Sara Bareilles's UCLA 2025 Commencement Speech: Embracing Fear and Finding Hope in a Complicated World
The Parachute of 'Both'
Soul Motto
"Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent."
— Shahrukh Khan
Reading this, I'm not just a teacher; I'm a student again, reminded of what it means to stand in front of a room full of bright, anxious, hopeful faces and choose truth over comfort. Sara Bareilles didn't give these graduates a map; she gave them something far more valuable: a compass for the heart. She stood in her own vulnerability, admitting her fear and her crisis of faith, and in doing so, she gave everyone permission to be human—to be messy, scared, and magnificently alive all at once.
Her story about her friend Gavin and the word 'both' is a lesson that no textbook can offer. It's the profound, aching wisdom that life's most brutal moments are often intertwined with its most sacred. Grief is both 'awe and ache'. The future is both 'terrifying and beautiful'. We spend so much of our lives trying to solve for 'or', when the real answer, the one that allows us to breathe and to grow, is 'and'. This isn't an easy lesson; it's one forged in loss and love, and she shared it with such raw generosity.
This speech is a call to find our 'growth edge'—that place where we feel the dizzying mix of 'yes, I can' and 'what if I can't?'. It's an invitation to trade certainty for curiosity, to see the freefall as a form of flying. It's a reminder that our deepest anxieties and our greatest heartbreaks are not signs that we are broken, but signs that we are growing, reaching for new territory, and becoming who we are meant to be. It's a challenge to jump. And she gives us the parachute.
Core Vocabulary
Key Mottos
- Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent.
- We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
- Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.