heal, as a team, or we’re gonna crumble.
Inch by inch, play by play, till we’re finished. We’re in hell right now, gentlemen—believe me. And, we can stay here and get the s_____ kicked out of us, or, we can fight our way back.”
Sheryl Sandberg at Harvard University
“It used to be that in order to reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be rich and famous and powerful, be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO, but that’s not true today.
Now ordinary people have a voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power structures and leveling traditional hierarchy.
Voice and power are shifting from institutions to individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless, and all of this is happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today, and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.”
Richard St. John’s Motivation TED Talk
“And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question.
She said, “What leads to success?” And I felt really badly because I couldn’t give her a good answer.
So, I get off the plane and I come to TED, and I think, “Jeez, I’m in the middle of a room of successful people, so why don’t I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids?”