I agree with your comment about the commencement speech “power display” Hana. That has always occurred to me as well. Naturally, the commencement speaker has had some sort of of outsized success in life and the you can do anything you want comment seems self congratulatory. They seem to be saying that they chose to be successful because it was in their capacity to excel. Yeah OK; So much for humility. Successful people all know they were lucky. All of them, even the asholes.

“ mild success can be explained by skills and labour. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

Nassim Talib, Fooled by Randomness.