Jim Carrey Commencement Speech: It’s Better to Fail at What You Love Than Fail at What You Don’t

The come­di­an Jim Car­rey, who remains ded­i­cat­ed to the prac­tice of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion, gave a com­mence­ment speech at the Mahar­ishi Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment, which com­bines teach­ing tra­di­tion­al sub­jects (math, busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion, etc.) with less con­ven­tion­al top­ics like TM and “Sus­tain­able Liv­ing.” In the speech, Car­rey put some things in per­spec­tive for the grad­u­ates: “The deci­sions we make in this moment 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 ask the uni­verse for it.” And then, draw­ing on his own per­son­al expe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly as a child, he offers this advice: “I learned many, many lessons from my father, but not least of which is that you can fail at some­thing you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance doing what you love.” You can watch the full speech here.

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

Jim Car­rey Sings a Pret­ty Damn Good Cov­er of The Bea­t­les “I Am the Wal­rus”

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)