Getty Images Look to your left and then to your right. Is that pretty girl Phi Beta Kappa? Marry her. 
 
 Class of 2012, 
 
 I became sick of commencement speeches at about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits of wisdom to 22-year-olds—which was quite a feat given that I was 23 at the time. In the decades since, I've spent most of my career teaching economics and public policy. In particular, I've studied happiness and well-being, about which we now know a great deal. And I've found that the saccharine and over-optimistic words of the typical commencement address hold few of the lessons young people really need to hear about what lies ahead. Here, then, is what I wish someone had told the Class of 1988: 
 
 1. Your time in fraternity basements was well spent. 
 
 The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years. 
 
 Charles Wheelan checks in on Mean Street with some advice for the Class of 2012: pay very close attention, because there are key things you need to know that you won't learn by simply donning a cap and gown. Photo: AP. 
 
 2. Some of your worst days lie ahead. Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them. I'll spare you my personal details, other than to say that one year after college graduation I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire. 
 
 3. Don't make the world worse. I know that I'm supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I'm going to lower the bar here: Just don't use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that "changing the world" also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it. 
 
 4. Marry someone smarter than you are. When I was getting a Ph.D., my wife Leah had a steady income. When she wanted to start a software company, I had a job with health benefits. (To clarify, having a "spouse with benefits" is different from having a "friend with benefits.") You will do better in life if you have a second economic oar in the water. I also want to alert you to the fact that commencement is like shooting smart fish in a barrel. The Phi Beta Kappa members will have pink-and-blue ribbons on their gowns. The summa cum laude graduates have their names printed in the program. Seize the opportunity! 
 
 Related Video 
 
 Successful people are often asked to deliver a university or college's graduation speech, Here are some words of wisdom offered in commencement speeches over the last few years from President Obama, Conan O'Brien, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Carter. 
 
 5. Help stop the Little League arms race. Kids' sports are becoming ridiculously structured and competitive. What happened to playing baseball because it's fun? We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn't about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message we are sending from birth is that if you don't make the traveling soccer team or get into the "right" school, then you will somehow finish life with fewer points than everyone else. That's not right. You'll never read the following obituary: "Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place." 
 
 6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives. 
 
 7. Your parents don't want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn't always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." Great quote, but I am willing to bet that Teddy's mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer. 
 
 8. Don't model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee—and so on. But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your performance. Don't let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in order to meet a friend for dinner, then you are "shirking" your work. But it's also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship. That's just not how we usually think of it. 
 
 9. It's all borrowed time. You shouldn't take anything for granted, not even tomorrow. I offer you the "hit by a bus" rule. Would I regret spending my life this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don't get hit by a bus. 
 
 10. Don't try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn't, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid. 
 
 Good luck and congratulations. 
 
 — Adapted from "10½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said," by Charles Wheelan. To be published May 7 by W.W. Norton & Co. ||||| 
 
 Laugh now... (Jessica Hill/AP) 
 
 The one trouble with this piece is that all the observations seemed vaguely familiar — from graduation speeches. 
 
 Here’s what they really don’t tell you. 
 
 1) Next year, you will probably be unemployed, or live in your parents’ basement, or be unemployed and live in your parents’ basement. This is not cruel. It is factual. Fifty percent of new graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. And 29 percent of 25-to-34 year-olds live in what the poll-taker was kind enough to refer to as “multi-generational living arrangements” rather than “your mother’s basement” or “your old room with all the anime posters and Admiral Ackbar figures carelessly splayed on every surface.” You will probably have the urge to respond to this by going to graduate school. Why not? Your only areas of expertise so far are “lacking marketable skills” and “having lots of debt,” so this is a logical next step. Later, when your six friends who did manage to find jobs after college wind up getting booted from the workforce, they will be unable to compete ever again because everyone around them will have six PhDs, at least one of them in a useful field that does not include “Medieval” in its name. 
 
 2) You will keep in touch with friends, but not the ones you thought. Of the friends who were so obviously friends for life that just before graduating you lovingly tattooed each other’s names across your faces, some will stay in touch and others won’t. But this is okay. That person from middle school you never talked to will wind up in the same city and turn out to know good places to play Skeeball, and a few years later you might wind up in each other’s weddings. Speaking of weddings. . . 
 
 3) When you hit a certain point in your 20s, everyone around you starts to get married, for no apparent reason and without any warning. This is first cute, then alarming, like Justin Bieber. First you go to one wedding. “This is nice,” you say to yourself. “Open bar!” Then suddenly it’s like popcorn kernels. Several start popping at once. Poofy white things surround you, along with the vague smell of burning. “This is fine,” you say to yourself. “They are my friends and I am happy for them! Open bar!” Then by your sixth or seventh you become the disgruntled person wandering from table to table in unsteady new heels muttering that “You know, all relationships end in break-ups or in death.” On the bright side you stop being invited shortly after that. 
 
