It’s weird. Standing on this stage. In this arena. I’m looking at a thousand faces. Many of them are about to be college graduates. And they’re all looking back at me so hopefully, so full of wonder, so wide-eyed and eager, as if to say, “I hope this idiot’s speech isn’t too long.”

Right now, I am making a commencement speech at Northwest Florida State College. I am wearing a suit. Also deodorant. Everyone is sitting in the basketball arena, clad in big robes and flat hats, staring directly at me. I believe many of the graduates are also wearing deodorant.

Most of the graduates are young. Their parents are present, quietly reading through their programs as I speak. Scanning the alphabetical list of graduates’ names printed on the program. I can see many parents are just now realizing how many graduate names are on the program today. If, by chance, someone’s last name is, for example, “Williams,” or “Zimmerman,” these people will be stuck in this arena until the installation of the next pope.

Funny thing. This basketball arena wasn’t here when I attended the school, long ago, shortly after the end of the Spanish-American War. Back before most of these graduates were born.

Northwest Florida State wasn’t even called that. We were Okaloosa-Walton Community College back then. We were just a couple outdated brick buildings, some double-wide trailers, and a drinking fountain that didn’t work.

I attended this school as an adult. On a whim, I walked into Admissions Building C, and I told the ladies behind the desk that I wanted to go to college. I told them I was a middle-school dropout. I told them I had quit school in the seventh grade after my father died.

I told them we were poor folks. My mother lived in a FEMA trailer. I drove a vehicle that predated the Carter Administration. I worked construction by day, I played music in beach bars by night.

I had no transcripts. No school experience. It was a wonder I even cud even spel my nam.

I told the woman behind the desk that I was probably wasting my time applying to college. There was no way the powers that be would let a loser like me into this school. Maybe I should just leave.

The woman smiled. And I’ll never forget when that kindhearted woman behind the desk in Building C looked me square in the eye and said, “When in doubt, just pretend you know what the hell you’re doing.”

The ladies behind the admissions desk made a way for me. I still don’t know how those women got someone like me into college, nor do I know whether their actions were, technically, legal.

The ladies showed me how to get financial aid. They helped me purchase used textbooks online. They showed me how to change my own life. That same afternoon, I went to a thrift store and bought my first backpack. I purchased my first pencil sharpener.

College was the greatest twelve years of my life. On this campus, I completed remedial high-school education courses. I completed college courses. I sat in classrooms alongside construction workers, ditch diggers, plumbers, military officers, infantrymen, and Hooters waitresses.

I learned how to write the English language on this campus.

I did homework in my car, parked in this parking lot, while choking down Whataburger. I attended night classes, with tired professors, and dedicated students who sometimes brought their toddlers to class, and frequently changed their toddlers’ dirty diapers right on top of their desks, showing the entire classroom their child’s bare white aspirations.

When I graduated, we did the ceremony in Building K. I don’t even know if Building K exists anymore. There was a small, plywood stage in the old cafeteria. There, I received a little piece of paper with my name on it.

That little piece of paper changed everything. Not because it led me to a career. Not because the paper made me somebody different. I’m still the same guy I was back then, only with better auto insurance. But that piece of paper led me here. To you.

I am standing on this platform, in an arena, looking directly at the future of America. And the future of America is actually listening to what I have to say. Well, maybe sixty-percent of the future is listening.

Ironically, the future of America is waiting for me to offer some bit of wisdom for their lives because that is what the college faculty paid me to do, although many members of the college faculty are currently wondering whether they made a poor decision.

But I do have something to share with you. It is the only wisdom I have. This wisdom came to me a long, long time ago. Over in Building C. It is sage wisdom which I am putting to use at this very moment, while standing behind this podium.

When in doubt, just pretend you know what you’re doing.