they shape their decision-making priorities. relying on values-based guideposts helps leaders deal with that challenge of making those important decisions. these priorities lay a foundation for continuing long- term success of an enterprise. they help create a vision and help to build an inclusive community and they foster open communications and trust and excitement in the organization. leaders are the builders and the for cultures to be sustainable, they have to be based on values. thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you today. i hope they are helpful as you shape your own leadership approach.again, congratulations on your graduation from this outstanding university.thanks, everyone. [applause]

>> former president bill clinton was the commencement speaker of the graduation ceremony at howard university in washington, d.c.the historically black college. the former president's speeches about 30 minutes. >> thank you very much. >> thank you for meeting me outside. as the father of a grown daughter, i wonder if you shared my experience. it is humbling and rewarding and occasionally frustrating to have a child who knows more about everything than you do.

i think she thought she did when she was in high school, but eventually it was true. i'm honored to be here. ihank you for the degree. thank governor wilder for his introduction. we have been friends for a long time. we served together. i was impressed by his leadership as a governor and impressed by his servitude when he went back to serve as mayor. i asked him, don't you enjoy being there?-- mayor? he said, yeah, but the good news is you're closer to the people. the bad news is you are close enough for them to strangle you with few mess up. i want to say how great it is for me to be here at howard.

first, because in 2009, i was in that it as an honorary -- inducted as an honorary member of phi beta sigma, founded here many years ago. i'm not quite that old although i looked it. i'm also glad to be here because of the record of this great university. i want to try to talk about not only howard's leadership and preparing people for science and engineering and technology at , not onlys careers the record of the medical school in addressing the health disparities, and i have to say this, for the rest of my family, the phenomenal success you have

in producing women surgeons, which i am impressed with. is theportantly to me national leadership across all of these disciplines and the ones i didn't mess -- mention in service. thank you for the community service you have been here while at howard. thank you for your interest in doing this around the world. i had pulled from the records the number of commitments involving howard university students or faculty made through the clinton global initiative network. there were 10 different commitments. the most recent of which is that howard is one of 13 medical schools committed to totally retrain the healthcare workforce

in rwanda. [applause]why this is important is rwanda was devastated by genocide. all the hospitals except the one in the capital city were i, working with my friend, helped to rebuild them in every part of the country. but they do not want to take in any foreign assistance from anyone to do anything after 2020. they had to have hospitals and people trying to work their and -- work there and rural clinics and community health workers. they asked us to put together a mr. goolsbee put together plans to deal with life-threatening diseases agreed to finance this for a year now. you should be really proud of howard.

every one of these schools including howard are committed to doing this work for three or four years for only seven percent overhead. the lowest in history of any foreign assistance programs. you should be proud. [applause]you'll save countless lives for decades and decades. i am well aware that the commencement speech is the least important part of this day. i congratulate all of you who are here. your parents and your friends i think --oved ones. andk those who taught you supporters of howard who are here. i actually remember who gave my commencement speech 45 years ago next month.

i remember exactly what the speech was. we were like this on the lawn at georgetown.just across town. it started out to be a clear day. then a huge storm cloud came over. the lightning began to dance in the sky. a howard graduate, the mayor of washington, d.c., stood up at the podium and looked at the sky and the students and said, and-- congratulations. get out of here, we are all going to drown. [laughter] if you want a copy of my speech, you write me and i will send you one. good luck. and off we went. [laughter]

what did i learn from that? the most successful commencement speeches are brief and highly relevant. wherever you are, mr. mayor, thank you for the memories. when you leave here, it is important for you to remember that you have been empowered to do something most people who even ever lived cannot do. with the employment situation and the economic challenges, virtually all of you have the power to choose what you will do it may soundving.

self-evident, but most people who have ever lived, including hundreds of millions, even billions of people on the face of the earth today, never had that choice. they simply did whatever was at hand in whatever form it presented itself to put food on the table, and if they had a family to support, to support their families. you have a choice. the only bit of personal advice i have is this. try to do something that will make you happy. most people are happiest doing what they are best at. you have been given that gift. that is the ultimate gift howard has given you. worlde going out into a that is the most independent world in history. you can see it's not just in trade, but travel and increasing

diversity. look at how diverse america is. pretty soon there will be no majority race.there is no majority race in california or hawaii. there will be no majority in america. we will be one big group of people that will have to think of something to hold ourselves together. it is very important. the second thing i want to say to you is this -- the world has many challenges. you know them. there is too much inequality. it has manifested that college students have debt and wonder if it iswill ever repay it. manifested for most people who don't have a college degree because they have been working 10 years without much of a pay raise. it has manifested all over the world by a global jobs crisis for young people. when the arab spring occurred in

egypt and you saw the young square, thehrir reason they are there is because their system turned out 10,000 college graduates and the economy never produced anywhere near 400,000 jobs for college graduates. there's a lot of instability in the world. manifested by the financial crisis and how quickly it sped across the world, but also in how these wonderful, open borders could lead to what happened at the boston marathon. two boys come here looking for a college education and seem to be this or the other thing goes wrong. they decide that the only way for their lives to have meaning is take other people's lives away.

