American Dream

Class of 2009!

I do not think I heard you.

First I want you to stand up and wave and cheer your supportive family and friends.

I am sure you can find them out there.

Show your love.

It is a great honor for me to be here today.

Now wait a second.

I know, that's such a cliche.

You are thinking, every graduation speaker here says that, it is a great honor.

But, in my case, it really is so deeply true.

Being here is more special and more personal for me than most of you know.

I would like to tell you why.

A long time ago, in this cold September of 1962,there was a Steven's co-op at this very university.

That co-op had a kitchen with a ceiling that had been cleaned by student volunteers probably every decade or so.

Picture a college girl named gloria, climbing up high on a ladder, struggling to clean that filthy ceiling.

Standing on the floor, a young boarder named Carl was admiring the view.

And that's how they met.

They were my parents, so I suppose you could say I am a direct result of that kitchen chemistry experiment, right here at Michigan.

My Mom is here with us today, and we should probably go find the spot and put up a plaque on the ceiling that says, thanks, mom and dad.

Everyone in my family went here to Michigan, my brother, my mom, my dad, all of us.

My dad actually got the quantity discount, he got all three and a half of his degrees here.

His PHD was in Communication Science becasue they thought computers were just a passing fad when he earned it 44 years ago.

He and mom made a big sacrifice for that degree.

They argued at times over pennies, while rasing my newborn brother.

Mom typed my dad's dissertation by hand, kind of ironic of those computer science disseration.

This velet hood that I am wearing, this was my dad's.

This diploma, yeaah, this diploma that I have here just like the one you are about to go, this was my dad's 

And my underwear, oh never mind, sorry.

My father's farther worked in the Chevy plant in Michigan.

He was an assembly line worker.

He drove his two children here to Anna, and told them, this is where you are going to college.

I know it sounds funny now.

Both of his kids actually did graduate from Michigan.

That was the American Dream.

Grab Your Dream

His daughter, Beverly, is also with us today.

My grandpa used to carry an alley oop hammer, a heavy iron pipe with a big hunk of lead melted on the end.

The workers made them during the sit down strikes to protect themselves.

When I was growing up, we used that hammer whenever we needed to pound a stake or something into the yard.

It is wonderful that most people do not need to carry a heavy blunt object for protection anymore.

But just in case, I brought it with me.

My dad became a professor at Michigan state, and I was an incredibly lucky boy.

A professor's life is pretty flexible, and he was able to spend oodles of time raising me.

Could there be a better upbring than university brat?

What I am trying to tell you this is way more than just a homcoming for me.

It not easy for me to express how proud I am to be here, with my mom, my brother and my wife Lucy. and with all of you, at this amazing institution that is responsible for my very exsitence.

I am thrilled for all of you, and I am thrilled for all of your families and friends, as all of us join this great big family I feel I have been a part of all of my life.

What I am also trying to tell you is that I know exactly what it feels like to be sitting in your seat, listening to some old gasbag give a long winded commencement speech.

Do not worry, I will be brief.

I have a story about following dreams.

Or maybe more accurately, it is a story about finding a path to make those dreams real.

You know what it is like, to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream?

And you know how, if you do not have a pencil and pad by the end, it will be completely gone by the next morning.

I had one of those dreams when I was 23,

When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking, what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and I grabbled a pen and started writing.

Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming.

I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work.

Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry, it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the web.

he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not teel me.

The optimish of youth is often underrated.

Amazingly, at that time, I had no thought of building a search engine.

The idea wasn't even on the radar.

Much later we happened upon a better way of ranking and we made a really great search engine, and Google was born.

When a really great dream shows up, grab it.