I always love this time of year. Graduation is here and commencement speeches begin. I love listening to great visionaries share their words of wisdom. Below are excerpts from three I will never forget.

First is the speech from Steve Jobs to the class of 2005 at Stanford University. Mr. Jobs never graduated from college and this was the closest he ever got to a college graduation. His speech relates to three stories from his life.

• The first story is about connecting the dots…You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

• My second story is about love and loss… Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

• My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something…Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Mr. Jobs ends with “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” His motto came from the back cover of the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalog in the mid-70s.

Second is the speech by environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author Paul Hawken to the class of 2009 at University of Portland. It’s a speech about today, our earth, and the people who live here. It’s about a deep sense of connectedness to the living world. These are my favorite excerpts from that speech.

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world… You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force… Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider… The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life?…The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams… We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true…This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss…The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

But my most favorite is the recent commencement speech given by Adm. William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, at the University of Texas at Austin on May 17. He’ been a Navy SEAL for 36 years. In his speech he shares life lessons from Navy SEAL training. I found his words gentle and honest and applicable to every stage of my life. The speech is my favorite because I didn’t expect a speech like this from a Navy SEAL. Click the link above to read and watch the full speech. Below are the 10 simple points he emphasizes.

1. If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. Making your bed will reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

2. You can’t change the world alone- you will need some help- and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the goodwill of strangers and a strong coxswain to guide us. If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.

3. SEAL training is a great equalizer. Nothing matters but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status. If you want to change the world, measure people by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.

4. Sometimes, no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes. If you want to change the world, get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.

5. Life is filled with circuses. You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it will test you to your very core. But if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.

6. At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course contained 25 obstacles including a 10-foot-high wall, a 30-foot cargo net and a barbed-wire crawl, to name a few. But the most challenging obstacle was the slide for life. The record for the obstacle course had stood for years…until one day a student decided to go down the slide for life head-first. If you want to change the world sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle head-first.

7. There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with them. So, if you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.

8. Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission, is the time when you must be calm, composed – when all your tactical skills, your physical power and your inner strength must be brought to bear. If you want to change the world, you must be at your very best in the darkest moment.

9. The ninth week of SEAL training is referred to as Hell Week. It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure from the instructors to quit. Looking around the mudflats it is apparent that some students were ready to give up. And then, one voice began to echo through the night – one voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two, and two became three, and before long everyone in the class was singing. If I have learned anything in my time of traveling the world, it is the power of hope. So, if you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.

10. In SEAL training there is a bell. A brass bell hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. So, if you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

His final paragraph sums up his advice in simple terms that made clear sense to my youngest children.

Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often, but if you don’t take some risks, step up when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give up – if you do these things, then the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today.

Please add your favorite commencement speeches. The longer the list, the greater the inspiration, the greater the challenge to seek excellence in all we do.