A thoughtfully curated, cleverly designed keepsake that distills the wisdom of all those powerful graduation speakers—from Barack Obama and Gloria Steinem to Kermit the Frog—into the best advice for grads of all ages. Carpe Every Diem is a thought-provoking collection of quotes from famous graduation speakers meant to motivate and inspire the next generation of leaders. Paired by theme, many of the quotes complement one another. George Saunders, for example, riffs on the “failures of kindness” of his youth, encouraging grads to be kinder. Jimmy Buffett offers a simpler nugget of kind-spiration: “Be Santa Claus when you can.” Other quotes, however, are paired with conflicting advice, giving graduates the opportunity to choose what to believe in. Each quote is accompanied by a short bio of the speaker and stamped with the year and institution where the commencement speech was delivered. With advice from the likes of Abby Wambach, Angela Davis, David Foster Wallace, Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, and more, readers will be swept away by the wit and wisdom contained in this book—perfect for graduates, creative thinkers, or anyone seeking inspiration. You could start with the advice here, distilled from over one hundred graduation speeches given by people who have been at the crossroads, like you, but have achieved enough success to be invited as commencement speakers. Your advisory board includes artists, academics, authors, and actors; presidents, poets, politicians, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and community activists. They have won Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, Presidential and Olympic Gold medals, as well as Oscars and Emmys. In researching the best advice from these august speakers, we have discovered a variety of recommendations. Sometimes the suggestions are contradictory; sometimes they reach a similar conclusion but through different channels. We have carefully paired the advice for you to review and judge. From now on, you get to choose your own adventure. Congratulations for being in a position to try out different paths and figure out where you want to go. And along the way, you might just pick up enough wisdom to get your own invitation to be a commencement speaker someday. Carpe every diem.