- But my lesson is this.

I don't give a shit

(applause)

okay?

You cannot let a fear of failure

or a fear of comparison

or a fear of judgment

stop you from doing what's going to make you great.

You cannot succeed without this risk of failure.

You can not have a voice

without the risk of criticism.

And you cannot love without the risk of loss.

You must go out and you must take these risks.

And people will tell you to do what makes you happy.

But a lot of this has been hard work.

And I'm not always happy.

And I don't think you should do just what makes you happy.

I think you should do what makes you great.

Do what's uncomfortable and scary and hard

but pays off in the long run.

Be willing to fail.

Let yourself fail.

Fail in the way in the place where you would want to fail.

Fail, pick yourself up

and fail again.

Because without this struggle,

what is your success anyway?

But as best we know it,

we have one life.

In it, you have to trust your own voice,

your own ideas,

your honesty,

your vulnerability

and through this, you will find your way.

You do not have to be fearless.

Just don't let fear stop you.

Live like this as best you can

and I guarantee

you will look back on a life well lived.

- As I moved to California,

$700 in my pocket and my toddler.

And I have to

fight the good fight

because people are telling me,

"I can't, you can't do this, you can't

"are you crazy?

"You're moving to California with your son?

"You'll never make it."

I was 26

when I decided to come here.

There's the age thing.

"Ah, you're too old."

If you listen to people

and if you allow people to project their fears on to you,

you won't live.

What if I believed those people

who told me that when I became pregnant in college

that I wouldn't finish?

I walked across that stage with my son on my hip.

And I collected my degree.

My diploma.

(applause)

I didn't hear the naysayers

when they were like, "you're too old to go to California.

"If you don't hit by 25, you're not gonna make it."

I will be 46 this year.

I am just touching the surface.

I am just getting started.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth, you know.

I had a passion.

I had a dream.

And I dived in.

And I went for my dream and

it all starts with you.

You're the temple

and you have control.

You're in a bad situation, it's up to you to get out of it.

You can't give another human

the responsibility of your happiness.

- When you have a dream,

it doesn't often come at you screaming

in your face.

This is who you are.

This is what you must be for the rest of your life.

Sometimes a dream almost whispers.

And I've always said to my kids,

"the hardest thing to listen to,

"your instincts, your human personal intuition,

"always whispers, it never shouts."

Very hard to hear.

So you have to everyday of your lives

be ready to hear

what whispers in your ear.

It very rarely shouts.

And if you can listen to the whisper

and if it tickles your heart

and it's something you think you want to do

for the rest of your life,

then that is going to be what you do

for the rest of your life

and we will benefit from everything you do.

Thank you very much.

- So don't be unconscious

all day on your phone.

(audience laughs)

Don't we live now

in a bit of a very shallow world?

Pop culture is extremely shallow.

And we're just asking the world

to get deep.

I don't like wasting my time

spending days just shaking people's hands and smiling

taking selfies.

It feels shallow to my existence.

I have a lot more to offer than my image.

I don't like being used to make people money.

I feel sad

when

I'm overworked

and that I've just become a money making machine

and that my passion and my creativity take a back seat.

That makes me unhappy.

So what did I do?

I started to say no.

I'm not doing that.

I don't want to do that.

I'm not taking that picture.

I'm not going to that event.

I'm not standing by that

because that's not what I stand for.

Slowly but surely,

I remembered who I am.

And then you go home and you look in the mirror

and you're like, yes.

I can go to bed with you

every night.

- Lobster is a soft

mushy animal

that lives inside of a rigid shell.

That rigid shell does not expand.

Well how can the lobster grow?

Well, as the lobster grows,

that shell becomes very confining.

And the kind of the lobster feels itself under pressure.

And uncomfortable.

It goes under a rock formation

to protect itself from predatory fish,

casts off the shell and produces a new one.

Well eventually,

that shell becomes very uncomfortable

as it grows right?

Back under the rocks.

I think lobster repeats this numerous times.

The stimulus for the lobster

to be able to grow

is that it feels uncomfortable.

If lobsters had doctors,

they would never grow.

Because as soon as the lobster feels uncomfortable,

goes to the doctor,

gets a Valium, gets some Percocet,

feels fine!

Never gets off its shell.

So I think we have to realize

is that we have to realize that times of stress,

are also times that are signals for growth.

And if we use adversity properly

we can grow through adversity.

- I personally am most unworthy.

But I

brought a girl child

from the street.

And I could see

in the face of the child,

that child was hungry.

God knows how many days, has not eaten.

So I gave her a piece of bread.

And the little one

started eating the bread

crumb by crumb.

And I said

eat, I said to the child,

"eat the bread.

"Eat the bread."

And she looked at me and said,

"I'm afraid

"to eat the bread.

"Because I'm afraid

"when it is finished

"I will be hungry again."

This is

a reality.

Maybe we are not hungry for a piece of bread.

But maybe there is somebody there in the family who is

unwanted, unloved, uncared, forgotten.

There is love.

Love begins at home.

And love to be true has to hurt.

And this is

what I bring before you.

To love one another.

That great love.

- [Jim Carrey] Your need for acceptance

can make you invisible in this world.

Like many of you,

I was concerned about going out into the world

and doing something bigger than myself.

Until someone smarter than myself

made me realize that there is nothing bigger than myself.

Don't let anything stand in the way

of the light that shines through this form.

Risk being seen

in all of your glory.

Our eyes are not viewers,

they are also projectors.

That are running a second story over the picture

that we see in front of us all the time.

Fear is writing that script.

And the working title is

I'll Never Be Enough.

Spend your whole life imaging those,

worrying about the pathway to the future.

But all that will ever be

is what's happening here.

And the decisions we make in this moment

which are based in either love or fear.

So many of us choose our path out of fear

disguised as practicality.

What we really want seems impossibly out of reach

and ridiculous to expect

so we never dare to ask the universe for it.

I'm saying,

I am the proof

that you can ask the universe for it.

I realized one night in LA,

that the purpose of my life

had always been to free people from concern,

just like my dad.

I did something

that made people

present their best selves to me

wherever I go.

How will you serve the world?

What did they need

that your talent can provide?

That's all I have to figure out.

I can tell you from experience the effect you have on others

is the most valuable currency there is.

You can fail, at what you don't want.

So you might as well take a chance

on doing what you love.

Relax, and dream up a good life.

- This is the most important

and crucial period of your lives

for what you do now and what you

decide now at this age

may well determine

which way your life shall go.

And the question is,

whether you have a proper,

a solid,

and a sound blueprint.

And I want to suggest

some of the things that should be

in your life's blueprint.

Number one in your life's blueprint should be

a deep belief

in your own dignity, your own worth,

and your own somebodiness.

Don't allow anybody to make you feel

that you are nobody.

Always feel that you count.

Always feel that you have worth.

And always feel that your life

has ultimate significance.

Secondly,

in your life's blueprint,

you must have