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Conan O'Brien's Dartmouth commencement address
Conan O'Brien's address to graduates on losing the job you'd built toward, and what came after
Why it’s worth your time
Conan O'Brien's Dartmouth speech is about losing the job you'd built your idea of success around, from someone a little over a year past losing his own. His exit from NBC had been very public, and under the jokes the speech is a plain account of what that loss taught him.
How to move on after losing the job you wanted
- Watch for the turn.
The first two-thirds are jokes about Dartmouth, its motto and its podium. The turn comes when he says he has something real to tell them: listen for how he revises his own 2000 advice about failure, and for the line of comedians he traces, from Johnny Carson, who wanted to be Jack Benny, to David Letterman, who wanted to be Carson, to O'Brien's own generation, each falling short of the hero they set out to become.
- Name the job you've been measuring yourself against.
Write down the one title, company or role you've treated as the sign you'd made it. Under it, write two things you'd still want to do at work if that job never came, and one thing you're good at now because your path didn't go to plan.
Good moments for this: after a promotion goes to someone elsewhen a role you wanted is cutaround a graduation, yours or someone else's
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
How you work with them, or for them, in the next few months tends to say more to the people deciding next time than anything you say about the setback.
What might make this harder
Give the list a few days. O'Brien jokes about daytime cartoons and mid-morning Chardonnay; a list written at the worst moment tends to come out as a list of grievances.
Questions people ask
What does Conan O'Brien talk about in his Dartmouth speech?
Conan O'Brien gave Dartmouth's 2011 commencement address a little over a year after leaving NBC. After a long run of jokes, he tells graduates that disappointment will come whether they fear it or not, and that missing your idea of success can push you toward work that's more your own.
What did Conan say about failure at Dartmouth?
He updates advice he gave Harvard graduates in 2000. He still says not to fear failure, but adds that you should do your best to avoid it, because it nearly knocks you flat, and that the clarity it can bring is the part worth keeping.
Where does Conan's work hard, be kind line come from?
He closes the speech by quoting what he said at the end of his last NBC show, and tells the graduates he believes it more now than he did then.
Is it worth watching if I'm not a new graduate?
Probably, if you've lost a role or a plan you cared about. The in-jokes are for Dartmouth, but the serious part is about a dream that changed after 25 years of chasing it.
What it says, and how it holds up
Commencement advice tends to treat failure as a teacher you should welcome. O'Brien's version is less tidy. He reminds the graduates that he once told Harvard's class of 2000 not to be afraid to fail, then adds a correction from experience: avoid it if you can, because it hurts more than the slogan suggests. What he offers instead is a claim about identity: falling short of the version of yourself you were aiming at is what makes you distinct. His evidence is a line of comedians, each of whom set out to become the one before and became someone else.
The workplace version is familiar. Careers often get organized around one marker, a title, a company, a promotion, and when it goes away the loss can feel like a verdict on the whole effort. O'Brien describes the year after his own exit as fogbound and adrift, full of things he tried without a plan, and also the most satisfying year of his working life. No single job, he says, should define you, and disappointment can bring clarity, with conviction close behind. It's a reframe worth holding loosely, as a description of where a setback can lead.
It helps to remember who's speaking. O'Brien had a famous name, an audience and a new show on TBS within the year, and his experiments were cushioned in ways an ordinary layoff isn't. A year on, with the new show running, he was speaking from the far side of the loss. If nothing has gone wrong yet and the trouble is getting started, Shonda Rhimes's 2014 address from the same Dartmouth stage, about doing more than dreaming, may be the better watch.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.