Drake’s Graduation Speech: The Art of Following Through

Earlier this month, at the ripe old age of 26, Drake graduated from high school. Aubrey Graham (his real name) dropped out of high school in 2001 to appear on DeGrassi: The Next Generation and then launch is hip hop career. Naturally his school asked their celebrity high school graduate to give a speech. He sweetly gave a shout-out to a teacher, Kim Janzen, who helped him through the credits required the graduate.

It’s not about the popular kids, it’s not about the kids that don’t feel as popular, because all that changes later in life. And I promise you, I’m 26 years old, it changes. What this is about today, for all of you, is about the art of following through. …

I reached a point in my life where I realized that there aren’t material things that can give me the excitement that I’m looking for. There’s a void, there’s a gap in my life that I need to fill and I needed to sit and think long and hard what that was. And it was the fact that I had left a gaping hole in my story of following through. So for five months, we talked back and forth on emails, we worked, we wrote papers, I studied for an exam, we figured out how I didn’t close my chapter of following through. Sometimes it’s about going there, not getting there. Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination. And sometimes when you get there, you’ll look back and you’ll realize that you wish you could go there again because all of the experiences you went through are the reason that you are who you are today.