Top 9 of the Best Motivational Speeches Ever

What could we potentially reach by listening to motivational speeches? Isn’t it look like wasting of time? No. A worthy motivational speech can be an impulse to action. It motivates you for something. Strong speeches make you understand that you are not simply a pointless human being in society. Every individual is important. As well as you.

Have you ever had an internal feeling that makes you look for more essential goals for a long time? If your answer is yes, you have to act. Foremost, you should have an impulse that will bring you to that action. Try to consider an authoritative personality. For instance:  Jim Morrison. He was one of the most fascinating personalities of the previous century.

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

That is only one of the many pieces of wisdom he presented to the world. These are not simply words. These words make you think. They force you to act.

Jim Morrison mentioned that in his interview at that moment when motivational speeches were not that popular. Nowadays, plenty of people are trying to make a difference in applying this method. Are you ready to begin researching the best motivational speeches that will impact your life?

Here is a list of 9 of the impressive motivational speeches ever

1. Al Pacino – Any Given Sunday (1999)

Any Given Sunday, Al Pacino’s speech from American Football drama, is our top in the list.

This widespread motivational speech truly makes your heart beat faster – ideally to watch before you finish a heavy day.

The motivational speech turns around the thought of inches being so significant in American Football, even if we have used not to notice them.

He says about various ways that his team can reach benefits on their competitors, even if it is only an inch at a time. He announces:

When we add up all those inches
that’s going to make the difference
between WINNING and LOSING
between LIVING and DYING

This idea is suitable within the whole life – that people who do their utmost effort tend to meet success more often than not.

And usually, you will not see it at the beginning, but as Pacino says, it’s the sum of all the little parts which bring you to victory.

Motivational speeches like this one inspire you when you need them most of all.

2. Jim Carrey: Commencement Speech at Maharishi University of Management (2014)

Jim Carrey could spend his life being a poor comedian, but in lucky 2014, he united classic Carrey humor with memorable insight at Maharishi University of Management’s graduation ceremony. He started his speech dishing punchlines, but in the end, he revealed secrets of his upbringing and the place of the fear in his destiny. You can see the astonishment in the student’s eyes in the added video.

My father could have been a great comedian but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe jog as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don’t want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

3. David Foster Wallace: “This Is Water” (2005)

Starting from the first minutes David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, in which he doubts about conditions of a commencement speech, it is plain that instead, he wants to share some ideas from his own rich experience. The sense of his speech: most people do not notice its own close-mindedness. We imagine ourselves as the centers of our own, personal universes, instead of noticing the greater, more interconnected picture.

If you mechanically think that you are aware of what reality is, who and what is truly significant, if you wish to deal with your default setting, then you, like me, perhaps will not think about possibilities that aren’t irritating and poor. But if you truly know how to think, how to draw attention, then you will definitely have other variants. It will practically be within your capacity to experience an overfull, hot, slow, consumer hell-type case as not only important but saint –  on fire with the same power that lit the stars: love, friendship, he mystical oneness of all things deeply in the soul.

4. J.K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Speech (2008)

This one for sure will make you laugh. J.K Rowling possesses the unique ability to make the audience think and laugh at the same moment. At one moment, the author becomes serious and highlights the central idea of this speech: disclosing things she wants she had known at her own graduation, and the significant lessons she has gained between that day and this moment.

There is one detail of this speech that makes it various from others on our list: a conversation about poorness. The author says the real truth about it. There is no romanticizing of poorness. As she claims, only dullards do that. This situation causes fright, stress, anxiety.

It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something by which to pride yourself, but poverty itself, is romanticized only by fools. But I feared at your age was not poverty, but failure… Now, I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted, and well educated, that you have never known heartbreak, hardship, or heartache. Talent and intelligence, never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates… ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure.

Nevertheless, what she scared most of all for herself when she was a teenager was not poorness. It was a fiasco.
Basically, this is a speech about the advantages of a fiasco. Yes, such an expression as an advantage from fiasco exists. J.K. Rowling is real evidence of that.

5. Steve Jobs: “How to Live Before You Die” (2005)

Steve Jobs, one of the central personalities behind tech titanium Apple’s success, is the following in our list of the best motivational speeches ever.

In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, the ex-Apple CEO goes deeply into his own journey as a businessman, and he says honestly about the problems that he is faced with and how he resisted all the obstacles on his way.

