Commitment

Peter Davis1 delivered the Graduate English Address as a Harvard Law School graduate at Harvard’s 2018 Commencement. His speech is titled A Counterculture of Commitment. The defining characteristic of our generation, says Davis, is keeping options open to the point that commiting to something—even trivial like watching a whole movie—becomes strange. We are stuck in infinite browsing mode, not only in our devices but for everything in our lives. It’s OK to keep our options open but if we want to do something meaningful at all we need commitment. Commitment implies saying no to other things. Commitment also means letting go the novelty of the new and shinny, and embrace the everyday battles against the small but effective enemies of our work. When Hollywood tells tales of courage they usually take the form of slaying the dragon. It’s all about the big brave moments but I’ve been learning from these heroes that the most menacing dragons that stand in the way of reforming the system or…