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Shonda Rhimes's Dartmouth commencement address
A 24-minute graduation speech by Shonda Rhimes on trading the dream for the work
Why it’s worth your time
Talking about the career you want can feel like progress while nothing actually moves. Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Grey's Anatomy, tells graduates how wanting to be someone else kept her stuck until she started doing, and she's frank about what success has cost her since. Twenty-four minutes of her can make the next unglamorous step look a lot more appealing than another round of planning.
Be a doer, not a dreamer, starting this week
- Watch the speech.
After a long, funny warm-up about her fear of public speaking and a word to the parents, she gets to what she calls the real deal part. Watch for the first lesson, about dreamers and doers, and the third, where she answers the question of how she does it all.
- Turn one career wish into one thing you do this week.
Write down one sentence you keep saying about your career, like I want to move into product or I wish I managed people. Under it, write what someone already doing that would do in an ordinary week, such as sitting in on a product review or running one meeting. Do that one thing before Friday.
Good moments for this: when a plan has stayed a plan for monthsbefore your first job after schoolafter a week where work ate everything else
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- Lands in your closeoutFriday's closeout asks for progress, priorities, and proud moments; this is one.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
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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
Rhimes's advice to take any job and keep moving suits someone stuck waiting for the perfect opening. If you already have momentum, the better question may be which step would teach you the most.
What might make this harder
Shrink it to the smallest piece a person in that job does routinely, like reading what they read or asking one of them a question, and do that.
Questions people ask
What is Shonda Rhimes's Dartmouth commencement speech about?
Shonda Rhimes, a 1991 Dartmouth graduate and the creator of Grey's Anatomy, gave it in 2014. Drawing on her own story, she tells graduates to stop dreaming and start doing, warns that the first stretch after college can be hard, and says anyone who claims to be doing it all perfectly isn't telling the truth.
What did Shonda Rhimes say about doing it all?
That she doesn't. She says that when she's succeeding in one part of her life, she's almost always failing in another, and she treats that trade-off as the price of work she loves.
How do I stop dreaming and start doing in my career?
Take the job you keep describing and find the smallest thing someone in that role does every week, then do it this week. A small, unglamorous step often tells you more than another month of planning.
What it says, and how it holds up
There's a kind of career talk that can feel productive and often isn't: the plans you describe over drinks, the vision board, the sentences that start with I want to be. Rhimes calls it out bluntly in her first lesson. Her dream was to be Toni Morrison, and she dreamed about it in her sister's basement, until an article about how hard it was to get into USC's film school sent her there instead, and into a kind of storytelling she hadn't pictured. Years later she had dinner with Morrison, who mostly wanted to talk about Grey's Anatomy.
The second lesson is about the morning after graduation, when you're suddenly at the bottom of the heap; she pairs it with a plea for perspective and for giving a little time each week to one cause. The third answers a question she says she's asked constantly: how does she do it all? She doesn't, she says. A good week on a script can mean missing bath time, and a school musical can mean missing a scene being filmed. That candor is useful at work, where the colleague who seems to manage everything is often making trade-offs nobody sees.
Some of the advice fits its audience more than yours. She was speaking to Dartmouth graduates and says plainly she grew up middle class with academic parents, and when she tells them to sell the car and fly to Bangkok, she adds that she's serious. For someone who already works flat out and still feels behind, a push to do more can read as one more demand. If the doing has tipped into running yourself down, her third lesson, about what gets lost, is the part to sit with.
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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.