they were not empowered as you about a year before, you remember another young man tried to blow up a car bomb in times square in new york. he and his wife got college degrees in america. he had a job and a home and a home mortgage. like a lot of americans, he lost it. most of us were raised to face failure and pick ourselves up and go back to work and make something good happen. [applause] i hope you will do that. thisow, he thought isolated him from the rest of the world, so the only way his lead could matter is if he took away the lives of people he did not even know. so, the first decision we have to make before we can get to the

policies and all of the things that would change the world for the better is to share the create a world of shared prosperity where there is shared responsibility and everyone can be a part of a community as long as they believe in certain values, including equal treatment and the absence of violence and the notortunity to begin again. to be free of failure, the opportunity to begin again. this whole thing comes down to what we think the future would be better if we faced it with onen hands or closed fists. of the things that hardened me when president obama asked hillary to be secretary of state and she said yes, and they developed this not just working relationship, this amazing friendship, which i watched with great interest, is that they

had -- [laughter] come on, guys. [laughter] when you are as old as i am, you will be able to laugh about this huge.they had this campaign. tooth and nail. trench campaign, down to the end, he was big enough to ask her secretary and she was big enough to take it. they trusted each other. they both acknowledged the differences in their positions were not that profound and there was a world out there that had to be healed. a world that america had to make a place in. a world we had to try to make work for the things we believed in. it was amazing.

i would travel around the world with my foundation, and all these politicians i used to know would marvel at this. they said, -- this is the way this is supposed to work. we have differences, would have an election and it is over. people join hands and work together. washington is dysfunctional today largely because people can't find anything to work together on. they think our differences are more important than what we have in common. wait for the next election, maybe you will gain power. i say that because everyone of us has to make make a decision like that every day. you can't live in a world that is interdependent, where the walls come down, and borders look like nets. you cannot keep every bad thing

out anyway. unless most people believe that what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences. it turns out that there is not only a religious basis for this and all faiths, the quran says that all output different people on the are not that they might despise one another that they might come to know one another and learn more on another. the torah says that he who turns aside from a stranger might as well turn aside from the most a -- most high god. the christian bible says you should love your neighbor as yourself. it is the second most important commandment after loving god. the dom a pot of the buddhist says that if -- you are not truly human unless when you see the arrow piercing your neighbor's body, you feel as if

it had pierced yours. in addition to that, we now know that it is scientifically true. i spent $3 billion of your money [laughter] to finish the sequencing of the human genome. [applause] all the people and the scientists will tell you what has happened. it is the best money we have ever spent. it has generated best -- massive economic prosperity. we have learned patterns that make little children susceptible to certain kinds of cancers. medicines have been developed which have saved their lives. we have just begun. the most important thing for all of you is that when the genome was sequenced, we learned that every -- look around this crowd,

every non-age related difference you can see, including race and gender, are all rooted in one half of one percent of your genome. we are all 99.5% the same. because of our ability to do genetic history, we have found interesting relatives. you know. which has made for funny things. -- some politicians found out in their lineage embarrassments of their current politics. the most important thing is, we are 99 point five percent the same. we all spend 99.5% of our time thinking about the half of percent of us is different. don't we? all of us.

you walk down the street by store windows, you see your reflection, you think i wish i was taller. that is also focusing on the half percent. the half of percent matters. it gave einstein the biggest brain. that .5% means lebron james is hard to stop at the striving for the basket. the .5% matters. so does the 99 -- so does the 99.5%. that is why this service counts. when you leave here, i want you never to forget for the rest of your life in good times and bad that you live in an interdependent world, and we have to pull it together, which means you have to do something sometimes for somebody else

because they are just like you are. that is really important. the last point i want to make is, it is very good economics. a few years ago, and american journalists wrote a book called "the wisdom of crowds." he chronicled all these experiments, which come down to this. if i pick 20 of you at random from this crowd, and i put you in a nice room, and the person with the highest measured iq in this entire crowd, the biggest genius, when into another room, and we kept feeding questions in there, had you solve this problem, that problem, how can

