Commencement 2013: A sampling of advice to this year's college grads

Here are some memorable excerpts from this spring's college commencement addresses.

17. Get your priorities straight

CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION/AP
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar arrives at the 44th Annual NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday, Feb. 1, 2013.

" [D]on't let career ambitions take over your lives. ... The better you are at your job, the more you're rewarded, financially and spiritually, by doing it. ... But home life is more chaotic. Solving problems is less prescriptive and no one's applauding, giving promotions, or throwing money. That's why so many young professionals spend more and more time at work with the excuse, 'I'm sacrificing for my family.'

"Learn to embrace the chaos of family life and enjoy the small victories. Which would your rather have your children say about you, 'He sacrificed for his family,' or 'He was always there when I needed him.' "

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Basketball Hall of Famer

At the New England Institute of Technology (in Warwick, R.I.)

17 of 20

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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