I don’t remember much about the commencement address at my college graduation. We were all crowded into a loud fieldhouse, which as I recall had lousy acoustics, and mainly we were waiting for those few seconds when we’d get to walk across the stage to prove we were graduates.

I hope the graduates who heard Chris Sacca‘s  commencement speech were able to hear him and to overcome their own anxiousness to fist pump across for their families to hear his good advice. Sacca, a venture investor, private equity adviser, former employee of Google  and investor in Twitter, told the graduates of University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management to embrace who they really are.

His speech includes this lovely call to arms to be weird:

The most important piece of advice I can give you on the path to happiness is not just to be yourself but be your weird self.

It takes too much energy to be anything but your weird self.We spend too much of our lives trying to live up to the expectations of others. We buy things we don’t really want with money we don’t really have to impress people we don’t really care about. Forget that, forget what other people think. Everyone here is weird, admit it. We each have our quirks. Celebrate those,be goofy, tell corny jokes, dance awkwardly, express your half-baked thoughts but most importantly laugh about your failures.

Once I was meeting the president of Ecuador at his palace and I’m really excited to show off my Spanish. He asked me how I arrived there that day and I tell him, “Cogi el autobus,” which in Spain, where I learned Spanish, means I caught the bus. I’ve heard at least one chuckle in this room that indicates in Latin America it doesn’t mean, “I caught the bus.” It means I made dirty, passionate love to the bus.

It’s our collection screw-ups in idiosyncrasies and memories and stories and lessons learned that make us weird and interesting. Weirdness is why we adore our friends. I can see the weirdness in mutual recognition of weirdness in your eyes as you look around each other. Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart gets hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.

That’s expressed an old saying whose author was lost long ago but it goes like this. “We’re all little weird and life’s a little weird and we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours. We join up with them. We fall in mutual weirdness. We call it love.”

Weirdness lies at the heart of all happiness. Want to be happy? Just go on with your weird self.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RskzYHPlh5U]

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