Escape the victim status! Joseph Brodsky's famous speech

Respect life with its charms and difficulties

Escape the victim status!

Fragments of Joseph Brodsky's famous speech to the graduating class of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor Stadium in December 1988:

1. Try to expand your vocabulary and treat it like you would your bank account. Give it a lot of attention and try to accumulate dividends. It's not meant to boost your eloquence in the bedroom or on the road to professional success, nor to turn you into a worldly savant—though it will eventually become that. The goal is to be able to express yourself as fully and accurately as possible, in a word, the goal is your balance.
   Every day many changes occur in a person's soul, but the way of expression often remains the same. His ability to clarify lags behind experience. Feelings, nuances, thoughts and perceptions that remain unnamed and unspoken or veiled in approximate formulations accumulate inside the personality and can lead to a psychological explosion or breakdown.
   To avoid this, you don't have to become a bookworm. You just need to build up a vocabulary and update it every day. Read books and poems! They are quite cheap, but even the most expensive ones cost less than a visit to the psychiatrist.
2. Don't trust politicians too much — not because they are often not very clever and dishonest, but because of the too large scale of work even of the best of them. At best they can reduce social evil but not eradicate it. No matter how significant the improved quality of life is, it will always be negligibly small because there will always be at least one person who will not benefit from that improvement.
3. The world is imperfect. There never was and never will be a golden age. The only thing that will happen to the world is that it will become bigger, more populated, but it will not increase in size. No matter how fairly the person you choose divides the pie, the world won't get any bigger, and the portions will certainly get smaller. In light of this statement, or rather, in the dark, you should rely on your home-cooked meal. That is, to manage the world independently, or at least that part of it that is available to you and is within the limits of your capabilities.
4. Try to be humble. And now we are too many, and soon we will be even more. Scrambling for a place under the Sun is certainly at the expense of others who don't. Just because you have to step on someone's toes doesn't mean you have to stand on their shoulders. From this vantage point you will see the human sea plus those who have taken a similar position to yours - visible to all but unreliable - the position of those called the rich and famous.
5. You want sometime in a bright moment become rich and famous or both? Don't give in to this thought entirely. To covet what someone else has is to lose your own uniqueness. On the other hand, however, it stimulates mass production…
6. At all costs, avoid ascribing victim status to yourself. No matter how dire the situation you find yourself in, try not to blame it on outside forces - history, country, superiors, race, parents, phases of the moon, your childhood, being late on the potty, etc. Right now , in which you place the blame on something, you undermine your own resolve to change.
7. Respect life not only for its charms but also for its difficulties. They are part of the game and the good thing about them is that they are not a lie. Whenever you are desperate or on the edge of despair, when you have troubles or difficulties, remember - life speaks to you in the only language it knows well.

Source: https://spisanie8.bg/novini/istoriya/2895-begayte-ot-statuta-na-zhurtva.html