 4) In life, no one rewards you for performing mundane tasks. You do not get gold stars for cleaning your shower. Most effective cleaning product commercials are based upon the false premise that a bald man or anthropomorphic sponge will give you a high-five once you finish grouting the tile. This is seldom the case, unless you accidentally inhaled some of the cleaning product as you worked. 
 
 5) Regardless of anything the rampant college hookup culture has taught you, you are suddenly expected to Start Going On Dates. You are no longer you; you are a Single Person who needs to Find a Human Companion, if only so he can accompany you to weddings. This leads to actual dates, with actual people, where you have to sit at restaurants with or without tablecloths and talk about your hobbies and/or interests. Otherwise you’ll wind up at the candy shower alone! That’s a fate worse than halitosis! (Adulthood consists of the creeping realization that the events you thought romantic comedies made up to generate conflict actually happen.) 
 
 6) Something strange happens to music as you age. You can remember more and more of it, and you notice that the hip youngsters around you cannot. This is deeply alarming. Before you age out of the coveted 18-to-24 demographic, take as many audience preference surveys as you can so that you can continued to enjoy entertainment for a few years after your views cease to be relevant. 
 
 7) Being young isn’t everything, but it’s a good thing. Life can be divided into two sections: the years when you know that if you fall over you are unlikely to break a hip, and the years when you’re not so sure. Enjoy your time in the first half! You are probably going to live a long time, thanks to modern medicine. Of course, you will spend most of your life trying to fund your parents and grandparents’ elaborate health and retirement benefits, benefits premised on the basic belief that they will never die and that until they do, they deserve to live in a style generally reserved for absolute monarchs of the 18th century. Voting will not change this. They outnumber you. So what I mean is: Make those weekends count! 
 
 8) As Cynthia Heimel says, “There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.” 
 
 9) You have no idea how personal finance works. Actually. There are only two things that your education should have taught you: how to deal with having money and how to deal with not having money. (“Go to grad school?”) It has taught you neither. Instead, you know the names of Renaissance poets and different things you can do with ribosomes in the privacy of your home. People have offered Millennials financial literacy tests and their only conclusion is that we have no idea what to do with money. Save it? Spend it? Invest it in something that will accrue in value over time, like ironic wall-paintings of Michael Jackson? Who knows? You had better figure it out quickly, though, before someone arrests you for tax fraud. 
 
 10) Some days will be better than others. Some days will be worse than others. If you are lucky enough to be graduating now, you will have the creeping sense that all your worries fall under the heading of First World Problems. “No one who owns this many sweaters is entitled to be unhappy,” you will tell yourself. This is wrong. Let yourself be unhappy because it will tell you what needs fixing. When your body feels pain, it alerts you that something is wrong. If the 1950s taught us anything, it is that you can only spend so much time pretending to be contented before you rupture something. 
 
 11) No one in book club has ever read the book. 
 
 More on commencements: 
 
 From Bill Nye to Michelle Obama: Notable Commencement Speakers This Year 
 
 Funniest commencement speeches of all time: 
 
 Enjoyed this? 
 
 Further sundry Petri opinions: 
 
 Stop Hugging 
 
 Facebook makes us worse than lonely 
 
 Is Shakespeare still relevant? 
 
 Also, I’m on Twitter: @petridishes
– Wish you could ditch the inspirational commencement speech for something a bit more realistic? So does Alexandra Petri. But she wasn’t satisfied with Charles Wheelan’s recent list in the Wall Street Journal, “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You,” because she kinda remembered hearing all of the observations it contained ... in commencement speeches. So, in the Washington Post, she offers up “the 10 things they really don’t tell you at graduation.” Get ready to be unemployed and living with mom and dad. She’s not trying to be cruel, just stating facts, she explains, and she has the statistics to prove it. Here's one: "29% of 25-to-34 year-olds live in what the poll-taker was kind enough to refer to as "multi-generational living arrangements" rather than "your old room with all the anime posters and Admiral Ackbar figures carelessly splayed on every surface." Don't expect a "gold star" for doing mundane chores like cleaning your bathroom. Though TV commercials may try to convince you that "a bald man or anthropomorphic sponge will give you a high-five" once you've mopped your floor, that'll only actually happen if you "accidentally inhaled some of the cleaning product as you worked." You should really, really appreciate your youth. "Life can be divided into two sections: the years when you know that if you fall over you are unlikely to break a hip, and the years when you’re not so sure," so make sure to have fun during that first part. Your education did not teach you the most important thing. Which is: "how to deal with having money and how to deal with not having money." Since it instead taught you all about the Renaissance poets, you’ll have to learn about personal finance on your own. Click for Petri’s full, amusing list, which includes a hilarious tip about book clubs.