TOW #10 - Attitude

"What you are being ejected into today is a world that is both half empty and half full."

     In June of 1983, award-winning writer Margaret Atwood was invited to be the commencement speaker at the University of Toronto. In her speech, she discusses the false helpfulness of college courses, the un-usefulness of a liberal arts degree, and the ultimate struggle of finding employment. All the while, she builds up to the idea that, despite so much difficulty to make it in the real world, there is hope: change can be made simply by one's attitude. She delivers this classic message in a way that makes it seem actually helpful and possible. Her speech effectively gets and keeps the attention of a hall full of fidgeting students and families, through an eccentric sense of humor and clever organizational choices.

     She begins by candidly narrating her struggle to prepare an encouraging speech for the "graduating class in 1983, year of the Ph.D. taxi driver, when young people have unemployment the way they used to have ugly blackheads." The use of real-world examples in an amusing way prods readers to envision the scene, and truly digest her words. She continues, "As for your university degree, there are definitely going to be days when you will feel that you’ve been given a refrigerator and sent to the middle of a jungle, where there are no three-pronged grounded plugholes." This analogy is rather ridiculous but it definitely makes the reader think a bit and invites a round of chuckles.

     She does spend much of her time discussing the bleakness of life, but near the end links a comment on stress-induced hair loss to a quote reference and life lesson: "I offer the following: 'God only made a few perfect heads, and the rest lie covered with hair…' Which illustrates the following point: when faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice." She structures it so cleverly that what seems like the oddest tangent leads straight into her main point about letting attitude determine one's life.

     Her chosen message and delivery is not dramatic, but structured in hopes that one or more of her simple quirks or jokes will stick in listeners' brains, for those times when they are face-to-face with the troubles of life that Margaret Atwood has already experienced and hopes to help them get through.