Exactly 20 years ago, on May 21, 2005, author David Foster Wallace stood before the graduating class at Kenyon College and delivered the annual commencement address.

The speech completely rewired my brain.

Each year, I reread it. Each year, it hits differently.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the speech––known as This Is Water––I want to share four lessons that changed how I see the world (and continue to shape how I move through it)...

1. The most important realities hide in plain sight.

The speech begins with a simple parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

The most important realities hide in plain sight.

Our beliefs. Our assumptions. Our understandings. Our defaults. They shape our entire reality without us even realizing they exist.

Foster Wallace adds:

The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

This has become one of my core operating principles:

Life is a game of awareness and action: Awareness to understand something's importance and action to execute on that importance.

But one-time awareness is never enough.

Awareness is perishable.

You may know something in a moment, but if you don't know it in the moment, it's impossible to act upon.

The most important realities hide in plain sight. Shine a light on them.

2. Check your arrogance at the door.

The speech continues with another story, one about an argument between an atheist and a religious man at a bar in the Alaskan wilderness:

And the atheist says: "Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.'"

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive."

The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that happened was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

Same event. Two radically different interpretations. Both expressed with full certainty and self-assuredness.

The problem:

Blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

Most of us walk through life with absolute conviction that we're right––about everything. Politics. People. Past. Future. We almost never consider the possibility that we're wrong about anything.

Foster Wallace closes his point with a goal in mind:

To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

As Mark Twain famously said:

"It aint what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Create space for humility. What might lead someone to believe the exact opposite of what you believe?

The world is filled with an unbelievably diverse array of colors––open your eyes to see them.

Check your arrogance at the door.

3. You get to choose your thoughts.

We all walk through life with a pre-installed, self-centered programming.

Foster Wallace puts it like this:

It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth...the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

This default setting will silently shape everything about your daily experience. You will see and live life through its lens.

He paints a picture of a long day at work followed by traffic jams, a crowded supermarket, and annoying characters. Your default setting is to experience this scene with frustration and anger.

But there is an alternative:

If you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

You cannot change reality, but you always get to choose how you interpret and experience it.

You can choose frustration, or you can choose compassion. You can choose self-centered annoyance, or you can choose gratitude.

You get to choose your thoughts.

4. You get to choose what you worship.

The final lesson from the speech is the most impactful of them all:

There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship...

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough...

Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly...

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

Foster Wallace shines a light on the problem:

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

This final lesson speaks to me because it is, in some ways, the entire ethos of ​my book​.

When you slip blindly into a worship of these cultural defaults––money, material things, power, status––you will never feel free.

True freedom comes from choice. The ability to choose your worship. To choose how you measure value. To live by design, not by default.

You get to choose what you worship.

Remember: This Is Water

The speech concludes with a powerful final reminder:

The real value of a real education...has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water. This is water.

20 years later it feels more relevant than ever.

The world is louder. The distractions stronger. The default settings deeper.

But as always, you are in control. You are entirely capable of squeezing everything you want out of this life.

The water's great. So, let's start swimming.