So here we go:

1. If it’s the wrong thing, don’t do it. I borrowed this rule from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The people who have followed it have improved their own lives and the lives of the people around them for centuries. When people complain about how hard it can be to know the right thing to do, they’re usually planning on doing the wrong thing and don’t want to deal with the guilt.

2. If it’s not the truth, don’t say it. Marcus Aurelius again. In college, you’ll hear from your fellow students and even from some professors that truth is relative, but that’s generally when they’re about to lie to you.

3. Buy yourself a pocket calculator. Use it to add up what it’s cost your family to get you to this point in your life. Your family will be happy to supply you with the raw data. You can also use the calculator to figure out the true cost of loans before you sign on the dotted line.

4. If possible, don’t go into debt for college. Families, credit card companies, and financial aid officers will be offering you what looks like free money for a while. The key words here are for a while.

5. Get a job. The best way to keep your debt at its lowest is to get a job during college and during your summer and winter vacations. The biggest gap in quality between college students is not between rich and poor, smart or not so smart, private-schooled or from inner-city high schools. It’s between those students who have a job during college and the ones who don’t. If you fight fire all summer and turn all the money you’ve earned over to the college business office at the start of fall semester, you’ll get more from your economics class than if you’d sat around all summer playing Grand Theft Auto. If you tell your roommate you can’t go to the party because you’ve got the graveyard shift at the local 7-11, you’ll be a step ahead of everyone else when you study feudalism in your Medieval History class.

6. Don’t Make Unconscious Life Decisions. What your major will be, the type of person you fall in love with, and your after-college plans are the first draft of a story. Like most first drafts, it’s got some missing scenes and tedious sentences. You’ve got some rewriting to do, and the more consciously you can do a rewrite, the better the final draft is going to be.

7. Don’t start anything you can’t finish. Today, you’re finishing a story. You know what a mixture of joy and sadness that is, and how a mixture of joy and sadness makes a story better than if it were completely happy or completely sad. When you say, “Of course I’ll pay you back,” or “I’ll love you forever,” or, “let’s raise a kid,” you’re starting a story you need to finish. If you don’t finish it, you’ll deprive yourself of the joy part of the mixture.

8. Pay attention. Woody Allen famously said that half of life is just showing up. That’s the easy half. The harder half is being a careful witness to what’s going on. A few details are often the difference between what you think is going on and what’s really going on. Scientific revolutions have come from a single small detail that didn’t fit the story people were telling about the world.

9. Don’t limit your plans to what you’re sure you can do. Plan things too carefully, and you’ll exile Mr. Dumb Luck from your life. Not a good idea. Mr. Dumb Luck is your friend even though he’s a big old goofy guy who dresses funny and tells people that you have no imagination.

10. The toughest rule of all. Embrace grief when it comes. If you can’t embrace grief when it comes, you won’t be able to embrace happiness when it comes.

I’m going to end with a short parable.

An ordinary grown-up is working at an ordinary job, living in an ordinary small town, a town full of quiet streets lined by summer trees and flower gardens and small houses reflecting modest incomes. But in the town a child has been abandoned, a tiny child only a few months old, and this quite ordinary grown-up takes on the responsibility of raising that child.

Here the ordinary ceases to be ordinary. The grown-up makes extraordinary sacrifices for the child, and assembles extraordinary resources to protect and nourish it. Yet the grown-up doesn’t see the effort or the sacrifice—it’s simply what has to be done. There’s no wonder in this great task, except in the eyes of the other people in the town, who see that a once-ordinary person’s love for a child is so powerful and so freely given that there is a soft and golden glow around them both.

The child’s contribution to that glow is a mixture of happiness and openness toward the bright beauty of the world and the joyful awareness of being protected and well cared for. Whatever caused the abandonment in the first place doesn’t matter any more.

That grown-up is you. That child is you.

Thank you for letting me share this day with you.

—John Rember