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Today we'll be sharing a special episode that is part of a series that we've created of the greatest graduation speeches of all time.

There have been some fantastic commencement talks over the past few decades and we've collected the best of the best for you to enjoy as soon as we get back from thinking our sponsors.

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Welcome to today's graduation speech from Gary Trudeau. He's a cartoonist and this took place in 2017 at the McColley Honors College.

My task here as I understand it is to ensure that you are not released into the world until you've been properly sedated.

I must warn you I've never failed at this but you'll be grateful to learn that I have a very simple message for you today.

Henry David Thoreau once exclaimed about all things simplify, simplify, simplify.

Although many have wondered ever since why he didn't just say simplify.

So to simplify, I want to talk to you today about a single habit of mine that I hope you've been developing for two years here.

One that your professors would hate for you to lose is the habit of seeing, purposeful seeing, seeing what's in plain sight, was off to the side,

and what the world looks like through the eyes of others. It's perhaps not surprising that an artist would want to talk to you about seeing.

It's how he gathers information. It's the first step in making art.

But if I could do one thing in my life over, it'd be to go back and learn to see as an artist all over again.

There's so much I miss the first time around. This wasn't always obvious to me.

My first year in college, I took a drawing class and dedicated myself to making pleasant figurative sketches. Until one day my professor looked at what I was doing and decided he'd seen enough.

Yes, yes, he said an exasperation. He knew I could draw. I clearly had some talents, but what he wanted to know was if I could see.

What I was producing, he said, were charcoal stylings. Visual music. Filled with decisions I made long before I entered the studio.

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