“Eminence is the one universal precondition to being a commencement speaker, and an implied (often explicit) theme of the speeches is, ‘Here lieth the path to success and happiness.’ There are two problems with this formula. The first is that any narrative of success is bound to be at least a little bit dull. The second is that successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so. […] Failure, on the other hand, is Harvard, Yale, and the University of Heidelberg rolled into one.”