we end world hunger, how can we create more jobs for young americans, how can we employ the long-term unemployed people who don't have high school diplomas. over time, the room would make better decisions than the room with the genius. it turns out, there is economic and social imperative that compels those of us who understand it to work together. creative cooperation works better than constant conflict. we forget that. if you can't share the future, unless you share responsibility for building it. i implore you to look for opportunities to do that. [applause] the last thing i would say is that you are living in a time

that is changing focus -- so fast, it is more likely than not a even if you start off fast, something will happen that you will find frustrating. you have to be able to begin again. you have to be able to begin again without blaming somebody else, in a way that isolates you from them. perhaps we will never know what tipped the scales of those young men who did the terrible thing the boston marathon. perhaps we will never fully understand what happened to that young man who drove the car bomb into times square. all the others who found that all their cooperation options were close, and the only way they could say hey look at me, i met her, i mean something, to take somebody else down.

if you were going to avoid that, you have to be able to begin again. the thing i liked about being here today is that you still like to laugh. it is a part all cultural -- is a part of our culture and it is essential in life. but i will close with this story. i hope you will remember it. try to do something that makes you happy. try to find a way to serve. try never to forget what we have in common is more important than our interesting and profoundly important differences. don't give up on yourself. or your life. one of the most rewarding experiences that i had, or have had since i left the white house, is the opportunity to work in south asia after that horrible tsunami which occurred a couple of years before hurricane katrina.

it was devastating to indonesia and southeast india and sri lanka. parts of thailand. president bush asked me to work with his father for a while. i did that. i work with the u.n. for two years. we had a great time. because of the disaster, long- standing civil conflict in indonesia was settled, because it brought back the fishing to them together. we brought new opportunities to grow and sell coffee to them together. but in every disaster, as you remember from katrina, and as we see in haiti, where i'm working, the housing is always the hardest thing to fix. there was one tent city, which 40,000 people in indonesia were sweltering, miserable in these hot tents. as the u.n. coordinator, i had to go visit and let them on load

me because we were six months late in getting them out of there. i showed up and the president of the camp was there. they had elected a president. he introduced me to his wife, and to his son. a 10-year-old boy, that i still believe to this day is the single most beautiful child i've ever seen. his eyes were luminous. i had a young indonesian woman working as my interpreter. when i started the tour, the mother and son went off. i said, i believe that is the most beautiful boy i've ever seen in my life. she said, yes, he is very handsome. before the tsunami, he had nine brothers and sisters. they are all gone. every last one of them.

i have two points to make. first, this man, who had lost nine of his 10 children, let me through that camp with a smile on his face, and never talked about anything but what those other people needed, and what he needed me to do for them. he honored his children by pouring himself into meeting the needs of the people left on earth. so, we do the tour. they ended at the health clinic. he were talking, and all of a sudden, the man's wife showed up again. this time, holding a three-day- old baby. she said, this is our youngest resident. we want you to name this child. she was carrying the baby, not the mother. i hesitate to tell you all this,

but in their culture when a mother gives birth when you baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and be waited on. [laughter] you should ask congressman cummings to introduce that next week preset how far that gets in the congress. this woman, who had lost nine of her 10 children, was holding baby. i said, you will be to name the child? it was a boy. they said yes. i said, they're my interpreter, what is the word in your language that can be an name that means new beginning? this woman got a big smile on her face. she said to me to my yes, lucky for you, and our language the dawn is a boys name.

we will name this boy dawn. he will be the symbol of our new beginning. i am telling you this because no matter what happens to you, it is highly unlikely that you will ever face anything as awful as what happened to that mother and father. they somehow found the strength to treasure the ones who remained, and to serve others. that is the heritage that you take with you from howard. that is what your people are doing in rwanda half a world away. if you do what makes you happy, and you don't give up, and you keep serving, i think you will live in the most interesting, prosperous, and peaceful time in human history. good luck. god bless you all. [applause]

next, a discussion on the effect of the internet on the brain and ,hild development.after that some of the commencement speeches from business leaders around the country. on the next "washington journal" will talk about president obama 's commencement speech at morehouse college in atlanta with joe madison and editor and publisher of conservative black chick.com, christine wright. issuesne e.g. -- energy in the u.s. with michael levi. that is live at 7:00 a.m. eastern, on c-span.

>> there will be very different impacts, depending on who you are. averages will not tell the story. the young and healthy will see big increases. in some cases, our survey says 200%. the number for illinois is 197. very close. sharp premium increases. others will get relative decreases. you just don't want to rely on an average. there is not a single number that will tell you the story about the implementation. a bit of get quite impact and some a lot less. >> this weekend on c-span, the impact of the new healthcare insurance premiums. sunday night at 9:00 eastern. also this weekend on book tv, pulitzer prize-winning author rick atkinson, live sunday afternoon. on american history's