Conan O'Brien's Dartmouth Commencement Speech

Conan O'Brien had just been fired from The Tonight Show — his dream job, the thing he had worked toward for 20 years — in the most public, humiliating fashion possible. When Dartmouth invited him to deliver their commencement address, he could have played it safe. Instead, he delivered the funniest, most honest commencement speech about failure ever given.

Conan's central thesis is that failure, particularly spectacular public failure, is the most valuable experience a person can have. 'It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique,' he says. His NBC debacle — which played out in real time before a national audience — became the foundation for a reinvention that made him happier and more creative than he had ever been. The loss of his dream forced him to discover what he actually wanted, which turned out to be different from what he thought he wanted.

The speech is brilliantly structured as comedy — Conan gets laughs every thirty seconds — but the message beneath the humor is profound. The people in that audience who would go on to achieve their dreams would learn less from that experience than the ones who would fail spectacularly, pick themselves up, and discover that the detour was better than the original route. Conan proved it with his own career, and his willingness to be vulnerable about the most painful experience of his life made the speech resonate far beyond Dartmouth.