Greg Olsen's University of Miami Commencement Speech

A few weeks ago, Greg went back to the University of Miami to deliver the commencement address. He shared what it meant to him and the message he left the graduates with. We wanted to share it with you.

Get Better Forever 

Reflections from my commencement address at the University of Miami

A few weeks ago, I went back to the University of Miami to give the commencement speeches for the engineering and business schools. Twenty years ago I sat in those exact same seats as a graduate, with The Rock at the podium giving the speech and my family somewhere up in the crowd. It was a different seat this time, and I want to tell you what it was like, because I'm still sitting with it. 

You forget how big a place can feel when you haven't really stood in it for a while. The campus is the same in all the ways that matter and different in all the ways it should be. 

My wife Kara was in the crowd. So were her sister and our brother-in-law, both Miami grads too. We met here. She missed my first ever college touchdown because she was tailgating in the Orange Bowl parking lot with her girlfriends, and I'm still bringing it up 22 years later. People assume Miami is a football story for me. It's really a family story. Football was just how I got in the door. 

I'm not a guy who pretends to have it all figured out, and I told the graduates as much. I'm not some unparalleled source of wisdom about to launch them into success and fortune. But there's one idea I really do believe in, and it's the one I wanted them to take with them: get better forever. 

If you took a snapshot of my life at any given moment and lined me up against everyone else in the picture, I'd never be in the lead. Not at Notre Dame, not as a freshman at Miami staring across the line at guys who looked like grown men, not in my first year at Fox, not now. The lead was never the point for me. The pace was. Just keep getting better, forever. 

Mario Cristobal was a young position coach when I got to Miami. He demanded something out of me that I hadn't really had demanded of me outside my own family. He saw something I couldn't see yet. A lot of what I've carried into the rest of my life started with the way he coached me as a freshman. 

Sometimes to be great, don't forget to be good.

Greg OlsenFounder

Earlier this year I gave another speech, in front of a much smaller room. I spoke at my brother Chris's funeral. He was 41 when he got diagnosed with brain cancer. He didn't make it to 42. What kept hitting me, sitting with him and our family those last couple of days, was how fitting it was that the person I knew who lived life the fullest had also lived one of the shortest. 

So that's what I left them with, and it's what I'll leave you with too. We spend a lot of energy chasing greatness. Chase it. Start the business. Take the trip. Ask the pretty girl out, try a new sport. But on the way there, don't forget the other part: 

Sometimes to be great, don't forget to be good. 

That one's served me more than any of the rest of it.

Watch my full speech here: