“Learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime. Even the termI promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious. You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to. For example, I had a phase where, for the entirety of 2012, I dressed like a 1950s housewife. But you know what? I was having fun.
I’m not afraid of these things because I understand why fear happens. It happens because sometimes in our guts, we know that if we acknowledge our fears and embrace our fears, we may beat our best ambition. I want you to hold onto your fear, get to know it, give it a name, give it a nickname. But never give it control.”“Now, I didn’t attend Tennessee State, but I am a fellow HBCU graduate. And I’d like to share a little story with you.
I stand before you today as the vice-president of the United States of America and as a proud graduate of an HBCU to say: There is no limit to your capacity for greatness and there is no obstacle you cannot overcome, and there is no barrier you cannot break.”“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it.