Finding Your Truth: Living a Soulful Life

John Legend gives a beautiful, stirring "soulful" commencement speech at UPenn. It brought tears to my eyes.



When you look at the list of crises we face, there is a common thread that ties many of them together.

The people who created these crises or allowed them to happen either didn't look hard enough for the truth, or didn't listen to those voices that could tell them where the truth lived.

We lost thousands of lives and spent billions (possibly trillions) of dollars fighting in and rebuilding Iraq, all based on the false premise that there were weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda and caused 9/11.

All falsehoods that were allowed to poison the debate while dissension and fact-checking came too little, too late.

We've spent trillions of dollars bailing out banks with phantom profits that were selling financial products whose values had no grounding in reality.

The fact that some of them didn't even understand their own product didn't stop them from getting millions of people to buy into it.

Meanwhile the regulators and the press failed to ask the right questions and bear witness to the house of cards until it had already collapsed.

From the war in Iraq to credit-default swaps to the internet bubble to the real estate bubble, too often we got caught up in the hype and failed to see the real truth...

Too often we become apathetic. We see the lies, we see the obfuscation, the deception. But we fail to point it out.

We're afraid to rain on the parade. Afraid to rock the boat. Afraid to pursue the truth.