You Are Not Special: The Novel
Via Media Bistro:
Finally: someone who deserves a book deal gets one. David McCullough Jr. has lined out a book deal with HarperCollins based on his high school commencement speech, “You Are Not Special.” This English teacher has a popular video on YouTube where he lays out the cold, hard truth to a group of high school grads, letting them know that if everyone is special, then no one is.
Here's some of his poetry:
You’re not special. You’re not exceptional; contrary to what your U9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card; despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia. No matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you, you are nothing special. Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped.
His full commencement speech should be required watching for every grad. Here's the full video:
News by Dave Reuss
Dave Reuss manages Outside Bozeman Magazine. He showcases his work and prostitutes himself to freelance clients at reusswriting.com.
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Comments
That seems like a long version of what they tell the Swedish high school grads.
That was awesome. I'd never seen that before... I don't know what the guy's written about, but that's a great speech, enough so that I'd defnitely give his book a glance based on that alone.
Beautiful.
This reminds me of Shane's grade 8 graduation speech in one of the early seasons of Weeds.
"You have failed us all!"