I don't want to trash this essay but I found it disappointing. I think the reason why is that the author had a great theme -- flip common advice around backward

I don't want to trash this essay but I found it disappointing. I think the reason why is that the author had a great theme -- flip common advice around backwards -- but then let it take over his argument to the degree that the substance was really poor. Very unusual for somebody who is a litigator. It is an example of style over logic. Life is not fair and you should do something you love. Birds also sing, mom is a pretty good person, and be sure to wear clean underwear. This missing piece here is that life is about how you choose to interact with it. It does not exist without your perception of it. Instead of wondering whether life is fair or not, you are the entity that should be fair. Instead of wondering how something might or might not feel to you, realize that you are the entity responsible for your feelings. You should be able to learn to love things you might not initially. If this were not true we'd all be stuck playing video games or taking drugs. The feeling that something initially gives you is not a very good indicator of how much you might or might not deeply love it over time. Learn to take orders and follow directions and you can be exposed to more things that you might like. Don't do that and you'll never know what you've missed. This entire line of thought the speaker espouses is like that: half-formed and glossy. You should do something that is meaningful and other people might not like, but don't use their hatred as any kind of indicator of the worth of what you're doing. That's backwards. Sounds good, but it's backwards. It also skips over the most important part -- how to know if what you're doing is meaningful and important. Using other people's hatred is not going to work. What's worse is that after a while all these commencement speeches just run together. All the same pablum about not having to follow rules, make life a game, follow your heart, stick it to the man, and so on. Enough already. It's not that these things are not true, it's that they are watered down, feel-good bullshit phrases that really don't give you much chance of actually doing anything useful from what you've learned from the speaker. I can understand why people like this essay. If it were the only one of it's kind I'd like it too. Hell, if there were only a hundred like this I'd still like it. But at some point I feel that we're doing a great disservice to college graduates by telling them a bunch of stuff that they would be inclined to believe anyway, just in a more clever format. Sometimes, maybe only once in a decade, somebody should tell these kids something that's a bit more practical.