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№ 2024.001 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Commencement address
Noubar Afeyan
Flagship Pioneering CEO and Moderna co-founder
Noubar Afeyan urges the MIT Class of 2024 to accept seemingly impossible missions, drawing on his childhood in war-torn Beirut, the 'Mission Impossible' theme, and Moderna's rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine. He outlines three actions for tackling hard challenges—imagine, innovate, and immigrate—while emphasizing moral responsibility, paranoid optimism, and embracing uncertainty. He frames graduates as 'agents for good' uniquely equipped by their MIT education to confront global crises.
Key moments
- 01 Recounting his Beirut childhood and fascination with 'Mission Impossible'
- 02 Describing Moderna's rapid COVID-19 vaccine development
- 03 Urging graduates to imagine, innovate, and immigrate
- 04 Reflecting on his Armenian heritage, moral responsibility, and embracing uncertainty
Visual speech map
Noubar Afeyan at MIT, 2024
A commencement address about impossible missions, imagination, innovation, immigration, uncertainty, and public good.
- 01 Beirut childhood
- 02 Mission Impossible
- 03 Moderna
- 04 Imagine
- 05 Innovate
- 06 Immigrate
- 07 Uncertainty
- 08 Agents for good
Origin
Impossible begins as a lived condition
Afeyan links childhood in war-torn Beirut, Armenian heritage, and the Mission Impossible theme to a lifelong comfort with daunting assignments.
Uncertainty is not an exception; it is the operating environment.
Identity carries history, responsibility, and imagination.
The impossible becomes a prompt for action instead of paralysis.
Case study
Moderna turns urgency into action
The COVID vaccine story becomes evidence that ambitious science needs preparation, collaboration, and motion before certainty arrives.
Capabilities built before crisis make rapid response possible.
Innovation requires coordination, discipline, and speed under pressure.
Public good is part of the technical challenge.
Method
Imagine, innovate, immigrate
His three verbs form a method for crossing boundaries: see a different future, build toward it, and move across places, fields, and assumptions.
Look beyond inherited constraints and rehearse a better future.
Turn imagination into disciplined experiment and useful tools.
Cross borders of geography, field, identity, and assumption.
Charge
Practice paranoid optimism
The speech closes by asking graduates to stay alert to danger while refusing cynicism, becoming agents for good in a world of hard problems.
Optimism supplies motion; paranoia supplies rigor.
Moral responsibility belongs inside invention.
MIT graduates are asked to serve crises larger than themselves.
Transcript
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