In this standard motivational speech Jobs says how he decided to leave a college and why this was one of the most significant periods of his life.

What is the reason?

He told that he left college to visit classes which were really interesting for him, then learning the subjects which he was not deeply passionate about.

One of that classes he visited after he left college was calligraphy. He was so inspired by the great standards of handwriting.

Some people may find this choice weird, but he connects the experience that he received from that class to the font selection that he implemented in Apple gadgets.

If Steve had never visited that calligraphy class, he would not have thought that much about an apparently little detail, like fonts, but Apple was the first enterprise to add various typefaces to their operating systems. Further, he says:

You can’t connect the dots if you’re looking forward, you can only do it looking backwards. So, you need to keep moving forward and hope that the dots align somehow.

The keynote from this widespread motivational speech is long-life learning. We keep growing and getting updated information. It is all about what we select to do with that data which really identifies us.

As Steve told:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

6. Denzel Washington: “Fall Forward” (2011)

In his 2011 UPenn commencement speech, Denzel Washington underlined three main reasons why we have to accept fiasco in order to reach success. Foremost, at the beginning every person will fail, so you have to just realize it. Second, If you do not fail, it means, that you really are not good enough in trying. And the last, at the end of the day, fiasco will help you to find out the way you want to move.

Fall forward. Here’s what I mean: Reggie Jackson struck out twenty-six-hundred times in his career – the most in the history of baseball. But you don’t hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs. Fall forward. Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that? I didn’t know that – because 1,001 was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.

My wife told me this great expression: To get something you’ve never had, you’ve got to do something, you never did.

7. Eric Thomas – I Can, I Will, I Must (2018)

Eric Thomas is an outstanding speechmaker, and in this classic motivational speech, he gives us a chance to believe that we can always resist all the difficulties, no matter what the complexity.

Thomas reminds this sentence within all the speech:

I can get through this. I will get through this. I must get through this.

He also intelligently mentioned our relatives as a reliable source of motivation in this motivational speech. He asks us to concentrate on the 3 closest persons and challenges us to question our own solutions when it comes to inspiration.

You gotta think about those people every day.

You have some days when you think about hitting the snooze button? The days you don’t feel like getting up, just think about them.

Instead of being sluggish and conceited, we have to think about our beloved ones, and question what they’d think if we decide to slack off.

Fairly, it’s great doing something for yourself, but realizing that you are a person to be proud of in the eyes of your beloved ones makes everything feel a few times better. This is one of the central messages from his motivational speech.

And that’s a reason why his one of the best motivational speeches ever. It takes the responsibility away from working for yourself and instead concentrates on putting in the work for people you couldn’t bear to let down.

8. Bill Gates’ Harvard Commencement Address (2007)

Remarkably humorous and discerning, Microsoft establisher Bill Gates’ Harvard commencement address presents a side of the successful businessman that might not have been that obvious despite the great fame and richness. He is perhaps Harvard’s most famous graduate, but he admits that the university’s environment of energy and knowledge was motivating. He mentioned that it is significant to get an education, but also to know the world structure.

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: ‘Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.’ That’s one of the funniest parts of this speech. Gates didn’t graduate. He is Harvard’s most successful dropout. He makes a big point, though: the fact that he dropped out doesn’t make academic life less of an important experience. Gates used to sit in on classes he hadn’t even signed up for.

As he mentioned in his speech, one of the most valuable moments of being a student is being in that center full of energy and knowledge. Getting an education is meaningful, and it is a privilege. Nevertheless, getting to know the modern world and society is also essential, even though it’s terrific sometimes.

9. Matthew McConaughey – University of Houston Speech

The last one in our list of motivational speeches is Matthew McConaughey, with his commencement speech at the University of Houston.

The Oscar-winning actor conveys some very important thoughts during his speech, but the one that impressed me most of all was how he told about joy being a “permanent approach”.

McConaughey told that:

Joy is always in process, it’s always under construction.

He told how earlier he used to judge the level of his success on aspects which he thought were significant for him, like the amount of received awards, or the sum of money his films earned.

But, it was only when he decided to concentrate on the whole process of making a movie, and enjoying every detail of it, then he met real success in those aspects.

He realized, when he did everything step by step at a time, and honestly enjoyed his work, then the things just fell into place.

Define success for yourself.

Matthew McConaughey introduced one of the best motivational speeches for the last couple of years.

So, here is our list of the most impressive motivational speeches. We truly hope that you liked them.

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