I am a software engineer, and I want to begin with a story from my world.
New employees are often asked to update large systems called legacy systems. Legacy systems have been around for a long time and have been modified by many people.
The documentation is rarely up to date. This is called technical debt.
Sure enough, you will be asked to make a simple change and the system will crash.
What should you do? You cannot hide what happened. You must tell someone as soon as possible. But it can be scary to admit your mistake.
But in the software world, we can roll back the system to a working version. Once it is back online you and your team can conduct experiments to determine why the changes led to the failure.
The root cause is likely not your changes. But once the cause is found your team can update the documentation and add risk monitoring practices to prevent the system from failing again from the same cause.
Professors make it sound like everything in your life should go smoothly. But the truth is: If you are doing meaningful work (engineering, business, education, health, the arts, public service, entrepreneurship), there will be friction.
I’d like to suggest an agile strategy to guide your life:
Build bravely, revise often.
That’s it. Four words. A life strategy. An engineering strategy. A human strategy.
There’s an old proverb sometimes attributed to Sigmund Freud, “if youth knew, if age could.”
One interpretation of this proverb is that young people lack the wisdom that experience teaches and older people lack the energy to do what youngsters can do.
But do you really need to choose between energy and wisdom?
You are in a rare position right now. You are leaving UM–Dearborn with the momentum of youth and the experiences needed to make a difference.
You’ve fought your way through long study sessions, group projects, family responsibilities and moments when the only thing you could do was keep going.
You didn’t just learn from books here; you learned to deliver projects under real world constraints.
Let’s talk about risks, mistakes, pivots and disagreement. These are concepts we all need to work on.
First: don’t be afraid to take risks.
Not reckless risks, but smart ones.
The kind where you can explain your reasoning. The kind where you learn something whether it works or not. The kind where your future self will thank you for having the courage to try.
Apply for a role you think you’re “not quite ready for.” Volunteer to lead a project task everyone is avoiding. Start a side project with a small audience. Ask the dumb question everyone on your team is afraid to ask.
You will never feel fully ready. But readiness is a decision, not a feeling.
Ships are safe in the harbor but that is not where ships are intended to go.
Second: Learn from your mistakes.
Don’t just endure them. Mistakes are inevitable when you do work that matters.
The key is to convert them into learning. Confidence is born from surviving failure.
In engineering we do postmortems. We look at what happened, what signals we missed, where our processes failed, and how we can design the system so one person’s mistake doesn’t become everyone’s disaster.
We don’t do this to assign blame. We do it because we care about reliability. We want to repeat our successes, not our failures.
You can do the same with your life. When something goes wrong, ask four questions:
1. What happened?
2. What were the costs?
3. What did I learn?
4. What will I do differently next time?
If you do this consistently, you can remove your fear of failure. You won’t fear mistakes; you will discover how to learn from them. If you’re an overachiever, and many Wolverines are, remember perfectionism is different from excellence.
Excellence ships. Excellence learns. Excellence improves. Perfectionism stagnates.
Third: Be willing to change direction.
Many of you will have more than one career (I have had several). Some of you will have more than one identity.
You’ll go from team member to team leader or from one industry to another. That is not instability. That is adaptation and growth.
The world you’re entering changes quickly. Tools evolve. Entire fields change overnight.
What looks like a straight path to some may be a set of pivots that someone had the courage to make in real time. You are allowed to update your plan.
Sailors cannot change the wind, so they adjust the sails to travel where they want to go. In software development, we use iterative processes.
We don’t say, “The first release wasn’t perfect therefore the product is a failure.” We say, “Great — now we have users, data, and feedback. Time to create the next prototype.”
You can treat your life the same way. Version 1.0 is not your destiny. It’s your starting point.
Now let me add an example from game design: Game designers learn to iterate products quickly because the feedback that comes from players is honest in ways that test cases are not. Designers create what they believe is a perfectly balanced game (beautiful mechanics, elegant progression, fair rewards) and then players show them the weaknesses within minutes.
Players will find a dominant strategy. They will camp near spawn points. They optimize the fun out of the game economy. They ignore the storyline and spend three days using a bot to collect useless hats instead of exploring.
Great designers don’t take this personally. They use the results of playtests to improve the game. They watch for places where players get bored or frustrated. They patch the exploit, rebalance the weapon, redesign the level and adjust the incentives.
Not because they were wrong the first time, but because they want to create something new.
People who thrive are not the ones who “got it perfect” on the first build. They’re the ones who can say, with confidence: “We learned something. Let’s update.”
Fourth: Not everyone has to agree with you.
Respect people who disagree with you. You will often collaborate with brilliant people who see the world differently than you do. Some will challenge your ideas. Some will challenge your assumptions. A few will challenge your patience. Your job is not to win every argument. Your job is to become the kind of person who can learn from other humans and build something better.
You can listen without surrendering what matters to you. You can keep your values and your humanity. One way to lower the temperature of a heated conversation is to ask: “What experiences led you to that conclusion?”
It turns a debate into discovery. It doesn’t guarantee agreement, but it does increase understanding. Understanding is what makes teams function well, how communities endure and how democracies survive.
Differences are not threats; they are opportunities to learn.
The cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget believed that people learn through a process that creates tension. When people encounter information that doesn’t fit their existing mental model, they feel discomfort or anxiety. Many people call this cognitive dissonance.
Piaget’s point was that discomfort is not a sign you’re failing. It’s a sign you’re learning.
People reduce this anxiety through a mechanism called equilibration. They either squeeze the new information into their old model, or they change the model itself.
Talking with people who see the world differently is good. It can be a cognitive upgrade. Sometimes an “obvious” truth is only obvious in your own head.
So don’t run from discomfort. Manage it. Learn from it. Let it refine you.
Graduates, in a few minutes you’ll walk across this stage and change your relationship with the University of Michigan-Dearborn. But it won’t end. You will carry your Dearborn lessons into every room you enter. You will carry its standards.
Show others your grit. Demonstrate your teamwork skills. Demonstrate the confidence you gained by accomplishing more than you thought you could on a project.
So here is my closing charge to you — it is simple, but not easy:
Build bravely, revise often.
Take some risks. Tell the truth when things aren’t working. Learn from your mistakes.
Update your plan based on new information.
Hold conversations with people who disagree with you. Remember to open doors for other people.
My office door is always open to you,
2026 Graduating Class of UM–Dearborn, whatever you build next — careers, families, companies, communities, systems, movements — do it with courage and humility.
Do it with the boldness of youth and the perspective of age.
Congratulations.
Go Blue and Go Dearborn!
This speech has been lightly edited for style.
