Life Lessons

“Wisdom is more precious than rubies,
& nothing you desire can compare with her.”
Proverbs 8:11 (NIV)

Today’s post contains some important life lessons from two recent commencement addresses. Both speeches have impacted audiences far beyond their original recipients. Though different, both wisely encourage all of us to pay attention, stay in tune, and do hard things.

Recently country music star Eric Church delivered a powerful 2026 Spring Commencement address at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Using an out of tune guitar as his metaphor, Church gave graduates some important life lessons. They were encouraged to keep their “six strings”- faith, family, marriage, ambition,community, and individuality- in tune.

Some address highlights include:

…”Six strings of life and a willingness to keep them in tune. Six principles. Six pillars. When all six are in tune with each other, the chord your life makes is full and resonant and true. All six will drift. Not one or two, all six, in their own time, in their own season."

"Your faith will go quiet when you need it loud. Your family will get complicated in a way only the people who love you most can complicate things. You will go through hard seasons with your spouse. Your ambition will hollow out, and your resilience will wear thin. Your community will start to feel like an obligation, and your world will try to sand down the edges of exactly who you are."

"This is not failure. This is not weakness. It's the inevitable, universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn't stop to let us tune up.”

“The difference between a life that sounds like music and a life that sounds like noise is whether you stop and listen. Whether you're honest enough to hear which string has drifted out of tune, and humble enough to make the adjustment instead of just turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices."

"Your generation faces a temptation no generation before has ever faced: the temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one, to be globally visible and locally invisible, to have thousands of followers and no one who actually knows where you live," he said. "Resist this. Plant yourself somewhere. Put down roots."

"Build the thing your community needs, even if the internet will never see it. Generosity is not something you do after you make it. It's how you make it."

"Social media is going to show you 1,000 versions of a life that looks better than yours. The comparison will be relentless, curated, and a lie dressed up in really good lighting," he said. "Someone's comments, someone's criticism, someone's cold opinion is going to try to convince you to retune yourself to match what they think you should sound like. Do not let them touch your string. You were made uniquely, wonderfully, distinctly. The world does not need another cover song -- it needs an original."

Jonathan Haidt, author of the best-selling books The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind also delivered a powerful commencement address at New York University where he teaches a course called Flourishing. The Atlantic posted Haidt’s full address here.

Haidt began and ended his address reading a poem written by eighty-year-old Mary Oliver in 2014. The poem, Instructions for Living a Life, encourages us to:

Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it

Haidt continued his commencement remarks saying:

“It sounds simple. But paying attention is in fact one of the most challenging and meaningful things you can do. Because what you pay attention to shapes what you care about. And what you care about shapes who you become. So treasure your attention more than the people who want to take it from you. Never forget what it’s worth. For Meta, it’s a trillion dollars. For you and your life, it is priceless.”

“Once you’re in control of your attention, you can start to ask yourself one of life’s most exciting questions: “What do I want to do? … I think the answer may be the same for all of you. What should you do? You should do hard things.”

“Which brings me to my final point. Because along with the question “What should I turn my attention towards?” comes a related question: “Whom should I spend my attention on?”… You should spend a lot of your attention on real people in the real world.”

Haidt concluded: “You treasure your attention, and then use it to do hard things, with other people, in real life, then––and trust me on this, as a social psychologist––your life is going to be amazing. And the world is going to be a far better place because you’re in it.”