Shonda Rhimes got real as she gave her commencement speech at Dartmouth College Sunday and flat out told the graduates to avoid being assholes. Her speech that ran for a course of 20 minutes was not the usual "follow your dreams" advice graduates oftentimes get, but it was packed with hard-won wisdom all the same.
"Grey's Anatomy" and "Scandal" creator Shonda Rhimes explained, "I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really engaged, powerful people are busy doing."
Rhimes told the graduates about the time that she got wasted the night before her graduation ceremony took place in 1991 as she was far too unhappy of having to leave her friends on campus. She said, "It was tough to transition from being 'special' in college to the toughness of the real world."
To put more meaning to her statement, Rhimes shared a story of her days in Dartmouth, when she spent a lot of time having romantic dreams of becoming the next Toni Morrison. It was a little later that she realized her real skills and talents lay elsewhere. This was when she decided to apply to a film school at USC.
"We are incredible lucky. We have been given a gift," Rhimes told the graduates. "An incredible education has been placed before us. We ate all the fro-yo [frozen yogurt] we could get our hands on. We skied. We had EBAs at 1 a.m. We built bonfires and got frostbite and enjoyed all the free treadmills. We beer-ponged our asses off. Now, it's time to pay it forward."
Twenty years after Rhimes graduated from Dartmouth, she may not be presently a Nobel Prize-winning author, but she shared, "I had dinner with Toni Morrison and all she wanted to talk about was 'Grey's Anatomy.'" The lesson to this is that there is no such thing as "having it all".
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