David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water'

David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech is the most intellectually challenging motivational speech ever delivered. His thesis is deceptively simple: the real purpose of education is not to teach you how to think, but to give you the awareness to choose what to think about. The 'default setting' of human consciousness — self-centered, impatient, quick to judge — is a prison, and the only escape is the daily, deliberate decision to pay attention to the world and the people in it.

Wallace illustrates his point with a parable about two young fish who pass an older fish swimming the other way. 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' the older fish asks. The young fish swim on, and one turns to the other: 'What the hell is water?' The point is that the most important realities are often the ones we never notice — the background conditions of our daily existence that shape everything we think and feel.

The speech avoids every cliche of motivational speaking. Wallace does not tell the audience to follow their dreams or change the world. He tells them to survive the crushing boredom and frustration of adult life by choosing, moment by moment, to extend grace to the people around them. It is motivation for the mundane — for the grocery store checkout line, the traffic jam, the cubicle — and it is more useful than a thousand speeches about reaching for the stars. Wallace died three years later. This speech is his most accessible legacy.