Most motivational commencement speech ever? Taylor Swift at NYU in 2022: “Never be ashamed of trying, effortlessness is a myth”

“Last time I was in a stadium this size I was dancing in heels and wearing a glittery leotard. This outfit is much more comfortable.”

How Taylor Swift inspired Yankee Stadium

That was Taylor Swift opening her NYU commencement speech in 2022, immediately sounding less like a megastar delivering life wisdom and more like someone nervously trying to survive public speaking with jokes.

I’d say that’s probably why the speech went on to work so well.

She wasn’t trying to sound impossibly polished or inspirational in the fake LinkedIn way commencement speeches sometimes do. Instead, she basically stood in Yankee Stadium and admitted to the often screaming crowd that adulthood is often messy, at times embarrassing but mostly just a continuation of random trial-and-error experiences… although with better clothes.

Swift joked that she was “90% sure” NYU invited her because she had a song called “22,” and the crowd lapped it up. But once the humor settled down, she started dropping lines that graduates still repost everywhere, even four years on.

“Learn to live alongside cringe,” she said, which could easily define the philosophy of modern existence given social media, 24-hour news and reality TV… not to mention some of our political leaders.

Making an effort IS cool

She admitted everyone eventually looks back at old versions of themselves and recoils in horror. The outfits. The opinions. The human interactions. The aggressively filtered Instagram era. It’s unavoidable.

Then came the line that basically became the emotional centerpiece of the whole speech: “Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth.”

And weirdly, that might’ve been the most anti-cool thing a celebrity could have said in 2022, which made it feel refreshing. Swift openly defended eagerness in a culture obsessed with acting unbothered. According to her, the people pretending not to care were never actually the ones building anything meaningful anyway.

How Taylor Swift lived her own advice

The speech also feels hilarious in retrospect because it accidentally seemed to foreshadow so much of her later music. There was serious Anti-Hero energy in her stories about public mistakes and self-awareness. Parts of it sounded like the emotional blueprint for The Tortured Poets Department.

And when she told students, “The scary news is you’re on your own now. But the cool news is, you’re on your own now,” it landed even harder months later once You’re On Your Own, Kid was released. Maybe it was coincidence. But knowing Swift – no, not personally, sadly – it also feels very possible the song already existed in some form by then and she knowingly slipped that theme into the speech.

The entire address, which you can enjoy again above, revolved around ideas that could be argued would later dominate Midnights: isolation, ambition, embarrassment, resilience and figuring yourself out while the whole world watches. Then there were her stories about rejection, getting mocked online and pretending to fight with her mom at airports so nobody would sit between them on Southwest flights. It was all relatable.

And as she closed the whole thing off about us all growing more resilient and the importance of breathing in and out, there was still time to throw in another joke.

“And I am a doctor now, so I know how breathing works.”

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