Every year at this same time, it’s all the same: Politicians, tech titans, celebrities, authors and other notables stand behind podiums in every college campus in the United States and deliver the same nuggets of wisdom and inspiration.
Well, Carl Hiaasen is having none of it. The brilliant Hiaasen, who has for years chronicled the wacky and weird in a series of novels about his beloved Florida, offers up his own take on the “real world” and the best ways to deal with it for graduates willing to face grim reality.
His new book, “Assume The Worst, The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear,” takes about five minutes to read (at least for us slow readers). But you will be tempted to carry it around forever in your back pocket as a quick reference guide for life. Think of this book as the pocket edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Mostly, Hiaasen tears apart all those hackneyed phrases and slogans you hear in every commencement speech, group therapy session and self-help podcast and offers his own take on what really works in life.
“If you live every day as if it’s your last, you won’t accomplish a damn thing. You’ll soon run out of money, your car will be repossessed, you’ll be evicted from your apartment, and the person you’re living with will dump you for somebody with a mid-level management job at BrandsMart,” Hiaasen writes.
And this: “Spending all your waking hours doing only what feels good is viable life plan if you’re a Labrador retriever, but for humans its a blueprint for unemployment, divorce and irrelevance.”
And what about, “If you set your mind to it, you can be anything you want to be”?
Total baloney, Hiaasen says. “Self-delusion is no virtue. If Bill Gates had set out to be, say, a professional bronco rider, he wouldn’t have made it past his first rodeo. He would have been catapulted from the saddle, stomped senseless by his horse, and ‘Microsoft’ would today be a brand of absorbent underwear.”
Trying to find goodness in everyone is also a waste of time, Hiaasen said. A good portion of people are not good. Graduates will be better off if they learn who is intractably arrogant, greedy, conniving and cruel in about five minutes of interaction, and avoid them when they can.
But that strategy is often tough, Hiaasen said, because the worst scoundrels are often likeable and smooth. “Try not to fall for their act. From the local zoning board to the halls of Congress, your mistrust will seldom be misplaced,” he writes.
Funny stuff. But Hiaasen also embeds his writing with some real wisdom. People can achieve greatness but first they have to grasp their strengths and weaknesses, he writes. “In other words, work with what you’ve got.”
Assuming the worst also may be the best and most promising course in life, he says. It will keep despair and disillusionment at bay and also free you to be pleasantly startled when someone actually does the right thing, including dining “with a twitchy in-law who doesn’t hit you up for money.”
Finally, Hiaasen writes that happiness is different for every person. But still he asks that everyone try and reach out to someone and make their lives a little easier.
“Force yourself to experiment with kindness, even when the impulse eludes you.”
