It was a rainy, early June morning in a small New Hampshire town when John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, delivered an unconventional commencement address for the Cardigan Mountain School.

“Now, the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you,” Roberts said. “I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty.”

In 1986, Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton with a degree in computer science. In 1994, he founded Amazon.com. And in 2010, he went back to Princeton to address the graduating class about the difference between gifts and choices — a profound reflection on his grandfather's advice that being kind is much more important than being clever.

Below you can watch the original delivery, along with the full transcript of the entire speech.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

In April of 1958, the 20-year old Hunter S. Thompson wrote a letter to his friend Hume Logan in response to a request for life advice.

Found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, Thompson's letter provides surprisingly profound reflections on the meaning of life, and what it really means to find your purpose.

The following post was not written by me. It was written by David Foster Wallace and delivered as a commencement speech in 2005 to the graduating class at Kenyon College. 

As one of the most iconic graduation speeches of all time, it contains simple, yet timeless nuggets of wisdom that all of us can benefit from. The speech was also published as a thin book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

The problem in the modern world is that we think of productivity in terms of addition rather than subtraction.

We’re on a constant lookout for the latest shiny productivity app, hack or tool. We focus on doing more, cramming more tasks into our daily schedules, ensuring that we can squeeze in as much as possible.

We’re so caught up in doing more that we rarely stop to ask ourselves: