David McCullough's Snowflake Graduation Speech

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How many graduation speeches have you heard, heard about, or even given?

Every single one has aimed to inspire and enthuse, rouse and motivate, and will contain words of advice, words of wisdom, lessons learned, ideas on success, insights into happiness, or a combination of them all, designed to explain what really matters in life blah, blah, blah …

Type into a Google search “You are not special”; you will be flooded with links to a speech, which went viral in 2012.

A no-nonsense Pulitzer prize-winning historian, David McCullough, told Wellesley High School's "pampered" and "bubble-wrapped" graduating class that they were not exceptional and that they should come to terms with it …


"Capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counselled you, encouraged you, consoled you, and encouraged you again.

But do not get the idea you're anything special. Because you're not.

Think about this: even if you're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. 3.2 million other students, just like you, are graduating from more than 37,000 high schools across the country right now.

That’s 37,000 valedictorians. 37,000 class presidents. 92,000 harmonising altos. 340,000 swaggering jocks.

Gestures have taken precedence over deeds and, today, people seek to accomplish things for the recognition, rather than the pursuit of a goal.

As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavours, and going to Cambodia during Schoolies Week to build a school is sometimes more about a future scholarship application or a job application.

Your parents are often overly protective of their children and this doesn't help you learn to deal with a tough and competitive world. 

So many adults – your parents and all the other adults in your lives, the behaviour of the adults around you – often gives you this sort of inflated sense of yourselves. 

I hope I can give you a little context, a little perspective. To send you off into the world with an inflated sense of yourselves is doing you no favours."

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